Review: Contemporary Dance Fort Worth Modern Dance Festival

At last year’s Modern Dance Festival at the Modern, structured improvisational and participatory dance in the Grand Lobby of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth proved popular with the kids. Kids love to dance, and they don’t mind doing it in front of an audience.

With that in mind, looks like Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth’s 12th annual Modern Dance Festival at the Modern is keeping the young’uns in mind.

The festival opened this weekend with Dance Unplugged, in which local and regional companies and dancers perform short works, and/or engage in structured improvisation. At Saturday’s installment, from 1 to 4 p.m., not only were kids encouraged to participate in a number of the events, including Follow the Leader, but the final group to perform, Collective Force Dance Company, featured several mommy dancers with babies strapped to their torsos in Seeds of Joy. Older children danced with the adults in a circle.

As in the participation-encouraged dances, the little ones looked like they were having a ball.

The event wasn’t all geared to the under-10 set.

Lori Yuill of Sugar Land had the most interesting modern dance of the program with In the Upper 30’s (2015), which involves a red-paint-splattered folding table and chair. Along with dancer Abby Flowers, they have fun with mirroring each other and using unconventional body parts in dance, such as shoulder blades. In several sections, there’s audible counting; and one scene features quick jotting of something on pieces of paper.

In another participatory piece, Yuill implored audiences to close their eyes as she described several places in Imaginary Landscape III. When they eyes opened, she used a variety of common moves in the modern dance vocabulary.

Mysti Jace Pride of Austin did the solo piece Tension’s Hold (2015), which has her facing the front doors (where most of the audience sits, on benches or the floor), her body making pronounced and rigid movements. Another lovely solo came from Fort Worth’s Anna Womack in Back, which had her bending over backward.

Sunday’s Dance Unplugged features a new batch of performers, but the CD/FW crew will still pepper performances with structured improv. The Unplugged performances continue next weekend (6 p.m. Friday, 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday), and there are short dance films. The festival culminates with CD/DFW Choreographers Exchange on July 23-24.

This story was originally published July 11, 2015 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Review: Contemporary Dance Fort Worth Modern Dance Festival."