CriticalDance Forum

Director checks her ‘Ego’ at the door

EgoArt’s artistic director, Nicole Pierce, uses improbable sources to generate movement.
One of her new dances, for example, is the result of an argument two company members had about who sings “The Rainbow Connection” more persuasively, Willie Nelson or Kermit the Frog.
To confuse the issue even further, the sound mix that accompanies the dance - in the next installation in EgoArt’s ongoing series of postmodern vaudeville shows in Cambridge - layers excerpts from both renditions, with surprising results.
Just like the quirky, pioneering choreographers of the 1960s Judson Dance Theater, Pierce, whose new “Ego Show 4: The Anti-Depression Project” opens Thursday at Green Street Studios in Cambridge, reveals an ongoing obsession with extreme juxtapositions and the role of memory.

Performance artist Pierce needs to leggo her Ego

The local dance scene hit an all-time low Thursday night in Cambridge, with EgoArt's trifling “Ego Show IV: The Anti-Depression Project” at Green Street Studios.

This pessimistic pastiche of dances, stand-up comedy and amateur videos is anything but uplifting, despite artistic director Nicole Pierce's opening statement that the show is about “ways of dealing with depression.”

Monuments and miniatures
Bernstein at Harvard; Central Square weekend

....
. Nicole Pierce, director of EgoArt, called her concerts at Green Street “Dances Only,” explaining in pre-curtain remarks that this was the first all-dance program she’d ever tried. Having discovered quite a lot of dance material woven among previous attractions known for their use of gorilla suits, she decided to give her dance its own platform.

Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ becomes life-cycle dance
.... in Nicole Pierce’s version of Mozart’s final work, being given its world premiere this weekend at The Armory in Somerville, the choreographer chooses not to interpret the piece as a tribute to the dead, but to use the music as a launch pad to reflect the cycle of life.

Requiem detexted - Nicole Pierce at the Armory
Mozart's Requiem is one of the most controversial works in the classical repertory. Mozart had completed only parts of it and sketched other parts when he died, unexpectedly at age 35, in 1791. ....
Nicole Pierce, who's a musician as well as a dancer/choreographer, has plunged into the fray with her Requiem, for eight women of EgoArt, a piece that had its premiere last weekend at the Armory Center for the Arts in Somerville.