Performing Arts

Garland. What if Kyle Schlaefer let loose his hold on this little featherweight of a girl? Would she flutter away like a moth?

REX C. CURRY/Special Contributor

Dancers from the Chamberlain School of Performing Arts rehearse for their performance of Dances at a Gathering at the Patty Granville Arts Center in Garland.

Suzette Mariaux's Heliotrope Bouquet featured seven girls, ages 12-14, who were all spindle limbs and sunny smiles, frisky as newborn colts and seeming to weigh nothing at all. But spindle-y limbs or not, they danced with insouciance and precision, clad in the tiniest of pale rose. You couldn't help but smile.

Precision counted a lot in Chamberlain Performing Arts' Dances at a Gathering, performed Saturday night at Granville Arts Center. A good two-thirds of the dances – including the jazzy Heliotrope Bouquet – sped by at a daring pace, demanding careful placement of foot and curve of the arm. The opening work, Lisa Hess Jones' Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, took its cues from Balanchine's swift deployment of sets of threes and sixes, with dancers rushing in and out and re-gathering in new groups.

What was most remarkable – even uncanny – about Concerto was not New York City Ballet zip (Ms. Hess was a soloist with the company), but the Kirov uniformity of line. Every arm, every leg, every slightest turn, was executed within a nanosecond of symmetrical perfection.

The slower works were either poetic (Twilight) or haunting. Kathy Chamberlain's loving tribute to John O'Malley, (1961-2007), a former student who created his own dance company in New York, let Neil Diamond's "Dear Father, we dream, we dream" provide some of the emotional impact, and the simplicity of the movement do the rest.

Offering a nice ballast to the fleet of foot, Collin Dance Ensemble performed a jaunty Hither Thither and a free-wheeling Conspirare.

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