Anchorage Daily News

Movement and music held a far-ranging conversation in Alaska Dance Theatre's "Live" concert Saturday evening. Questions, comments and exclamations flew back and forth among the performers in a lively production at the Discovery Theater.

Dancers love to move to live music; they jump at the chance to play with the fluid rhythms and tempos that musicians set up when they get together. Likewise, musicians like the challenge of teasing out the finer points of musicality in dancers.

This artistic collaboration can be a winning situation for performers and audiences since everyone gets to see the music and hear the dance in wonderfully creative ways.

The give-and-take among the artists in Saturday's concert was at times seamless and at others obvious. Each variety of exchange response made for some lovely dances. When the musicians and dancers were on the same page, bouncing ideas and rhythms off each other, the synergy created was potent.

This was evident in "Fall Ball," a work by UAA Dance Ensemble alumni Katya Kuznetsova and LaShonda L. Williams and EnviroBEAT musicians Yngvil Vatn Guttu and Erika Ninoyu.

Dancers became musicians and musicians became dancers in this piece that relied on rhythms in bodies, garbage cans, wine glasses and wood boards for its impetus and progression. Two performers began by running wet fingers on the rim of glasses, the single note sound carrying them in a slow circle around each other.

Other noises -- a ball rolling across the floor, a stick thunking against a plastic bucket, pebbles shaken in a coffee can -- opened the movements to all sorts of interpretations. A tinkling of metal shuddered in the dancers and the muted sounds of a wooden "plank-o-phone" flowed sinuously through the player's arms and torso.

Elegant dancers met the work of an elegant musician in ADT artistic director Alice Sullivan's "Valses Poeticos," set to Enrique Granados' composition of the same name. The interplay between pianist Alexander Zlatkovsky and several soloists was particularly refined and harmonious.

Shannon Bradley's delicately shaped solo echoed Zlatkovsky's pianistic restraint while Sara Keller translated the music's playful aspects with off-balance spirals and turns that finished with a flick of a foot. Avianna McKee was grace and sensuality, pulling musical threads into movements that whispered to Zlatkovsky who responded in kind.

Guest choreographer Maureen Whiting's "Juicy Point B pas de deux" was music and dance at their wackiest. Shonti Elder provided the noise -- an adagio and ciaccona by J. S. Bach on a totally out-of-tune violin.

Matching this off-key dissonance were Julie Tobiason and Kory Perigo looking like escapees from the demented dancers factory. They seemed to believe that a movement wasn't worth doing unless it was punctuated by joints popping all over the place or bodies dripping over each other and the floor.

ADT choreographer Leslie K. Ward's "Zenith" was a humid summer's slouch through West Virginia's "hometown heaven," set to Van Morrison songs. Taking a cue from vocalist Veronica Page, the dancers sauntered through swinging movements that ended in an arm suspended in space or a body on the brink of collapse.

ADT's "Live" was noisy and a bit strange at times, but the collaboration of dancers and musicians made for a concert that reflected the best in both art forms.

Anne Herman holds a masters degree in dance and has been a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts.