3rd Law Cleans Even Better

Let me be frank here. This probably is more a love-fest than a review. I think almost any dance critic finds some dancers, or some companies they love. With me one of those is Boulder, Colorado's "3rd Law Dance/Theater." To my lens - whatever aperture or focus you want to assign to it - that company gets it right. Not only is their choreography and staging wonderful, but they find thematic material almost any audience can relate to well. Thus, whatever abstractions choreographer Katie Elliott places in her movement, 3rd Law's audiences are able to find meanings within those themes. And said themes are wonderfully enhanced by Jim LaVita's projections, the carefully chosen and mixed sound scores, Craig Bushman's lighting designs that reveal all without smearing the projections, and last but not least, a company of excellent and carefully entrained dancers.

We reviewed 3rd Law's "The Clean Room" when it was premiered in Boulder's Dairy Center for the Arts Performance Space in spring 2008 (www.worlddancereviews.com/dance/archive.php?page=reviews_archives&id=154'). They presented a somewhat "revised and enhanced" version of that concert in Lakewood, Colorado's Cultural Center Theater this weekend (January 15 and 16, 2010). "We changed a few things and tightened it up," states Katie Elliott, "and it was sure nice to present it in a theater that was really built as a theater like the Lakewood Cultural Center." This version of "The Clean Room" does have some changes. It is tighter. And the Lakewood CC Theater is an absolutely wonderful and state-of-the-art venue in which to present dance. But it is way more than that. Anyone can find "more" in a second viewing of any work. And a venue like Lakewood can add a lot. But in my view "the Clean Room" has gone from wonderful to stunning - however, you want to interpret those words. The work is also especially pertinent as the movie "Avatar" captures public imagination. In that movie Director James Cameron uses digital technology to create a separate Gaia-like universe and species, and moves his human actors to and from it. In the end Cameron "saves" that "universe." 3rd Law does much the same in "the Clean Room." but also asks us what does "your avatar" do when that alternate "reality" crashes? What is your real reality? And they do that with one species, wherein Jennifer Golonka's and Eliza Kuelthau's solos are yearningly human, even as Danielle Hendricks gets trapped in a digital mode that writhes in spastic movement and eventually crawls offstage as it dies/crashes/terminates. Michael Richman becomes a virus disguised in drag. Programs run in simultaneously in parallel and series, and nothing in that alternate reality is permanent. Not the data media. Not the data. Not the programs, or whatever reality we assign to any of that.

"The Clean Room" is a wonderful juxtaposition of humanity and any digital cyberspace it creates. Elliott's choreography creates images that are poignantly human, and others that are just as poignantly digital and impermanent. It seems to come down to just what is our conciousness about? What is our reality?

If you have not seen "The Clean Room," and ever get a chance to do that I recommend you see it. Ditto for anything else 3rd Law does. In the meantime I promise you that if they screw up, I will tell you.

Donald K. Atwood

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