Theatre Jones North Texas Performing Arts News

A dance program consisting of 22 dance works (not all of them short either) might have more than a few saying, "Holy tutus, Batman!" Tutus, pointe shoes, short-shorts, bare feet, jazz shoes and all kinds of dresses fill the stage of the Campus Theatre in downtown Denton for Collage Dance Festival 2012, presented by the Denton City Contemporary Ballet.

Joining DCCB are Festival Ballet of North Central Texas, CholoRock Dance Theatre, Greenspace Dance, Big Rig Dance Collective, and Ayu Shimizu (exchange student from Kansaigaidai University in Japan), Sami Neal and Brandon McGee. Former So You Think You Can Dance contestant Chris Koehl also returns to the festival.

As the hosts of this year's festival, DCCB naturally has a spotlight, but eight pieces (10 if you count the ones performed by DCCB 2) is a bit excessive, especially when the same swift attitudes, coupe jetes and pitched grand battements appear in each one. For the most part, the dancers handle the technical difficulties of the pieces pretty well, but performance quality tends to be all over the place. For example, most of the dancers don't show the maturity needed in Lisa Racina-Torre's El Tango de los Assassionos, but they manage to incorporate the dramatic subtleties in Sami Neal's Nicest Thing and Tricia Ragsdale's Meltdown.

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