Dance review: "Lost Action" weaves a sobering tale

Dance Review |

Canada's Kidd Pivot is one stunner of a dance company. Its seven dancers move swiftly yet smoothly, fluidly yet concisely, and they're strong — able to swing one another up as though limbs and torsos were mere gossamer. In "Lost Action," an 80-minute work about soldiers and loss by company choreographer Crystal Pite, they put their strength to uses both thrilling and sobering.

"Lost Action" is inspired in part by Pite's reading of letters written home by a great-great uncle who died in World War I. The piece is framed by drillmaster-derived vocabulary: fall-in and fall-out formations, hints of jumping jacks. But its heart is consumed with battlefield rescue and loss.

Dancers Eric Beauchesne, Malcolm Low, Yannick Matthon and Jermaine Spivey made up the dynamic "soldier" quartet Thursday at On the Boards, and their interplay was a marvel of speed and balance. Pite emphasizes partner work over solos, but Spivey and Matthon both had their spotlight moments — Spivey spinning a whole language of collapse out of a cross-stage progression, Matthon using breakdance-influenced modular movement to inflect military rigidity with tensile strength.

In a more minor key, Pite and Francine Liboiron's duet — a Shiva-like multi-limbed affair — evoked the traditional female experience of war: missing the warrior. Their duet led into a hypnotically elastic, meditative solo by Liboiron.

Together, the full company stayed in crisp sync with the percussive moments of Owen Belton's fractured electronic score, in which sliced and diced spoken phrases, laughs, sighs and even intakes of breath became the raw materials for rhythmic loops of sound. Artful repeats of group passage work, at varying speed, let you savor a sequence's beauty more than once, and at the same time shaped the structure of the whole. Jonathan Ryder's lighting played with shadows and silhouettes to bewitching effect too.

It's a crowded dance weekend, but if you can possibly get to this, go.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com