Blue Lapis Light leaves crowd awestruck
For an event often drenched by showers and thunderstorms, the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival a perfect opening Friday night for its 58 th edition, capped by the appropriately titled “Star Dust.”
It was a performance in which four members of the Austin, Texas-based group Blue Lapis Light, easily resembling angels, arched and twirledas they repelled along the face of Fifth Avenue Place, Downtown. Hardly noticeable were the harnesses that embraced them.
A large crowd began gathering around The T Station on Stanwix Street about a half-hour before 9 p.m., and the city co operated by closing Stanw ix Street shortly before the performance, also sponsored by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Pittsburgh Dance Council.
Photographer Jason Fu rd a, who has a full-time job inside Fifth Avenue Place as a business analyst, is also an independent photographer.
He was among the first to arrive, having watched a the rehearsals from his AM Health Solutions window during the week. “I was very jealous,”he said. “I wanted to ask how much they would charge to try it out.”
Althoughthe idea of dance is often to escape gravity, the historyof dance doesn’t often reach to the heights of this performance.
Contemporary dance, ever so eager to push the artistic box, took several forms in achieving new directions. Yvonne Ranier, a founder of the pedestrian aesthetic in the JudsonDance Theater movement, created “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building” (1971), where the title describes the dance.
Japan’s Sankai Juku was another matter. The butoh dance company made international news by descending skyscrapers upside down, ever so slowly.
That was interrupted whena member of the troupe fell to his death in 1985. Although negotiations were underway to repeat this feat for the Pittsburgh Dance Councilin 1986, the company temporarily suspended it. However performers used the ropes, along with a wandering peacock, in their local premiere Kumquat Seed)” at Heinz Hall.
Even so, that connected with the death-defying sense of watching Blue Lapis Light descendfrom the 23rd floor of the building to occasional oohs and a ah sand gasps from the crowd.
With colored bubbles and rectangles of light illuminating them, they looked like mere flies on the side of the building at first. The quartet gradually descended, entwining that downward motion withgraceful cartwheels and divine arabesques.
With music by Hans Zimmer, the Beatles and Brian Eno wafting through the air, thewomen, clad in shimmering blue leotards and winglike appendages, embraced a “stage” that only window washers could imagine.
Gradually adding swinging arcs away from building and multiple somersaults, they simply seemed to touch the earth at the end, as members of the crowd rushed to applaud.
The performance will be repeated Saturday at 9 p.m.
Former Post-Gazette critic Jane Vranish: jvranish1@comcast.net. She blogs at pittsburghcrosscurrents.com.