Flash Dance: 30 Dances in 60 Minutes

Flash Dance: 30 Dances in 60 Minutes

Cafe Dance, through Feb. 24

Running time: 1 hr

This is the season of short, that time of year when local stages are especially likely to serve up abbreviated works. Think of FronteraFest, with its bounty of 25-minute performances in the Short Fringe, and Austin Independent Choreographers' Dance Carousel, spinning out 40 one-minute dances in the Long Fringe. Then there's Austin Script Works' annual harvest of 10-minute plays in its Out of Ink festival (coming our way in March at the Blue Theater). It's an exciting time, not so much because brevity always equals quality, but because the constraints of time seem to inspire creators to rethink what they're doing, to find a new economy of word or gesture for communicating meaning, to distill their art to its essence.

So it is with choreographer Kathy Dunn Hamrick, who has gotten into the act this year with Flash Dance, a program presenting, as its subtitle helpfully informs us, 30 dances in 60 minutes. Set aside, if you can, those inevitable images of a backlighted Jennifer Beals getting waterlogged; you'll find no MTV gyrations or Eighties glitz here, just pure, clean, clear movement in expressive, compact little nuggets. Dunn Hamrick has divided the 30 dances into five sections, each with a particular focus – a part of the body, parts of the studio space, words – from which a host of different dances spring. Hands inspire a solo involving a knife and fork manipulated by a dancer wearing a table around her waist, as well as a duet set in frigid water (Barton Springs, perhaps?), where the dancers use their hands first to warm their chilled bodies then to propel themselves under the surface. The studio prompts a group of dancers to grip the bar and arch their bodies outward, playing off the tension in their arms and backs; one dancer to position herself in a corner, pressing against this wall and that wall, exploring the space in which the two meet; and one dancer to use a structural pole as a partner. Two dancers improvise movements based on words printed on cards held up by other dancers, then one dancer dances every movement read from a card by Dunn Hamrick. The variety of these works heightens their appeal, reminding us of the infinite directions in which dance may take us and keeping us in a constant state of surprise over which ones Dunn Hamrick and her dancers will choose.

But more than the eclecticism of the dances, it's their considered simplicity and the crispness of their execution that make this program the delight that it is. Each piece is grounded in an elementary idea that's investigated fully through the most basic and cleanest of movements, such that you get a feeling of completeness when the dancer stops, even if the dance lasted less than a minute or involved something as uncomplicated as crawling through a hole in a cardboard box. Something whole was created, and that sense of wholeness elicits in the viewer a satisfying "ahhh" – much like the kind sparked by a dazzling fireworks display – which, in a sense, these flash dances are: appearing ever so briefly, but flaring oh so brightly, bursts of illumination that captivate us and leave us wishing they lasted longer.