The Sedona Dance Project hosted the inaugural Sedona Dance Festival at Verde Valley School in the Village of Oak Creek on Thursday and Friday, April 18 and 19, featuring both the company of the Sedona Dance Academy and a number of guest artists recruited for the occasion by festival founder Danielle McNeal Strabala.

Strabala described the festival as being rooted in the philosophy of “ubuntu,” or “everyone gives a little to make it happen.”

First Act

Sedona voice teacher Merrill Leffmann launched the evening with a short cabaret performance. Sparkling in sapphire blue, Leffmann first gave the audience John Kander and Fred Ebb’s “Yes,” a flirtatious number in which a girl considers a variety of attractive possibilities that might come her way and urges herself to take advantage of them, in a rendition rich with the experience needed to convince listeners that the singer knew what she was talking about. Her second selection, a composition of her own titled “My Man,” flickered briefly into an impromptu standup routine as the sound system faded in and out and Leffmann made the most of the opportunity to jest with her audience, nightclub-style. To put it in period terms, the dame had quite a set of pipes on her, too.

Flamenco artist Yumi La Rosa followed Leffmann with “A Que Sabe la Vida,” a flamenco demonstration in which the snapping of La Rosa’s heels contrasted with the fludity with which she managed her scarlet train and the eloquence of her wrists. It was both formal and abandoned, an assured seduction that ended in a backbend and left La Rosa prone upon the flounces of her own skirt, a dish on display.

Next up were Keanna Agustin and Bridgette Caron Borzillo of CaZo Dance Theatre of Mesa with “The Storm.” The dance turned out to be a visualization of a teenager’s tantrum, full of lifts, abrupt turns and athletic poses. Essentially mournful, it depicted a repeated cycle of defiance and reconciliation.

The duo were succeeded by Nicole L. Olson of the Phoenix-based Dulce Dance Company in “Drinking of Them Like Wine,” choreographed by Candy Jimenez. The title, it transpired, had nothing to do with either the structural or emotional content of the dance, which was yet another representation of a tortured soul groping in the dark that never delivered on the music’s initial implied promise to break out of its dismalness.

Olson performed most of the first half of the number, which partook strongly of 1930s dark funhouse-style surrealism, prone or kneeling before a thematic shift to upbeat 1950s diner music jerked her upright. This was the cue for a bout of windmilling and sobbing atmospherics in which the soloist enacted a figure that could have been either a victim of delirium tremens or a helpless prisoner of consumerism.

A company performance by the senior students of the Sedona Dance Academy closed the first half of the show. Choreographed by Strabala and SDA principal Jessica Phillips to Keala Settle’s “This Is Me,” it showed off greatly-improved group work on the part of the young dancers — and yet the whole point of the choreography was that it kept having individuals or small groups breaking off from what the rest were doing, sometimes offsetting their moves by a beat, in order to underpin the song’s message. Plus a good ensemble number is always energizing, especially when it bursts into exuberant cartwheels at the end like the SDA team did.

Second Act

The festival picked back up after intermission with the showing of “A Short Film for Aliveness,” performed by Emilia Ann Rauckyte. This consisted of interspersed black-and-white vignettes of the narrator posing and dancing in front of various nature backgrounds, mostly solo but sometimes partnered, while getting deeper and deeper inside her own head and contemplating suicide. It was a very typical New Age piece, internal and self-focused.

The second act of performances featured Tracey Holberg, James Marinaro and Mary Pemberton of Wight Noise Dance Company of Peoria in “Photographs,” a short, expressive work that began with the trio looking through photo albums as a prelude to getting caught up in a series of of spins like snapshots snatched up by the wind, momentarily becoming what they depicted, before the choreography froze them in place again. They were followed by Shanaleigh Mejia, who offered a rarity for the Verde Valley, a performance of traditional Congolese dance titled “Connecting with Nature’s Spirit.” Unaccompanied at first except by chant, until the audience couldn’t resist and began clapping along with the beat, it began as a planting dance, with Mejia wielding a digging stick. The bell and drums came in and she cast aside her cloak, leaping with the empowerment she gained through the experience. The digging stick became a spear, its thrusting gestures redirected as the dancer signaled without words that she had become something else entirely.

The presentation of pieces such as “Drinking of Them Like Wine” and “Aliveness” in conjunction with Congoloese dance was a particularly effective programming choice to invite the audience to reflect on the similarities and differences between traditional and modern approaches to dance. Both forms often deal with the alienation of the dancer from the everyday world. In traditional dance, this is due to possession by spirits, while in modern dance, it is assumed to originate in depression or trauma — lack of emotional control.

Much more significant than this distinction, however, is the way in which dancers approach this separation in differing cultural contexts. In modern dance, the soloist is most typically a prisoner unable to find liberation through the dance and approaches the possession with pessimism, but in traditional dance, dancers embrace their alienation with optimism, using it to achieve union with the divine, an orgasmic catharsis that makes the existence they experience in an unaltered mental state tolerable.

Next, SDA dancer Anisa Jaffe returned for a solo performance in “Echoes of Yesterday,” another example of Strabala’s choreography, in which she partnered a yellow rose for an acrobatic exploration of love lost among its fleeting petals, the flower substituting for the absent object of her affections. The 520 Dance Company of Tucson then closed the show with a quartet performed by Maddy Greene, Hayley Mellum, Janessa Sala and Nicole Surran to a setting of Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” This one was a visually-deceptive piece in which the foursome entered in tunics that almost implied hospital gowns — and then proceeded to belie that initial institutional impression with a quick, balanced routine full of twirls that did an excellent job of capturing the slowly-building joy of movement inseparable from well-written music.

The dance festival was held in conjunction with a gallery showing of works donated by local artists as part of a silent auction to support SDP, which were on display in VVS’s Brady Hall prior to the performance.