Baredance: Burton Taylor Studio (From The Oxford Times)

Baredance: Burton Taylor Studio

1:53pm Wednesday 7th April 2010

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For four days last week Baredance presented their latest show, Between You and Me, at the tiny Burton Taylor. Seeing a group you don’t know at a fringe festival is always a risk, but in this case proved to be well worth taking. The dancers, all from the USA, are an interesting trio: Stephanie Yezek tall slender and intense, Renee Brozic Barger elegant and rather aristocratic, and Megan Morse Jans rounded, friendly and accessible. The work is a sequence of eight short pieces on the theme of identity within a relationship, and was commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Before Bed is a mainly light-hearted piece in which Yezek and Jans, who made the work together, struggle to maintain their own space while getting physically entangled. Then came Triptych 1, the first of three solos by Barger with some strong dancing in which she seems to be expressing loneliness, and, in the third, drunkenness. Madwoman in the Attic is based on the character from Jane Eyre, and gives Yezek the chance to display her dramatic talents as well as her dancing skills. She starts off crouched in a corner in a slinky black dress, her face covered by the splayed fingers of both hands. Gradually she forces herself to survey her surroundings through this shield of digits, and launches into a frenetic, agonised dance, her fierce looks used here to great advantage.

The trio have also been working with the student dancers of Oxford Freefall, and next came the first of two creditable performances from these five girls, “created during a two-week workshop the previous weekend”! Barger’s After Dinner is danced by Jans and Yezek, the former an innocent, the latter a sophisticate. Is this the beginning of a seduction or a slowly developing estrangement? It’s ambiguous and quite dark, intriguing and satisfying. Jans returns in a cocktail dress to dance Like a Peach with an enigmatic smile, and to end, a seemingly frozen Barger and Yezak shiver their way through Thaw.

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