Catey Ott’s Powerful Dance Concert

Choreographer Catey Ott Thompson marked the 10th anniversary of her Catey Ott Dance Collective with five new works beaded into an intellectually stimulating non-stop hour-long performance titled 3^rd eye (i) Conscious/idiosyncratic ideology with integrity. The show raised fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of dance and answered them with satisfying examples. Ott Thompson’s interest in and respect for her dancers, obvious in the way each movement provided opportunities for personal expression, made for powerful dancing.

The Danceworks Studio Theatre was dressed as an art gallery. C. Kai Marquardt’s community-created metallic hanging sculpture was the armor-like centerpiece; behind were Kim Miller’s boudoir-like white and rose lace draperies. Paintings of mythical subjects graced the side walls and a sculpted candlestick arched upward to an electric flame. These were made by Arrowhead High School visual arts students for Lake Arts Project 2015, for which Ott Thompson choreographed “Phoenix: Falling to Rise Again.” That dance, in which a young woman learns that she, too, can rise from the ashes of loss, was the centerpiece of 3^rd eye (i) Conscious.

That holy act of faith was framed by philosophical considerations. In “Mother of American Modern Dance Awards,” Ott Thompson’s second collaboration with the formidable Milwaukee performance artist Miller, the titular award is given to the legendary Ruth St. Denis (played by Ott Thompson dressed as an East Indian dancer carrying burning incense) by the postmodern pedestrian movement champion Yvonne Rainer (Miller, in American gym clothing, moving chairs.) The comic performance informed the whole concert. If St. Denis’ work freed Western dance to be global and timeless, Rainer asked it to be utterly honest. Ott Thompson is daughter to both, and sister to the contemporary dancer Douglas Dunn whose manifesto “Why I Dance” was also included, with lines such as: “I dance to achieve a vital, non-heroic presence; I dance to have a say in what I submit to; I dance to forget why I dance.”

In “Life is (No) Daffodil,” Ott Thompson embodied further reasons to dance, responding to William Wordsworth’s nature poem “Daffodils” and Langston Hughes’s lament “Mother To Son/Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair.” Her layered solo was bookended by equally self-defining passages danced by her former New York comrades Sarah Pope and Kathleen Stansell. The concert opened and closed with strong examples of the present company’s humanely spiritual aesthetic with dancers Danielle Anderkay, Cynthia Collins and Elizabeth Roskopf. Lights were by Colin Gawronski; music by Randall Woolf.