Other Feet

(Jan. 5, 2012) If you’re livin’ right, during this past weekend’s New Year’s Eve you enthusiastically fulfilled your annual dance-the-night-away duties, effectively ushering in 2012 with your feet. Can you still feel it? If you did it right, those puppies should still be whimpering.

However, that being the case, you’re totally exempt from having to get down this weekend. In fact, have a seat. There are some other (likely) more talented feet worth watching.

Lela Annotto dances to a different drum. SUBMITTED

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Another dance performance? I know what you’re thinking. “Wah! But I sat through four versions of the Nutcracker last month. I’m ballet’ed out.”

Got it. This is not that. This week the Big NorthWest Dance Group and the Ink People Center for the Arts present the intimate Small Dances in Small Spaces at the Redwood Curtain Theater On Jan. 6-8. The show is a collaboration between local boundary-pushing human-movement artists interested in creating an atmosphere far removed from dance performances you may have seen.

You can call it contemporary dance. Or modern dance. Post-modern dance, maybe. What it isn’t is ballet. Chill.

For example, dancer Lela Annotto described her contribution to the show, “On the Line,” as a dark piece incorporating locally produced music and recordings of train sounds with projected visuals taken from our area’s older train yards like the Balloon Track. For better or worse, you have not seen that before.

Choreographer/dancer Bonnie Hossack is also excited by the uniqueness of Redwood Curtain as a dance venue — its relatively small stage is the source of half of the event’s name.

“It’s a long, narrow space. Kind of like dancing in your hallway,” she says, adding that spectators are likely to be fairly close to the performers.

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