2024 Audience Reviews

Company: Fellow Travelers Performance Group
Show: Widening the Circle
Venue: Barbara Barker Center for Dance

Why the circle needed widening at all

Although the name is apt, I found that “Widening the Circle” was most interesting in what it says about the forces that push against that widening. Some of these forces, though formidable, can be overcome as demonstrated in “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost . . .”. The dance was taught and performed despite COVID isolation restrictions and coming on stage to learn the dance emphasized that storms can be weathered, and the circle can emerge wider for our joy of having overcome them. Many of the other dances hit differently. Laying out the warnings against climate change, school violence, and reactionary backlash reminded me of the unintended poetry in the Sandia National Laboratory Long-term nuclear waste warning message. “We considered ourselves a powerful culture. . . This place is not a place of honor. . . What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us”. The starkness of the alert betrays the fear within; that like Cassandra’s warnings it will not be heeded by those it most desperately tries to protect. In unskilled hands this could lead to wallowing in self-pity, but the artists here give it each issue a deserved weight and the sense that something can be done, should be done, and if we can focus will be done to make things better, even if future generations will need to face them again.