“Go.”
A spoken word, accompanied by a jazzy crash of drums and the leap of bodies, begins KDH Dance Company’s Interiors, starting off an uninterrupted hour of physical storytelling.
The dancers milled about onstage beforehand, warming up while audience members trickled into Ground Floor Theatre. They rolled out ankles and wrists. They hopped and stretched, clad in textured costumes designed by dancers Cara Cook and Carissa Topham Fisher, loose and comfortable. Performers whispered amongst themselves, building connections from scratch in front of the viewer.
KDH founder Kathy Dunn Hamrick recently passed the baton to a new crew, and here artistic director Alyson Dolan and executive director Drew Silverman make a lasting impression. Ever wanted to live inside the music video for “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads? The evocative movements and wide-open spaces of this show are for you. Dolan’s choreography stitches yoga, ballet, jazz, primal movement, and contemporary dance together, a cosmic quilt presenting action as art – as an expression of, well, interior thought.
Interiors is a total sensory experience. I almost short-circuited trying to drink in every element. My eyes zipped between each dancer as their arms created whirligig fishes or rolling motions of breath. I tried to track the projected window in the background as its images morphed from pastoral scenes to revolutionary marches. My ears vibrated pleasantly as tunes swirled with atmospheric effects, from rain to babbling brooks, ominous ticking clocks and meditative gongs layered overhead. It was like swimming underwater while Radiohead or the final David Bowie album played directly in my brain.
Despite those meticulously crafted sounds, incidental noise isn’t the enemy in this production. Footfalls and bodily thumps aren’t a necessary evil to be tolerated, but a celebrated contribution. Hands slap flesh or pound the stage to emphasize emotions, mindfully punctuating choreography. Drew Silverman’s compositions are an essential character in the company. He mixes a heady audio potion, deploying phased-out tones enhanced by live instrumentation from Henna Chou, Leila Louise Henley, and Andy Nolte. It swings from tone poems to pure jazz, classical cello beats to folksy guitar runs reminiscent of a Gustavo Santaolalla score. Even the silences hold sacred space. One highlight recreated scrolling through radio stations as four dancers sat diagonally toward the backing window projection, slowly sweeping hands through the air as scanned static briefly paused on pre-recorded spoken snippets and live musical runs from the sidelines.
Interiors is performed with childlike exuberance of motion. If you’ve ever felt the freedom of running without purpose, of dancing not to be seen but to feel, the choreography will resonate. Performed with wild abandon, the dancers – Anna Bauer, Jairus Carr, Lisa del Rosario, Love Muwwakkil Estes, and the aforementioned Cara Cook and Carissa Topham Fisher – telegraph pure joy. Their collaborative motions aren’t precise. Moves don’t mirror, but complement each other in their exquisite mimeographed formations, sequences passing along shared energy.
While the first number frenetically burst onstage, the performance ended sweetly, softly. Dancers lined up, hands on hearts or outreached to the sky. They formed a prayer – a benediction to the colossal creativity not only on display, but within us all.
KDH Dance Company Presents Interiors
Ground Floor Theatre
June 5-7
This article appears in June 6 • 2025.