“The final entry in the Sioux City Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Evening of Symphonic Dance’ didn’t feature any dancers, but … by the time Music Director Ryan Haskins got to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s ‘Symphonic Dances,’ the audience was more than able to visualize how someone might move across the stage in front of the orchestra,” writes Bruce Miller in Sunday’s (3/10) Sioux City Journal (IA). “That’s because [five] members of the New York-based Dance Heginbotham did a great job suggesting how a piece might be interpreted in two earlier selections. A group of five moved fluidly across the stage during Ernst von Dohnanyi’s ‘Serenade for String Trio,’ resembling notes on a staff… A second piece, commissioned for the Sioux City organization, used Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Circus Polka’ as its jumping-off point. Stravinsky wrote the bold, brassy music for the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. It was designed for 50 elephants and 50 dancers at Madison Square Garden… Stravinsky included his own nudges in the four-minute work and got the intended reaction. In Sioux City, [dancer Macy] Sullivan, dressed in a hula-hoop dress and hot pink shorts … strutted with commitment, finding the humor the composer intended it to have.”
Posted March 11, 2019
