Performances showcase range of local talent

By Carol Egan
Special to The Advertiser

•	Leeward Community College Dance Festival Featuring: Tau Dance Theatre, Glinko Marishino, Honolulu Ballet Theatre and others 7:30 tonight, LCC Theatre $12 455-0385

Palombo was a young UH graduate student when she programmed a piece for the first festival, 18 years ago. Nearly two decades later, Palombo, director of LCC's dance program, runs the festival with assistance from Don Ranney, lighting designer and technical director.

This year's event presented four local companies along with the LCC and University of Hawai'i-Manoa dance ensembles in an eclectic evening of original works.

Tau Dance Theatre opened the program with Peter Rockford Espiritu's "Olomana Suite," featuring Marie Takazawa and Morgan Cloud. Lyrical in style, the work showed off the dancers' balletic talents.

Unquestionably the most interesting of the LCC Dance Ensembles' four pieces, "Suite for Feet," was choreographed by Palombo to music by Leo Kottke. The light-hearted opening quartet segued to a lyrical solo of languorous extensions and breathy suspensions (beautifully danced by the long-limbed M Klatt) and ended with an exuberant display of exaggerated masculinity performed with gusto by six young men. The choreography brought out the best in everyone, and was a treat for the audience as well as fun for the dancers.

Speaking of fun, Jennifer Butler Shannon's "In the Zone," originally created while she was still at UH-Manoa, is refreshingly nonderivative. Shannon's facility for movement invention shows unusual natural talent. The four excellent UH dancers (Ben Arcangel, Marissa Glorioso, Wayles E.S. Haynes and Christopher Quiocho) played off and with each other, often cueing one another vocally with a loud "go," much as jugglers or circus acrobats do. At times moving individually and in unison, the well-trained dancers showed the clarity of purpose and strong technique that is a trademark of the UH-Manoa dance program. One looks forward to seeing Shannon's work continue to develop. Venues such as this will hopefully give her that opportunity.

Matthew Wright and the Honolulu Dance Theatre contributed two works. The amusing "L.C.C. D.F.O.4." was accompanied by a taped physics lecture. While a professorial voice intoned scientific facts, robotlike figures walked stiffly about, occasionally executing little turns in the air or small stiff-legged jumps and making frequent abrupt changes of direction.

Wright's second piece, "Scum," despite the excellent ensemble dancing and solo work of Marina Hitosugi-Levesque, suffered from excessive length and occasional lapses into pantomimic and literal movements, gestures and even vocal utterances.

Although several works were diminished by overpowering recorded musical and video accompaniment, the program concluded on a joyous note with two dances choreographed by Denise Koch and performed by the Kuumba Collective Creativity West African Dance and Drum. The only group to use live music (two African drummers) had the stage pulsating with pounding rhythms and dancers' abandon.