Performing Arts

RICHARDSON – If you've seen Battleworks Dance Company, you'll recognize the style immediately: fierce, aggressive, intoxicating. The company made a stunning impression Thursday night at University Theatre on the University of Texas at Dallas.

MIKE STONE/Special Contributor

Every gesture between Samuel L. Roberts (front) and Kanji Segawa is bold and sculpted.

The mood throughout was hardboiled and the music even more so, since even the first half of the program featured slam-bang works by UTDance Ensemble and Collin Dance Ensemble. There was Michele Hanlon's disturbing Addict for UTDance Ensemble, with six women in tattered jeans and messy hair repeatedly jabbing themselves with imaginary needles, their faces dead. It ends with an overdosed Amanda Jade Lousberg crashing on the floor.

Or Tiffanee Arnold's Amazonia, set to the music of Philip Glass, where 12 women and one man from Collin Dance Ensemble appear in silhouette, moving slowly to the front on the stage, some crawling, some moving backward. As light illuminates individuals, we see speckled leotards and painted faces, and the movement grows agitated, with dancers dragging and pulling one another.

The same toughness showed up in Robert Battle's Battle Etude performed by UTDance Ensemble and Micki Saba's The Way Things Happen.

Kim Jackson's Oooo ... A Shiny Penny was downright jaunty compared with the others. And the sole lyrical ballet, Ms. Arnold's Moonshadows, offered a welcome reprieve. Thirteen dancers in blue flitted like moonbeams in a glade, disappearing in a trice and reappearing like butterflies.

And then finally came the much-anticipated Battleworks Dance Company, ratcheting up to high decibels in three signature works, Strange Humors, Takademe and The Hunt.

In Strange Humors, bare-chested Samuel L. Roberts and Kanji Segawa appear in a diagonal shaft of light, at opposite sides of the stage. In a style both odd and controlled, they confront each other, jerking an arm, entangling for a moment, twitching, contracting and slamming to the floor. Every gesture and movement is bold and sculpted.

Dallas native Jennifer Mabus gets a different workout in Takademe, set to Indian music. The footwork is fast and detailed, while her body undulates like an uncoiling cobra.

For sheer power, nothing could match The Hunt. It had jackhammer ferocity, featuring Ms. Magus, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Sagawa and Marlena Wolfe. They took the stage like a storm. All were clad in long black skirts with a red interior. They flailed, lurched, fell backwards flat on the floor and hammered the floor with wild intensity. It was a killer performance.

Margaret Putnam is a Richardson-based writer who covers dance.

msputnam@sbcglobal.net

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