Inside the crowded Macky Auditorium on a chilly Saturday night, the Parsons Dance Company presented an inventive, thought-provoking and captivatingly athletic mixed bill that was warmingly easy to love but far from shallowly commercial.
Parsons explodes more than a few dance stereotypes.
During a master class Saturday afternoon at CU Boulder, his motivational style and sense of humor suggested an easygoing Midwestern college football coach. Much of Parsons' work is about the sophisticated development of style, humor, physicality, image and visual effect as ends in themselves. Wearing black pants, shorts and hoods that transformed them into stealth corporate functionaries, seven of Parsons' 11 talented dancers mocked the grandeur of Rossini's music while playing an entertaining and irreverent game of hot potato with an irrepressible letter. With company co-founder and lighting designer Howell Binkley, Parsons has become an enthusiastic advocate of photographic and multimedia technologies as a means to reshape perspective on movement and emotion. A forthcoming production will feature the dance world's first 70mm digital set, with an assist by Industrial Light and Magic.