bold art and hard sex

Somebody wrote that on my fridge with magnetic poetry. Two very admirable goals for life.

I went to see Dance Montage 2008 tonight (and arrived twenty minutes early - YES!), which is an annual showcase of short choreography. It was a mixed bag of performances, though lovely Léda Davies kicked some serious ass as both a dancer (in N'Bara Ta-Gan) and choreographer (for Wanderlust). Yay Léda!

Flipping through the program, I noticed that several dancers were pulling double-duty, performing in different pieces. And then I noticed that some dancers were pulling triple-duty. And then I noticed that a woman named Chelsey Higdon was performing in FIVE out of eleven pieces. Damn, girl, that's a lot of rehearsals.

Unsurprisingly, from where I was sitting, Chelsey was gorgeous. The pieces she performed ranged from belly dance to hip-hop to contemporary to ballet, and she figured prominently in each of them.

After Resistance (a pretty badass piece choreographed by Annalisa Whittle, in which the dancers were wrapped in elastics and manipulated them to great effect), I overheard the young woman next to me say, "Wasn't Chelsey great?"

I leaned over. "Is Chelsey the one who's dancing in, like, five pieces?"

"Yeah," she replied, with just a tiny note of jealousy in her voice. "And she's a first-year."

In the ballet piece, Aejopstux (again, quite good, choreographed by Carla French), there's a moment where Ms. Higdon is spirited away by the two male dancers, Joel Hathaway and Michael Myroniuk. The remaining nine female dancers bunch together in the corner and watch (again, with a hint of longing) as the pair of toned men vie for the attention of the lithe first-year pivoting between them.

Meta-Dance Montage? Hm.