Karin Stevens Dance company in rehearsal at the Fremont Abbey. Photo by Alan Alabastro.
It’s Friday, the end of a long week, and one of the posts I meant to get out by now was a lengthy preview of Karin Stevens Dance, in residence at the Fremont Abbey Arts Center, whose season concert is tonight and tomorrow (7:30 p.m.; tickets $7-$15). The longer piece is coming tomorrow, so just look at this as the appetizer course.
Stevens is a Seattle native but she spent most of her twenties working in Florida and then in the Bay Area, only returning a couple years ago. Since last year, she’s grown her fledgling company to more than a half-dozen members, and tonight you can see these talented folks tackle Stevens’ ballet inspired contemporary dance in five separate pieces, with both live and recorded musical accompaniment.
The most ambitious piece in the program is Point of Departure, the first peek at what Stevens expect to be an 18-month development process with artist Craig van den Bosch. Using the visual similarities between Islamic architecture and the Large Hadron particle collider as the jumping off point, the piece unfolds in rich geometric patterns like a kaleidoscope.
But the most fun piece–at least to judge from sitting in on rehearsal earlier in the week–promises to be Byway Connection, a semi-improvised, three-part dance piece with accompaniment by the Mack Grout Jazz Trio, which lets Stevens play with a more staccato score than the languid legato of string-backed pieces. Not that there’s anything wrong with strings: cellist Emily Ann Peterson‘s live performance of J.S. Bach’s Suite for Cello No. 1 in G Major, which opens the evening, is a lovely movement-based meditation.
