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| Amanda Morse, Dana Detweiler and Jessica Hightower |
Saturday night was BIG in downtown Portland -- traffic was slopping over from the Timbers game, the symphony was in concert, some sort of do was animating the Portland Art Museum, the restaurants looked busy. I was headed for quieter climes, or so I thought, to watch Gust, the debut dance concert of TopShakeDance. But when I got there, the old Pythian Building was hopping, with a prom party on the fifth floor and a wedding on the second -- people were looking GOOD.
Conduit dance studio is on the 4th floor, and dancer/choreographer/TopShakeDance founder Jim McGinn has climbed those steps many times to rehearse with Mary Oslund and Tere Mathern, among others, over the years. He's danced with Oslund's company for 12 years and Mathern's for seven, and that by itself gave a hint of what to expect from McGinn's Gust.
Not that choreographic history is necessarily choreographic destiny, I suppose, but Gust was physically demanding (check), an hour with no intermission (check), abstract (check again), engaged with an equally abstract soundscape (check with an asterisk), ranged from the still to the frenetic (yo), found its expressiveness both in the overall form and structure of the dance and its small gestures (double yo). A description of Mathern or Oslund's work would contain many of the same elements. Which isn't to say McGinn's Gust is derivative of their dances, just in the same family.
