YaleDancers bloom onstage

The fall YaleDancers show offers an experience that lies somewhere between TRL and Swan Lake. It's not quite like MTV's saccharine sequences of music videos—dancing-to-the-music where each new 3-minute song brings with it a different array of performers, costumes, and lighting—but it's also not anything like ballet, since there's no pretense to offering any overarching theme that runs through the varied performances that make up the show. The range of genres of music and dance styles represented is wide enough—there's classical ballet, modern, jazz, and even some hip-hop—but sometimes there's a startling incongruity in the way that the music and the dance combine. The scene titled "The Way She Moves," choreographed by Sally Bernstein, BK '03, and Brooke Lyons, MC '03, features the sort of lilting, yearning dance steps that echo the classical training many of performers have clearly had, but the distinctively high-brow motion is set to Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman," the quintessential pop ballad from everybody's favorite piano man. For the most part, this incongruity works—the dancing is technically expert, even if it lacks finesse in spots—but in the same scene, the music switches to Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady," the lighting turns to a garish orange, and the dancers reappear all in black with twinkles in their eyes and beckoning smiles that are more reminiscent of Showgirls than "The Nutcracker."

There are also scenes like Abigail Krasner's, PC '03, "An Unquiet Peace," set to the plaintive sound of a lone cello, that don't aim for the same distracting, over-the-top flair; instead, the dancers' crisp, almost effortless moves and the thoughtful lighting changes radiate a quiet intensity. Opening the show, the energetic "Freedom Cry" takes its cue from strains of African and Caribbean culture: against intense Jamaican yellows, reds, and greens, the lunging, free-moving choreography of Katy Henderson, BK '04, and Kathy Baillie, SM '04, and the music of Bob Marley and Buju Banton combine in what appears to be a sort of metaphorical narrative about trying, but failing, to reach a goal.

HYORUM SUH/YH Girls, Girls, Girls!!!!

It's the way YaleDancers exploit the power of dance as metaphor, not the samples from Billy Joel, Britney Spears, or Björk, that ultimately makes the fall show so strong. In "Everything's Changed," an eerie, deliberate elegy for Sept. 11, the movements literally illustrate the dance of life: set to a musical sequence overlaid with the voices of individuals throughout New York who survived the attacks or simply observed them from the street, Julianna Bentes', SM '04, choreography takes the compulsive moves that everyone made on that day—clutching a cell phone, cradling a relative, dropping a jaw at the live televised footage—and schematizes them into a web of motion and lighting that moves from fearful, tentative steps to frenetic rushing underneath the swirls of searchlights.

The final somber dance is anything but lugubrious: it stops mimicking or interpreting the action on onlookers, and instead turns back to pure expression. The forms of classical ballet that looked somehow out of place against Billy Joel earlier in the show suddenly seem perfectly appropriate. Sweating and shaking, as if consumed by their own motion, the performers gradually find refuge in the high-brow: taking their hands from their own violently beating hearts and extending them out to embrace each other, they literally spin out like a flower bud that has just begun to bloom.

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