SHARP Dance Company presents 'Façade'

Though it was my first time seeing SHARP, I did recognize familiar faces. Joe Cotler, a returning collaborator who co-created the world premiere “Puzzle” with artistic director Diane Sharp-Nachsin, is a member of Koresh Dance Company. And company member Kate Lombardi also is a member of Dancefusion and Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Company.

Yet SHARP has a voice and style all its own. Façade explores what lies behind the surface to uncover fundamental human experiences such as loss, longing, and glee.

Loss and longing

The program began with Sharp-Nachsin’s “The Affair,” an excerpt from 2013’s Perceptions. Three dancers — Lombardi, Sandra Davis, and Greg Anmuth — performed an asynchronous trio suggesting one person’s response to a partner’s infidelity.

Davis and Anmuth, clad in black, danced desire and attraction with sensual lifts and exchanged caresses. Lombardi, in a white dress, danced a response conveying pain as she doubled over and placed hands over her mouth. Lighting underscored the cause-and-effect choreography as spotlights alternately illuminated the duo and soloist.

The next piece, “Not With Uncertainty,” was choreographed by company member Caroline Butcher, who performed it with Hannah Brumbach, Linnea Calzada-Charma, Sandra Davis, and Lombardi. This was one of my favorite pieces. Featuring images that created a visual feast of constant yet varied movement, the work felt fully realized.

Leigh Anne Hague’s oceanlike artwork was projected onto a backdrop, and the dancers’ blue ombré costumes and undulating movements reinforced this concept. Butcher’s choreography drew from ballet, modern, and yoga with passés, running, percussive breathing, and legs extended from a modified crouch that resembled a pose yogis call "three-legged dog."

Changes in levels and tempo, such as quick turns combined with slow arm reaches, kept my attention. Butcher’s formations were especially imaginative. In one sequence, three dancers formed a diagonal line flanked by two others.

Please remain seated

Another dancer, Miguel Quiñones, created the next piece, “Luminary.” This energetic solo portrayed the competing yet often coexistent emotions of craving and aversion. Quiñones alternately seemed to reach for and run from something.

“Luminary” also used movement to consider control, as Quiñones sometimes grabbed his own hand to move it in a different way, as if it were an unruly object rather than a part of his body. I wish this dance used more of the space instead of confining most of the movement to a single quadrant of the stage.

Façade’s first act concluded with “Roller Coaster Rules,” a piece by Sharp-Naschin using comedic movement, gesture, costume, and Rich Orlow’s voiceover. “Haven’t we all heard the rules on a roller-coaster ride?” ask the program notes.

This dance “takes a fun look at listening or not listening to those rules,” with four dancers treating four chairs as the seats on an amusement-park ride. Their youthful excitement and irreverence for the “roller coaster” was heightened by their costumes, featuring colorful accessories and clothing adorned with animals.

As the voiceover instructed riders to stay seated, the dancers stood on their seats. They mimed drinking and smoking during a warning against substance use. And for some reason, they repeatedly swatted each other’s rear ends. “Roller Coaster Rules” was as silly and sometimes inexplicable as the young people Butcher, Davis, Lombardi, and Quiñones portrayed.

More than the sum of its parts

Following an intermission, SHARP premiered “Puzzle.” But first came a video that treated the audience to even more laughs during its behind-the-scenes look at the work’s creation. In the video, dancers introduced themselves and answered questions about the company, working on this new dance, and what it was like to have two choreographers.

Text superimposed on the screen depicted Sharp-Nachsin’s refusal to take things too seriously. For instance, the dancers were asked which choreographer counted more effectively. All but one member answered “Joe!” without hesitation. But Amnuth hedged, and the subtitles explained he was just being polite because he is SHARP’s newest member.

“Puzzle” was another of the evening’s standout pieces. Its three sections blended and merged styles of dance. The first was at once fluid and robotic. Dancers placed their hands atop their heads and under their jaws in a gesture repeated throughout the section, then paired in male-female and female-female duos. Amnuth lifted and spun Lombardi with particular grace here.

In the second section, four female dancers extended their arms, suggesting contagious longing. Amnuth stood out in challenging sequences that required quickly moving from upright positions down to the floor, then up again. He poured his body across the stage, executing a particularly sinuous backward somersault.

In the final section, industrial music and red lighting brought to mind the metronome of the heart, the body’s engine. Dancers showed off their athleticism as they performed body rolls and spun with other dancers draped across their backs. I thought of Roni Koresh’s choreography when dancers moved across the floor in a circle, as in a folk dance.

Together, the pieces of “Puzzle” added to more than the sum of their parts, as did Façade, a program in which SHARP used a variety of techniques and styles to engage a full spectrum of human emotion.