This weekend, your eyes will have much beauty to behold, when the UCSB Department of Theater and Dance presents its annual Fall Dance Concert, Double Exposure: Revealing | Relating | Responding. Featuring works by Gallim Dance Artistic Director and Guggenheim Fellow Andrea Miller, Vice-Chair and Director of Dance Christina McCarthy, guest faculty member Brooke Smiley, and senior BFA dance students, the evening’s pieces will reorient your way of looking at familiar themes — love, individuality, spirituality — through the eye-opening repositioning of graceful and inspiring moving bodies.
The concert’s ocular themes are appropriate, given the visionary reputation of the women at the helm. Miller — whose works integrate the imagery and modalities of theater, visual arts, music, and politics — has been known to contort the common into the uncommon, like with her piece “W H A L E,” in which dancers spin and tumble around a deconstruction of domesticity. Her lively “Pupil Suite” is performed to the exuberantly colorful music of the Israeli band Balkan Beat Box, wherein the dancers’ dynamics explode with unexpected vivacity and jittery jolts, like a ballroom dance on an extravagantly listing tropical vessel.
In “Nevermore,” McCarthy overturns the surface meanings of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem “The Raven” with her multimedia interpretation of his words through dance and puppetry. The choreographer/puppeteer has been a longtime fan of his writings and their exploration of love, madness, revenge, loss, and death. “I love how they blend reality with a macabre unreality that is full of the dark side of our psyche, played out in what is essentially our mundane world,” she said.