ISU Bengal

Issue date: 2/20/08 Section: Life

Media Credit: Nee Alistair D. I Move performance art dancers perform their intense act at the Black Box Theater in the Stevens Performance Arts Center last spring.

The L.E. and Thelma E. Stephens Performing Arts Center moved to diverse performances this weekend, ranging from pulsating rhythms and frenetic movement, to slow deliberate motions set to the sound of pure silence and poetry. These eclectic modern dance presentations by the Idaho Moving Project, -I~MOVE, filled the Beverly B. Bistline Thrust Theatre Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings.

This fourth outing of I~MOVE, Idaho State University's professional touring dance company, was the first time the production was held in the Bistline Theatre. About 900 people attended the modern dance performances during its three-day run.

Lauralee Zimmerly, co-artistic director and co-founder of I~MOVE, said the new venue allowed attendance for greater than expected this year compared to those held in the Rogers Black Box Theatre.

"It's a really unique venue," Zimmerly said.

The performances represented the work of the faculty of the Dance Department at ISU in choreography and costume creation. The seven pieces included a performance set only to poetry and silence, with a background of sentences projected onto a large white screen as they were written. Another piece could only be described as a frenzy of athletic movements and pounding music.

The dancers often proved that the stage presented no boundary, performing moves on the edges of the stage that seemed destined to end in falls. But Zimmerly said this is an essential part of the art form.

"Risk taking has always been a part of modern dance," Zimmerly said. "It's a very avant-garde approach to movement that is hard to codify."

Zimmerly said the purpose creating I~MOVE, in the fall of 2004, was to introduce what he and her original colleagues, Nicole Dean and Melanie Kloetzel, saw as a missing element in the artistic landscape of the community.

"We wanted to start something new in Pocatello, which ended up as a faculty modern dance company," Zimmerly said. "There's no other interpretive dance in the area, which makes this a unique art event, and I love to see different kinds of art."

Continued...

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