The 90-minute mixed repertory program featured the work of three early-career choreographers, selected through an international competition. It began with Oklahoma City Ballet resident choreographer DaYoung Jung's "Still, We Move," a contemporary ballet for eight dancers.
Stage fog shrouded an opening trio danced by married couple Grace-Anne and Austin Powers with dancer Miguel Anaya, set to lively violin and piano music by Italian composer Alfonso Peduto. The two men twisted, held, and lifted Grace-Anne into the air, once holding her face up with her legs outstretched overhead, where she then floppily retracted her legs into her body and then shot them out again.
In a lingering soup of stage fog, Jung's choreography then ebbed and flowed through elegant group formations into picturesque tableaus as designer Jacob M. Gooch's lighting tracked the dancing's moods, shifting between spotlit moments and bright full-stage illumination.
Well-crafted, polished, and the most aggressively danced piece on the program, the tension-filled ballet pulled the audience in and held them with rapt attention. Nowhere more than in an intimate, athletic pas de deux by the Powers. In it, Austin's deft, rapid-fire partnering of titan Grace-Anne revealed the muscular striations in her limbs with every powerful twist and turn of her technically brilliant dancing.
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