The Candy Dish
Running Time: 1 hr, 15 min
If there’s one word that can silence a child – or an adult, for that matter – it is “candy.” But the audience couldn’t keep quiet at the Getalong Gang Performance Group’s the Candy Dish, an assortment of choreographed delights. Charmed by eight sweet dances from Zenobia Taylor, a founder of Getalong, and Ballet East artists Amberlee Cantrell and Funmilayo Hill, they couldn’t stop laughing.
Each choreographer concocts her confections out of her own personal flavors: Cantrell draws on music for inspiration; Hill employs Polynesian finesse; Taylor lampoons different styles and eras. The show hits the ground dancing, so to speak, with Cantrell’s “Wasted in Our Leotards” and “Barely Overwhelming,” driven by the jazzy-folk harmonies of Medeski, Martin, & Wood and Herbie Hancock. The dancers use their hips with flawlessly sensuous movements. Cantrell’s piece “and then I find myself Stuck again” is performed by Elizabeth Palmer, who rightly has a solo act demonstrating her graceful endurance.
Red flowers are the object of frustration and affection for Hill, who combines the Japanese technopop of Towa Tei and striking beauty of the aloha spirit.
Taylor’s, however, carves out stories, which are the nuggets of the show. The ladies are dressed in Fifties petticoats for explosive dancing to bubblegum tunes like “You Don’t Own Me” and “Heart and Soul.” Then comes the wrestling of a mother and restless daughter behind the back of a Southern preacher. Somehow, the daughter, the elastic Angela Johnson, winds up wriggling all over the preacher like a monkey crawling on Jack Hanna. Two ladies tug at the same man, Spencer Driggers, who also plays the preacher, while yearning, as we all have, to Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time.”
The Getalong Gang dives into the show’s title and comes up performing on sugar highs for any viewer’s palatte. – Patti Hadad
(Friday, Jan. 27, 9pm)
This article appears in January 27 • 2006.