One Reason to See Parsons Dance This Weekend

Go see Parsons Dance at the Meany tonight or Saturday. You should go to watch one man perform one solo, and you will thank Seattlest for telling you to do so. In all our many years spanning from actually being a dancer to attending countless modern dance performances, we have never in our life seen anything such as Parson's 1982 work Caught. (That we had never seen it, much less heard of it until now, is pleasantly humbling.) Thursday night, it was performed by Jeremy Smith, a newcomer to the company. You may not have the good fortune of seeing Smith in action, as two other dancers will likely take his place Friday and Saturday. And while we're certain those performing it tonight and Saturday will be skilled, and you will indeed still thank us, we saw them on stage with Smith in other pieces, and we know that he is lightning incarnate.

Set to a minimalist score by prog-rock deity Robert Fripp, Caught depends heavily on lighting design. Smith, shirtless and wearing loose white pants, walks into a top-lit circle of light dead center stage. He commands your attention before he moves--we couldn't shake the resemblance to Sting's character in Dune. As he writhes and pierces the air with sharp arms and angular movements, he traverses the stage in pursuit of the shifting circle of light. The choreography makes precise, arduous use of the geometric cones of light as they appear in seemingly random locations about the stage. Smith's intensity builds, and soon he is leaping chest-high, captured in defiance of physics--always in the air, never on the ground--by two strobe lights at each side of the front of the stage. The timing is not merely impeccable, it is at times seemingly impossible. And where some lighting schemes can be gimmicky and intrusive, in this case the sudden embrace of strobe light and mid-air dancer epitomizes the truly delicate yet powerful nature of timing in dance. Paired with Smith's unbounded electricity, Caught gave us the sensation of the first time our father threw us in the air as a young child, each time hurling us just a little bit higher. All we could say, in between bouts of giddy discovery and trying to catch our breath, was "Again, again! Do it again!"

The rest of the performances? Mildly entertaining at some points, technically impressive at others, but overall we expected more from Parsons Dance. The opening piece, Mozart, was vaguely charming and evocative of a casual day with friends at the park, but never amounted to much. Hands was another lighting-dependent piece, this time a prime example of gimmickry. Five dancers, ten hands illuminated (with their bodies in the dark), and six minutes too long. Like a Saturday Night Live sketch, it had promise at the outset, but by the time you realized you'd tired of it, you also sadly realized it was nowhere near its end, either. Swing Shift had some striking female solos, but they were dulled by the bizzarre futuresque costumes befitting Battlestar Galactica, and a plodding ensemble section towards the end that simply dragged on without purpose. And the closing piece, In The End, set entirely to Dave Matthews music, was like an off-Broadway montage gone horribly, terribly wrong. We felt downright assaulted by the saccharine choreography and its perky hand-on-hip attitude. There was stylized slow walking, jazz hands (jazz hands!) and the only redeeming aspect was yet another solo by the inimitable Jeremy Smith. You'll know which one he is, you won't be able to take your eyes off him.

8pm, Friday and Saturday // Meany Hall, UW// $39

Photo of Jeremy Smith from Parsonsdance.org