September 25–October 2, 1997

critic pick|dance

Trapezius

Dancer/choreographer Louise Gillette is artistic director of Trapezius Aerial Dance Company, so named because she likes to set pieces on low-flying trapezes. But the apparatus is absent from the company's current production, Fear of Flying. Gillette had to nix them after suffering a neck injury. Gillette hasn't abandoned an aerial approach to dance, however. She's got her cast of nine dancers doing maneuvers while strapped in harnesses.

That forced a rethinking of certain concepts. "With the trapeze you can get on and off and hang by your ankle or hand. With a harness you are always suspended at the middle of your body," she notes. Initially, Gillette thought this presented a limitation. Then available options expanded. "Someone can jump on the person who's in the harness and use them as a platform," she observes. "That opens up different kinds of possibilities."

Fear of Flying draws on the nature of obsession, fear of being alone and fear of intimacy. It's done in 15 short scenes; each covers a different emotional quality. Sections are alternately in the air and on the ground. At times the dancers break away from the proscenium, "to give the audience a more three-dimensional experience."

Creating dances provides this choreographer "a non-verbal way of coming to understand my experience." She says there's no neat beginning, middle or end to Fear of Flying, which concerns love, sex, conflict and separation. As she comments, "All these feelings are so complex you can't really break them down into a linear format."

Trapezius Aerial Dance Co./Fear of Flying, Fri. & Sat., Sept. 26 & 27, 8 p.m., Temple University's Conwell Dance Hall, Montgomery Ave. at Broad St., 204-1122.

- Deni Kasrel