Kansas City Dance Festival

Kansas City already has a lot of dance; why does it need a summer dance festival?

Answer: because this. KC Dance Festival, now in its second year, was a stunning collection of performers and works that I probably would never have had a chance to see together anywhere else.

Among other nice things, dance is a splendid showcase for humans doing what ordinary humans ordinarily do, only at 100% intensity. It’s a satisfying way of reminding ourselves what a remarkable species of animal we are, and the KCDF program drove home the point with passion and style.

The program opener, a Soviet-era classical pas de deux from Vasily Vainonen’s The Flames of Paris, made the most of this animal magnetism. Fleet-footed Laura Hunt looked free and happy, yet sparklingly precise. Her partner, Alexander Peters, was spirited and strong, with just enough of a ragged edge to show he wasn’t afraid to take chances. Together they painted an appealing picture of an exceptionally attractive couple who have just discovered a completely new way to have the best doggone time imaginable.

The second work on the program, Marco Goecke’s Mopey, used a completely different idiom, yet yielded the same stellar results.

This contemporary solo work’s movement vocabulary reminded me of a precision-engineered Rube Goldberg contraption: perfectly straightforward and logical mechanics, combined in inventive and unexpected ways to yield a quirky, intellectually delightful outcome.

Goecke likes actions that move fast and forcefully, then crystallize in an instant into unconventional yet exacting alignments. He experiments with odd methods of locomotion for moving his performer around the space. He plays intriguingly with scale, alternating small gestures with big, sweeping phrases. He handles entrances and exits — a Big Deal for some choreographers — with no-sweat casualness: sometimes the dancer simply goes off the stage, then comes back on again a moment later, with no choreographic explanation. Hey, why not?

A big share of the credit for putting Mopey across goes to the tour-de-force performance of soloist Abigail Sheppard. Deliberately quirky choreography can seem contrived unless the performer brings to it a strong sense of intentionality; Sheppard made every moment of Mopey look surprising when first glimpsed, yet inevitably right once my brain had processed it. What’s more, she executed the demanding choreography strongly and precisely, yet without ever losing a feeling of warm, personal engagement with the audience.

And then there was The Still Point, a 1955 ballet that’s probably the most widely known work by longtime Kansas City Ballet director Todd Bolender, staged here in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth. Somehow, in all my years of seeing Kansas City Ballet productions, I had managed to miss The Still Point — but now that I’ve seen it, I’m staggered at its compact brilliance.

It opens prettily, with two couples dancing to Debussy music. A third woman appears, and everyone dances happily enough at first — until an unexplained chill develops among the women, and the latecomer finds herself excluded. Nobody seems to like the situation, but nobody seems to know how to fix it. Eventually a third man appears, but the excluded woman has been hurt too much to accept his sympathy easily; the end of the ballet brings her, at best, a negotiated peace.

Don’t let this description mislead you into thinking The Still Point is some scenery-chewing melodrama. It’s just the opposite: a thing of marvelous subtlety, all about undercurrents and ambiguities. It’s a very tense ballet – in which the tension builds beneath a surface of lovely, fluid classical dancing that’s perfectly matched to the music.

Feminist critics might argue that the takeaway is just the tired old message that a woman is nothing without a man; they may be right, but I take a broader view. He’s working within the balletic language of 1955, of course – but what I think Bolender is telling us is that even well-intentioned people can hurt each other without really trying, and we need to be prepared to give each other a lot of space to get over that. Overall, just an amazing work; I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

There’s almost no point in going through the rest of the program other than to say that everything on it was worth seeing. Even the work I liked the least — Jennifer Owen’s beautifully sculptural but emotionally reserved Long Day/Good Night — was intelligently crafted and finely danced.

In one evening, I’ve gone from wondering why KC needed a summer dance festival, to wondering how they ever got along without it.