USC Dance Collaborator Receives Bessie Award!
Congratulations to a great friend of the USC Dance program, choreographer/dancer Celia Rowlson-Hall, who was honored with a prestigious Bessie Award in October, 2010!
Rowlson-Hall set her original piece, Cinderella at the Bar, on the USC Dance Company during the 09/10 season.
Created in 1983, The Bessie Awards, formally known as the New York Dance and Performance Awards, are awarded annually to innovators in the dance world, whether they be choreographers, performers, composers or designers.
Rowlson-Hall received the honor for her performance in Faye Driscoll's 837 Venice Boulevard.
Read below for an excerpt of a review from The Village Voice.
The 60-minute piece ends with a long disintegrating sequence in which the two of them carry Rowlson-Hall through an extended ballet “solo.” It’s both funny and excruciating. Rowlson-Hall is slender and long-limbed, and this is an aspiring dancer’s fantasy-nightmare. Her friends gamely hoist her and twist her, lift her legs high, make her soar. She feels (and is) beautiful. Most of the time. But this is exhausting for all three. At one point, they shove her up one of the two additional poles, and park her there, clinging like a monkey, while they take a panting time-out. Eventually, the positions they maul her into are blurred beyond recognition, and you ache for all three performers.
In the most arresting and disturbing sequence, the three perform in unison what might be a dance-school recital number wearing gold and red capes. Out of nowhere, Rowlson-Hall calls a halt—no, howls at them to stop; they’re screwing up the routine. She then launches into a hair-raising monologue, morphing from what might be an angry chum to a disappointed teacher or ranting parent into a hatred-spewing, homophobic, racist bigot. What she snarls at them for what seems a very long time is so shockingly over the top and eventually so absurd that you laugh even as you cringe. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Rowlson-Hall’s performance is how she begins to crumple—her voice breaking, her eyes filling—so that this time when she says, “You might as well die,” she’s talking about herself, and the others take her hands and make them stroke her into calmness.
