On Jan. 17 and 18, dance company The Wooden Floor presents new progressive pieces in its third visit to REDCAT. This year, the company collaborates with Alpert Award-winning choreographer Susan Rethorst, New York-based choreographer Ivy Baldwin and artistic director Melanie Ríos Glaser to bring idiosyncratic dance that is about “inquiry, possibility and expansion.”
Rethorst’s Too pulls movement from the dancers’ energy and context, inviting the “arbitrary, the ridiculous, the exaggerated, the uncool.” Baldwin’s Time-lapse Alphabet combines ornate hand and arm dances inspired by Renaissance architecture with underwater slow-motion mirroring. Glaser’s True of False: I was born in the Nederlands captures the dancers when they were being themselves at The Wooden Floor while deconstructing how pop culture affects the way that the youth walk and talk.
The Wooden Floor aims to challenge notions of who can inspire, create, perform and appreciate art. To that end, it provides free dance classes and family services to 375 low-income youth from underserved communities in Southern California. Hundreds of young people from ages 8 to 13 audition for 75 spots of decade-long tenure every year. The company also offers the students pre-collegiate mentoring, preparing them for higher education.
Since 2005, 100 percent of its young artists have graduated from high school on schedule and have gone on to college.
Above, we posted a video of The Wooden Floor performing Waterway, choreographed by Glaser, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.