Review: DISTRICT CHOREOGRAPHER'S DANCE FESTIVAL 2024 at Dance Place

“Being Alive: Brave & Startling Truths” is a collection of fresh works from DMV-based movement artists, brought together under the umbrella of Dance Place’s annual District Choreographer Dance Festival. These performances were spirited, heartfelt, and inspiring, and the curation produced a cohesive festival experience that inspired self-discovery and contemplation. Of the nine works presented, I will discuss the two that I felt thematically anchored the production. 

The festival began in the Edgewood Arts Center, a block north of Dance Place’s main buildings. After the first two works in this location, the audience was invited to walk down tree-shaded 8th Street NE for the next site-specific performances. We ambled leisurely in the heat of the afternoon. 

Choreographer and performer Javier Padilla was already in process as we arrived at the Arts Park underneath Dance Place’s iconic facade. We found Padilla between a telephone pole and many strings of yarn, leaning away from the pole and letting the yarn hold his weight. 

Audience members holding balls of yarn created a web across the Arts Park, which Padilla danced through as other audience members read open-ended prompts about human-being into a wired microphone. The dance looked improvisational but deliberate, both playful and deeply serious.

This work was generative. The physical and energetic area, filled with criss-crossed strings, organic sound, and Padilla’s movements, built up to be something recognizable but difficult to define. The making visible of a communal experience unique to that time and space is what makes “tu y yo, conmigo, repito” a success of site-specific performance. 

It was difficult to see where Padilla’s piece ended and the next piece began, which was fitting, as “what remains / to be seen” by Matthew Cumbie & Collaborators commenced with a spoken musing on beginnings, endings, boundaries, and what lives between. 

Standing on a picnic table in white coveralls, Cumbie invited us to breathe and be present. He told us of a time he was here previously, and what it was like. Jamison Curcio emerged across the circle of standing audience members, also in white coveralls, and told us of a time she was here previously. 

The two then began to talk to each other, describing and moving through a duet phrase step-by-step, sometimes asking to reset and do it again from the beginning. The simultaneous chorus of past-tense language (“I went here, then you went here,”) with their then-presently accumulating choreography engendered a pleasing contrast. 

That temporal confusion of linear time invoked shortly after the visual of the tangled string was smart and subtle. All of the pieces were good, and these two in the middle of the show grounded the rest in courageous vulnerability and mindful consciousness. 

The themes of this festival–becoming, possibility, and potential–glowed out from every work presented. Skilled dancers delighted the gaze of every onlooker, be they a paying audience member or someone passing by on the street. New Dance Place Artistic Director Tariq O’Meally was a friendly and appreciated presence guiding us through the process; congratulations to him and Dance Place on an excellent opening production for the ‘24-’25 season.

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