Picturing Motion

Every year the dance students in Contemporary Arts at SFU curate and produce a mixed program showcasing their original choreography, and featuring the performance and design talents of their peers. This year's program, entitled Motion, Picture, was put together under the artistic directorship of Robert Azevedo and Heather Lamoureux, and has one more performance this evening in Studio D at SFU Woodward's.

Here's what I noticed last night:

• Opposite-sex partnering that was heavy on romantic longing and bittersweet partings.

• Same-sex partnering that, albeit in very different ways, grappled with questions of doubling and the connections between self and other.

• A noticeable emphasis on gestural vocabularies that were variously conspiratorial, confessional, and confrontational.

• Ensemble work that mixed serial unison in tight bodily massings with repetition of random individual phrasings scattered about the stage.

• Some startling multi-directional lighting effects, including diagonal corridors, dappled washes from the side, and one rock star back light.

• Double endings: once with music, once without.

P.