TIMES UNION // By Tresca Weinstein //
In both its title and its contents, Ellen Sinopoli’s new dance, “Sometimes I Cascade” is a perfect distillation of the choreographer’s quintessential vibe. The piece had its premiere Saturday night at The Egg, performed by the five gorgeous dancers who make up the latest iteration of Sinopoli’s 34-year-old company. It’s a mini masterpiece of flow — lithe extensions and curving shapes, fluid intertwinings, turns in the air and rolls on the floor. Like a flock or a family, the dancers gather and then part, over and over again. Community, connection, continuity: These are perennial elements of Sinopoli’s work.
The company’s annual concert also included a reprise of Sinopoli’s first-ever collaboration with the Capital Region ensemble Musicians of Ma’alwyck, which debuted in January. Titled “Celebrated Emblems,” the project was inspired in part by dancer Marta Becket, who renovated an old opera house in the tiny desert town of Death Valley Junction, California, in the 1960s, and danced there every day until she was 89.
Becket’s story inspired composer Missy Mazzoli’s 2010 work “Death Valley Junction,” which in turn inspired Sinopoli’s “Dust Devils.” Like the music, performed live Saturday by the Musicians of Ma’alwyck, “Dust Devils” evokes a sense of timelessness and repetition. In loose, sand-colored costumes, the dancers writhe and twirl through cycles of motion, quick and then quiet—as if driven by a desert wind and then stifled by its stillness.
In “Telling,” the second part of “Celebrated Emblems,” the movement is harder-edged. Set to James Lee III’s uneasy “Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet,” it’s marked by a sense of suspension and apprehension. The dancers (Liv Butowsky, Kaitlyn Combs, Emily Gunter, Kyra Pitts, and Frances Teppner, joined by guest artist and former company member Erin Dooley) take up defensive postures, or face away from each other, often divided into small groups or struggling to find their way into one.
The evening marked the return of the Egg Kids Project, an opportunity for pre-professional teen dancers to work with a veteran Sinopoli performer — in this case, Emily Gunter. She choreographed a lovely, varied piece for the young dancers (Lucy Angier, Bari Geandreau, Zoe Greenblatt, Alex Lambie, Kinsey Marshall and Lucy Wasbes). Propelled by global rhythms of the band Amazonon, they stretched, ran, jumped and slid into splits, yet even the smallest motions — like an arm bending behind a back — were embodied and intentional.
Perhaps the most memorable work on the program, however, was Sinopoli’s elegiac “Fade,” from 2021, set to Henryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” The five dancers are each isolated in their own chairs within a soft circle of light. They melt slowly to the floor, curl into themselves, rise up again and find their way back, never straying into each other’s spaces. And then, one dancer walks away into the wings, and then another, as the curtain falls.