"Arts Preview: Hixon Dance"
Jim Fischer, Columbus Alive!
November 1, 2017
Independent dance companies keep scene on the move
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A mainstay of the independent dance scene, Hixon Dance marks its 10-year anniversary with a retrospective program Friday and Saturday, Nov. 3 and 4, at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington.
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Founder/director Sarah Hixon dug through 10 years of movement-making and selected both a representative cross-section of work and choreography that returns to particular themes and movement qualities.
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“I am taking movement I had used before and seeing how I could change it and alter and manipulate it to make it seem different and totally new,” Hixon said. “It’s funny now looking at [individual dance pieces] as a body and seeing movements or movement qualities that are the same, [or] occasionally some concepts that are related or similar. It’s interesting for me to step back and look at them in that way.”
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One recurring theme is conflict. While Hixon said the pieces don’t necessarily have a linear narrative, several of the pieces build on the notion of competing interests.
“Gestures from the Sawdust Root,” a work for seven dancers set to music by French composer Francis Poulenc and inspired by an Allen Ginsberg poem, is a loose social commentary on the conflict between nature and machine. A piece set to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” played on toy piano devolves into a child-like, self-involved tantrum. “No Exit” comments on situations that infringe on our personal space. The piece finds four dancers sharing a 4-foot-by-4-foot raised platform, trapped with one another and afflicted by the close quarters.
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“Having no conflict is kind of boring,” Hixon said. “People in their daily lives are experiencing conflict, even if it’s not dramatic.”
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“In live performance or art, people bring their own perspective or lens to what they see or hear,” she added. “I feel like a successful piece isn’t one where audience members totally understand what I was saying, but where they get that nugget or essential element, that universal emotion or thought or some kind of experience that I want to portray through my work.”
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Some music will be performed live on stage, and a new sculpture by Chicago artist Hannah Barco will also be featured.