The company presents a 75-minute cycle of dances and music inspired by the dreamtime stories from Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory, presided over by the eminence of Kathy Balngayngu Marika. She is at her most effective when she simply gazes into the audience. The dance vocabulary, as one might expect, is earthy, depending a lot on the floor: dancers slither, crawl, and creep as much as they fly.

Standouts among the dances are "Life Cycle," a series of dances in which a caterpillar metamorphoses into a moth: the moth-woman in pale yellow is partnered by a man completely in black earth-based body makeup; and the ecstatic "Feather (But'tju)," danced by Frances Rings: feathers drop from the flies and cling to the dancer's body.

Peter England's cunning set is a wall of blackness upstage that stops just a few feet short of the deck. It enables totemic sprits to descend from above out of nothing. Later, the wall cracks open to suggest the knowledge brought by a centennial worm-like creature to an ensemble of giggling womem, or the wall opens farther to open up other playing spaces.

posted: 8:47:02 PM  

In a celebrity smackdown rostered from this year's musical biopics, Ray Charles beats Cole Porter for moxie, as evidenced by Taylor Hackford's Ray. We see the young Charles bluff and fast-talk his way onto a Greyhound bus that carries him from dirt-eating Florida to Seattle, and this in the coloreds-in-the-back days following WWII. It's the same moxie that he uses later to negotiate one of the most artist-favorable record deals in the business. To end the film, Charles in mid-career kicks an entrenched heroin habit, in a harrowing sequence of scenes. (And endures a very scary 1960s-era mural in the offices of an ABC recording executive.) In between, a rousing passage tells how his big hit "What'd I Say" was improvised as a way to fill out a set—though the coincidence seems too tidy, it's such a great story, it deserves to be true.

Jamie Foxx simply embodies Ray Charles: it's a superb job of acting. Karen M. Baker and the rest of the sound department deserve Oscar recognition for their job of seamlessly integrating vintage recordings of Ray Charles's singing into contemporary recorded dialogue and ambient sound. And newcomer Sharon Warren is striking as Charles's tough-loving mother Aretha.

posted: 6:27:49 PM