Life, passage of time key elements in "Crea"

By Rashida Rawls

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Like a vortex, “crea,” a new chamber work, swirled around the interior of the High Museum of Art’s Robinson Atrium on Thursday evening, blending live music and dance. The collaboration between choreographer Lauri Stallings’ performance group gloATL and Georgia Tech’s contemporary music ensemble Sonic Generator, led by Thomas Sherwood, stirred up energies from the atrium’s nooks and crannies as Stallings and Sherwood interpreted the soaring interior space in playful dialog between classical and contemporary music and dance.

“Crea” is the third site-specific work Stallings has choreographed in Atlanta since she formed gloATL last spring, and it’s Stallings’ fourth year as a full-time dance-maker. Sonic Generator is in its fourth year as Georgia Tech’s contemporary music ensemble in residence. The group of classically trained musicians made its Woodruff Arts Center debut last March performing six cutting-edge works. “Crea” is Sonic Generator’s first collaboration with a choreographer.

Playing an arrangement of minimalist and post-minimalist works, the chamber music ensemble was placed just in back of the space’s center. Behind the musicians, architect Richard Meier’s pure white sweeping wall, lined with airy ramps, swept between the atrium’s interior and the curved outer wall of windows. On the opposite side, two walls converged at a solid right angle behind seating for the majority of the youngish, rather hip group of viewers. At the atrium’s center, a vortex, made visible by choreography, seemed to spiral up from beneath the stone floor.

In a slow, undulating, opening solo, Toni Doctor Jenkins’s twisting body shapes defined the space’s spiraling energies. With one gently crooked arm spiraling back behind the head, Jenkins suggested an image from “Swan Lake,” a most famous of all classical “white ballets.”

Through Marc Mellits’ “Mara’s Lullaby,” Steve Reich’s “Vermont Counterpoint” and Belinda Reynolds’ “Between You and Me,” Stallings’ choreography -- discovered by way of Ohad Naharin’s Gaga movement system – occasionally glimpsed classical ballet movements as dancers flowed in and out of quick initiations and surprising drops of weight, punctuated by airy ballet jumps and arabesque lines.

Meier’s ascending ramps set “crea” aloft in “placeness,” a light, playful solo performed by Sarah Hilmer to J.S. Bach’s Gigue (from Cello Suite No. 5 in c minor) in tandem with cellist Brad Ritchie, also elevated on the second-story ramp. In “blanc,” to David Lang’s “Cheating, Lying, Stealing,” a haunting violin melody was juxtaposed with a resonant, steely rhythm as dancers perched on ever higher levels. Meier’s square openings in the walls framed their moving shapes, displaying dancers as living works of art.

The play between classical and contemporary gave way to the realization that two distinct worlds existed here, when Virginia Coleman sat on the front row watching as the group of dancers in the performing space seemed to play out a childhood memory. As ballet movements morphed into Stallings’ contemporary movement style, the room’s energy surged up and out of the ground through rippling bodies.

Time became apparent in the final section, which introduced a new idea. Suddenly, “crea” was about life and the passage of time. Philip Glass’ “Closing” from “Glassworks” conjured an emotional poignancy as a mature Nicole Johnson supported a young Jones while dancers skipped down the ramp, joining the pair in a whirling dance of unpredictable impulses, zigzagging into spaces yet to be discovered.

Cynthia Perry blogs about dance at ArtsCriticATL.com.