Chamber Dance Project Review
June 25, 2025 | Sidney Harman Hall – Washington, D.C., USA
Washington D.C.’s Sidney Harman Hall is an atypical, but excellent venue for dance. Although it occasionally plays host to dance companies, it primarily serves as the home for Shakespeare Theater Company. At 775 odd seats, it’s more intimate than a concert hall, but brings more spectacle than the collegiate theaters of similar scale that often showcase dance work.
Featuring choreography by Christian Denice, Jorge Amarante, Ulysses Dove, and Artistic Director Diane Coburn Bruning, the opening night of Chamber Dance Project’s “Red Angels” program dazzled the packed house.
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Chamber Dance Project Red Angels Review
The performance opened with an excerpt from Denice’s Dwellings restaged by Chamber Dance Project dancer and rehearsal director Patric Palkens.
The curtain rose on the string quartet downstage right, the pulsating beat and soaring but tentative melody of Stephan Thelan’s Circular Lines. A single dancer in flesh socks, gray, and cream came to center, undulating through port de bras so fast that it seemed to trail behind her.
Like all of the work on the program, Dwellings was also deeply in tune with the music.
Since its inception in 2000, part of Bruning’s mission with Chamber Dance Project has been to showcase dance with live music and the interplay between dancers and musicians.
Throughout the performance musicians Sally McLain, Karin Kelleher, Uri Wassertzug, and Benjamin Wensel – who between them played four of the six works on the program – all rose to technical challenges as great as the dancers; particularly McLain, Chamber Dance Project’s Principal Musician, who picked up the electric violin for Dove’s Red Angels.
Along with narrator Matthew Tourney and Jimmy Garver in Prufrock, and the jazz trio of Lena Seikaly, Tony Nalker, and Tom Baldwin in Songs by Cole, the musicians took on an indispensable role, often interacting with the dancers diegetically as well as musically.
Dove’s Red Angels, the title work of the program, closed the first act. Originally choreographed in 1994 for New York City Ballet, Red Angels was one of the last works Dove created before his death from AIDS in 1996.
It is also the second Ulysses Dove work performed in Washington D.C. this spring, following Washington Ballet’s production of Vespers at the Kennedy Center in February. Like Vespers, Red Angels was a tour de force in technical specificity.
At the open rehearsal a week before the performance, Peter Boal – Artistic Director of Pacific Northwest Ballet and Red Angels original cast member there restaging the work for Chamber Dance Project – explained to the studio audience how it was filled with easter eggs. Dove subtly incorporated shapes from famous Balanchine and Petipa ballets as if to say:
“Here’s your line, now let’s see what I can do with it.’”
Boal pointed out a some, and left clues for a few more.
In performance, Red Angels was angular and intense, filled with lines sharp enough to slice tomatoes. Its steely muscularity, red unitards and saturated red light a qualitative contrast to the writhing fluidity of Dwellings, although both works were choreographically intricate and gave the dancers a chance to flex their technical abilities.
The middle work on the first half of the program was the world premier of Jorge Amarante’s Tensión Por Vos. Performed on opening night by Iris Dávila and Marius Morawski, Tensión Por Vos was notable both for its partnering and the circumstances of its creation.
Amarante’s choreography seamlessly blended contemporary ballet and tango vocabulary as Dávila and Morawski built a world of passion in the free flowing fling-and-flung of long carving arcs and quick whippy footwork.
Amarante, a choreographer based in Argentina, had been scheduled to create Tensión Por Vos on the Chamber Dance Project dancers in person. However, due to the current political environment in the United States, the company never received the visa for Amarante for which they applied.
In a reprisal of COVID-19 practices, Amarante created Tensión Por Vos for the dancers in their DC studio via a zoom call from his living room in Buenos Aires, dancing around the sofa with his wife.
In her curtain speech Bruning described both the difficulties of working through a screen and a translator simultaneously, but also how the creative process and a love of dance transcended all cultural boundaries and allowed Amarante and the dancers to make an instant connection.
The reaction from the crowd was vocal, hissing with frustration and anger as Bruning explained the situation.
Amarante and Chamber Dance Project’s story is part of a now well-reported pattern of performing artists being denied US visas and having to cancel or reschedule performance dates; it is an experience being shared by presenters across the country and performers around the world.
Performances by international artists don’t just sell tickets and fill theaters. They fill hotel rooms, restaurants, and local businesses. International performers with large followings often bring audiences that are new to the theaters where they perform, audiences willing to travel and bring their business with them.
Cultural exchange makes the world a richer place in every sense.
If this attempt at state-sanctioned cultural isolation continues, the generational effects will not just be human and artistic, they will be economic and local.
The second act featured three works by Bruning: Prufrock (2019), Songs by Cole (2017), as well as an excerpt from Four Men (2021) given as an encore performance by Patric Palkens in honor of his retirement.
Perhaps my single favorite moment of the evening was “Don’t Fence Me In” in Songs by Cole, with Lope Lim, Palkens, and Peter Mazurowski in full cowboy regalia from head to toe, galavanting around the stage in 6-gallon hats, flannel shirts, a pair of six shooters, and with boots and spurs that jingled in time to the music.
Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek wink at Agnes de Mille’s classic Rodeo, the whole hoedown was a hoot-and-a-half as the cowboys soft-shoed, shook and shimmied, spinning their cap guns around.
In true vaudeville style, Palkens returned for a repeat of the theme which included an extended interlude with the vocalist and arranger Lena Seikaly that had the audience cheering after him as the lights faded.
At the open rehearsal, a member of the audience called attention to a correction Palkens had given one of the other dancers during a rehearsal of Dwellings.
“Don’t let the aesthetic of one work bleed over into the next,” Palkens said. “This is Dwellings and it’s starting to look like Red Angels. Let’s look at a few things…”
.
The audience member thought it spoke to Palkens’ finesse as a rehearsal director as well as a dancer.
Throughout the performance Palkens the dancer wore myriad qualities – suave, flirtatious, lugubrious, downright goofy – but at all times he was himself. Long, charismatic lines suspended into pressurized turns, almost discarded with an ease of precision that comes exclusively through time.
The audience, many clad in white for the opening night solstice after-party, were on their feet for minutes after the curtain came down. The curtain call brought the musicians and dancers, and artistic staff in a parade, each presenting Palkens with a single rose as he took a final bow.
Opening night also brought the announcement of a second retirement; Bruning announced that the coming season would be her final as Artistic Director before handing off the reins to a successor. As she said during her curtain speech:
“It’s always been about the vision, not myself… but I still have a year to cause trouble, and trouble I will cause.”
Featured Photo of Chamber Dance Project‘s Patric Palkens and Crystal Serrano in Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels. Photo by Rachel Malehorn.
