“Scattered,” a dance production that features high-energy choreography and incorporates fluid music and film, kicked off its United States water-themed tour at UF Saturday.
The Phillips Center for the Performing Arts buzzed as the dancers of Motionhouse, the United Kingdom-based dance company, took center stage to begin the premiere.
For Artistic Director Kevin Finnan, who is also co-founder of the company, water plays a crucial role in life as well as in his dance production.
The performers interact and dance with a curved projection screen wall that is about 14 feet tall, similar to a skateboard half-pipe. A video played on the wall as dancers slid, climbed, and crawled all over it to the beat of water-themed music.
“The entire music soundtrack, film and dance are all knitted together. So at the beginning of the show, we press play, and the dancers have to know where they are the entire 70 minutes of the show — to the second — in order to interact with the film. They have to know the show inside and out,” Finnan said.
There were times during the show when the dancers hung from the top of the set, frozen in time like ice. Then they began to melt, turning into water dripping down the curved screen.
In another scene, a dancer battled an upward current of rushing water. She struggled to climb against a vicious tide, battling not only the stream of water but gravity, too.
“What I saw was a very artistic way of describing how life works — how people are stuck in emotion,” said Ralph Lamonge, an 18-year-old UF health science freshman. “The way they incorporated water into their presentation and movements was pretty amazing.”
Ashley Forrester, a 20-year-old UF dance sophomore, was mesmerized.
“Just the physicality of it and how they just empower you to move. It was unreal,” she said.
Forrester said the dancers joined UF’s modern dance and composition dance classes earlier in the week to have some one-on-one time.
More than 1,350 tickets were sold for the performance, and the Motionhouse dancers were more than excited to start their first U.S. tour at UF.
“It’s a complete thrill,” Finnan said before he and his dance team did the gator chomp and walked off the stage to continue the U.S. tour, which will travel to 17 more locations. “Go Gators.”
