Minnesota Fringe Festival 2021: "Impulse"

Day: 6

Show: 15

Performance Type: In Person

Location: Southern Theater (indoors, masks required)

Length: 45 minutes

Title: Impulse

By: Manifest Dance

Summary: Three new original dance pieces performed by a talented company of dancers.

Highlights: One of my favorite things about Fringe is that it gives me an opportunity to see dance, which as a busy theater blogger in the before times I rarely had time to do. This is the only in person dance show at this year's Fringe, and if this is an indication of the #TCDance community, they're coming out of this pandemic really strong and ready to create beautiful meaningful work. Creator and choreographer Sam Lewis performs a gorgeous solo piece sandwiched between two group dances, which are also performed and co-choreographed by Isaiah Langowski, Sam Meryhew, Joe Tennis, and Vivian Wolkoff. The choreography is modern, unique, evocative, and beautiful to watch. The dancers are so graceful and specific in their intentional movements, and I love the way they use the space at the Southern Theater, perhaps the best dance venue in town. Unfortunately there's only one performance remaining, and if you don't already have a ticket for tonight's show, you're out of luck. I'll leave you with their description of the show: "After being cooped up for over a year we are ready to come out swinging. This show is our screams, our cries, and our celebration. For ourselves, for lives lost, for lives begun. 2020 was perspective."

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.

"Merge: Give Ear" streaming from the Cowles Center

Berit Ahlgren and Nathan Keepers
(photo by Shelly Mosman)

Give Ear is one of the many shows that were scheduled to open in March 2020; I call them "ghost shows." Some of them had a few performances before being cancelled, some of them just dress rehearsals or previews, some of them never even reached that point. Some of these shows will return in some form when theaters open again, but some will never come to be, and just remain an idea in the artists' minds. The Cowles Center gave creators Berit Ahlgren, Nathan Keepers, and company the opportunity to revisit Give Ear one year later and make it into something new. The result is a film/dance/theater piece that combines footage from the filmed final dress rehearsal last year and the new performance this year (both filmed on the Goodale Stage with no audience) with footage from the rehearsal/creative process (in one of the gorgeous studios in the Cowles Center) that sort of bridges the two performances. As Nathan says at one point, it "turned out to be super meta and weird." It's a look inside the artistic process as these artists try to make sense of the original piece they were trying to make one year ago and everything that's happened since. Nothing will be the same when this pandemic is over. Give Ear is an exploration of what that looks like for this one specific "ghost show."