In the past year, Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre (CRDT) has made a concerted effort to expand the company and open its doors, bringing in several new dancers, additional collaborators, and an Executive Director, and unveiling energetic social media and marketing campaigns. These efforts have launched CRDT into a more prominent position in the dance community, without compromising its mission to merge the visual and performing arts and celebrate cultural diversity.
While it’s easy to admire Cerqua Rivera’s steadfast commitment to fusing dance, live music, and visual art, each dance presented in their fall engagement at Links Hall was accompanied by the Cerqua Rivera band and matching images projected onto the back wall. As the evening wore on, this kind of formulaic execution renders many of its dances unmemorable, with three exceptions.
Much of CRDT’s fall engagement this year centers around the retirement of two of the group’s leading dancers: Raphaelle Ziemba and Rachel Hernandez. Ziemba’s 2014 trio In the Depths of the Sensuous features the two women with Laura Chiuve in a series of brief interludes, all oozing with sex. The women disrobe to reveal silky slips and dance in, on, and among several chairs in various solos, duets, and trios. The highlight of the piece is Ziemba herself, performing an electrifying solo that, in the close quarters of Links Hall’s white space, felt uncomfortably intimate.
The 2012 Pedestal by Mei-Kuang Chen also highlights Ziemba and Rachel Hernandez, whose aesthetic is reminiscent of Kirsten Shelton in the early days of Luna Negra. Dancer Daniel Chenoweth takes turns partnering one woman while the other mirrors her movements sans partner. Combined with a recorded soundtrack of thunder and rain, chilly live music by Joe Cerqua, and muted rain drop images projected to the back wall, Pedestal feels the most outside CRDT’s M.O. The final haunting image of the two women seated back to back on a small table upstage, one foot sliding off again and again as the scene fades to darkness, stayed with me the rest of the evening.
CRDT Artistic Director Wilfredo Rivera presented a world premiere, Recuerdos: Para Mis Padres, as the show’s finale. Accompanied by a Latin score and images of what we assume are Rivera’s parents, the movement and stylings bring us to Honduras in ways that sometimes feels like cheeky dinner theater, and at others is wonderfully touching. As with many of the program’s other works, Recuerdos features some strong dancing and catchy music that seems really satisfying for the performers. Nothing is left to the imagination as the melding of art, music, and dance places our thoughts and feelings exactly where Rivera wants them.
In some contexts, I suppose that the formula works, but Links Hall is, perhaps, not the right venue for Cerqua Rivera. Had they performed at a larger venue such as Ruth Page, with the band behind and projections from above, rather than right at the dancers faces, this program could have packed a larger punch. After 16 years, I’m anxious for this company, which features strong dancers, a really fantastic ensemble of musicians, and a unique model, to stretch its mission beyond just the obvious. Is it possible for the dancers to draw the art with their feet? For the band to elicit sound-activated video effects? For one singular mural to unfold throughout the duration of the evening? Even with the loss of its two star dancers, CRDT has worked diligently over the past year to build a pedestal for itself; it will be up to them to maintain it and engage the community in new and interesting ways.
CRDT's fall engagement closes October 10with a one-night engagement at Mayne Stage in Roger's Park. Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 at the door, with performances at 7:00 and 10:00PM