From my review published June 23, 2012 in Classical Voice of North Carolina. Read the full review here.

Kate Weare’s Lay Me Down Safe blew my mental breakers in the first minutes, getting right down to what the best dance does best: It brings experience and understanding through the body and its senses. When the lights came up at the end of this eight-dancer exposé of love and danger, I felt like a selkie caught outside my sealskin—unprotected, revealed; muscle, bone and skin tingling with sensation. Much of this magic is worked with the choreography, which struck me as profoundly female, but the entire visual is important, and of course, the dark, rhythmic music mix (including Nouvelle Vague, Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen). Both the backdrops and the costumes—tunics over skirts—are in shades of warm greys, which change in emotional value when the lighting alternates between sidelights and shadow-casting footlights. All the elements combine to create an atmosphere where tender safety and casual obliteration exist in the same moment—just as in the “real” world.

See rehearsal video here. See video of Drift onstage here.

SDT in Lay Me Down Safe. Photo: Nicole Guarino, courtesy ADF.

SDT in Drift. Photo: Sara Davis, courtesy ADF.

SDT in Dog. Photo: Andy Ross, courtesy of ADF.