Kate Weare and Monica Bill Barnes

Kate Weare Company and Monica Bill Barnes & Company shared a program this week at ADF, and I highly recommend both companies, but particularly Kate Weare.  Her work was very intimate, deeply invested in the body and relationships, and inventive.  

Here's an excerpt from my review:

"There's a surprisingly narrow distance between victory and despair, between strength and vulnerability, between intimacy and violence. Kate Weare and Monica Bill Barnes, good friends and colleagues, traced the dimensions of these spaces in a shared program at the Reynolds Industries Theater this week (June 15-16). The two companies presented wildly different works, but shared a similar intensity and commitment to the performance.

The Kate Weare Company presented "Bridge of Sighs" (2008), a work for two men and two women. In the opening image, a man and woman (Douglas Gillespie and Leslie Kraus) stand facing each other, a small distance between them. Slowly, she raises her head to look at him and then suddenly, sharply, smacks his chest. A held breath of a pause and then a tumble of stomps and slaps, using all possible body parts to pummel each other. Their tangled steps create a ragged tango in the silence."

Read the rest of it here.