In Review: Sound and Smoke

Selah Dance Collective celebrates ten years, cabaret style.

WORDS Ninette Paloma

Twenty-six wavering bodies consider the urgency of a melancholy trumpet. They press their open palms into their chests and thrust their hips in empathetic response. Fingers curl and eyes narrow and through the disjointed haze of isolated torsos and wailing brass, the 1920s come roaring into view.

Part cabaret and part historical dramatization, Sound and Smoke unleashed a fortified punch of decadent dance over three days at Center Stage Theatre in mid-January. Throwing her hat into the brazen ring of the Weimar Republic, Selah Dance Collective’s artistic director Meredith Ventura explored themes of comedy and death as she navigated her way around a series of heady vignettes that pulled from the abstractions of literary and artistic figures. Approaching the life and works of women such as Isadora Duncan and Virginia Woolf as a subjective starting point, the fragmented refrain of the female archetype echoed soundly from section to section, spilling into a stunning pas de deux by dancers Eryn Orsburn and Vietor Davis; a series of gentle solos including two standout performances by Monique Nadeau and Pablo Gatica; and an explosive ensemble with over two dozen dancers that ambled and rolled their way across an intimately lit, black box stage. Woven throughout the production was Ventura herself, a metaphorical master of ceremonies who delighted with a tongue-in-cheek number set to Marilyn Monroe’s “I Just Want to Be Loved by You.”

A cabaret would not be complete without a show-stopping act, and Sound and Smoke’s came in the form of Chloe Roberts, who brought the audience to their feet with her sizzling rendition of “Mr. Cellophane” from the musical Chicago. With electric presence and self-effacing humor, Roberts snaked and sashayed her way around a crowd of apathetic dancers – commanding their attention and drawing the air out of the theatre in the process.
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Never afraid to pull from a mélange of concepts and kinetic textures, Ventura dazzled with her company’s ten-year anniversary production, injecting a much-needed dose of humor and heart-pumping joy into the Central Coast dance scene.