Let me first thank Festival Curator, Barbara Müller-Wittmann and producer Beth Hogan for creating this Summer Festival, Dance at the Odyssey, showcasing so many of our local dance companies and choreographers and giving them a place, an outlet for performance and to show their work. This is well done in the current climate of dwindling funds and shrinking budgets. This festival continues through June 28, 2026 at the Odyssey Theatre.
Dance at the Odyssey – Sakura Amano in “Vestibule” choreography by Kate Myers – Photo by Gunindu Abeysekera.
The set for Kate Myer’s Vestibule is dominated by three large hanging canvases across center stage. The first, viewed from left to right from the audience, depicts two women intertwined and wrapped together among the leafy branches of a tree. The second shows a bald man, relaxed with one hand on his shoulder surrounded by splashing waves and two fish within the turmoil created by the movement of the water. The third canvas has a woman gazing skyward, in front of the sun and clouds covering her and reaching the dry ground where spikey rocks jut upwards. These three painted tapestries show different aspects of nature hanging in the black void of the Blackbox theater space and seem to represent Earth, Water and Air respectively, or at least aspects of nature. Fire is absent. The painter, Timothy Hunter is to be commended on his work here.
Dance at the Odyssey – Sakura Amano, Erin Co, Mikayla Knestrick, and Ellington Persley in “Vestibule” choreography by Kate Myers – Photo by Gunindu Abeysekera.
The dancers entered one at a time and walked vigorously to the center where they began agitated thrashing movement. They were individual and not interacting. The costumes were flared pants in earth tones, brown, green, beige, white, with halter tops making for a smooth flowing visual in the choreography. Also present were large gold hoop earrings and the hair worn down making the whole remind me of a young Ali McGraw. Costume design by Alina Beaman was gorgeous and helped set the tone of the piece from the very beginning. In this first section of the piece the four performers were independent and showed various stages of angst until one of them ripped one of the canvases down from its position and began to thrash it to the ground. The others followed suit and grabbed the remaining two paintings treating them in like fashion. I thought that with this new movement sequence the pictures now conveyed a vision of the future that was not in keeping with the desires and imaginings of the four. The canvases were crumpled up and discarded upstage against the back wall. Blackout.
Dance at the Odyssey – Sakura Amano, Erin Co, Mikayla Knestrick, and Ellington Persley in “Vestibule” choreography by Kate Myers – Photo by Gunindu Abeysekera.
After a lengthy pause in the dark, the lights come up to reveal eight pieces of pure bare canvases lying on the floor in a circular configuration. Each dancer began in solo movement with a singular hand reaching up into the light and then slowly moving down in front of the face continuing to the floor. All four repeated this movement and while engaging in terms of focus there was no way to fathom why this was so important or how it was attached to the meaning of the piece. More on that later. There were no designs on these canvas pieces, and the dancers used them to wrap themselves in and to augment their movement. Sometimes they wore the canvases while moving and at others the canvases became the focus as they danced around them. All of the movement was fluid and quite beautiful and there were moments of unison that were clean and precise. The malleability of the spine was integral to Myers’ choreographic vocabulary here. The blank canvases are where their future stories are to be written, by themselves and no one else. We got this as it was clear and came across in the choreography.
There was a great deal of gestural movement lending itself into port-de-bras and this offset the work of the spine very well. Each dancer was engaging and focused and left nothing to chance. All movement was a direct application of technique and I appreciated this skill very much. However, I wish to call attention to the program notes versus what I saw onstage and hopefully something positive may come out of it.
Dance at the Odyssey – Sakura Amano, Erin Co, Mikayla Knestrick, and Ellington Persley in “Vestibule” choreography by Kate Myers – Photo by Gunindu Abeysekera.
According to the program notes: “Vestibule explores feminist futurities by asking: What becomes possible when women move together to dismantle inherited separations between body, mind, environment, labor, and care? The work inhabits the vestibule as a threshold between inner and outer worlds, somatic practice and ecology, individual presence and collective becoming”. This is a highly laudable intention and also extremely complicated to transmit into movement so that every audience member gets it. How does one “dismantle inherited separations between body, mind, environment, labor, and care” through choreography for four women? What transpired onstage was that four women showed us that they were individual and antagonistic in accepting three versions of natural stasis produced by who knows? Then after a very marked break, they came together and moved in unison and were much more in synchronicity with each other while handling eight blank canvases which did not dictate any future image for them. In essence, they were able to create their own futures on these blank canvases. All and good. These lofty program notes did not aid in the comprehension of the physical choreography seen onstage. It was enough to see the actual physical movement and glean from that the intent of the creator/choreographers.
Dance at the Odyssey – Ellington Persley (standing) in “Vestibule” choreography by Kate Myers – Photo by Gunindu Abeysekera.
In this case the program notes throw the experience of any given audience member into doubt. It could be that the group was working towards this exalted meaning from the start, but when the actual choreography is viewed onstage it is enough that the audience see the struggle of the four and then their eventual communal agreement in movement. Grand explanations notwithstanding. I look forward to more from Kate Myers and her crew of dedicated dancers.
“Vestibule” was choreographed by Kate Myers along with dancers and choreographic collaborators, Sakura Amano, Erin Co, Mikayla Knestrick, and Ellington Persley.
Dance at the Odyssey continues through July 5, 2026: June 21, 2026, 8pm – Lincoln Seymour and Dancers’ Rat-Race and Emma Shane’s Return to Instructions; June 26, 2026, 8pm – Lincoln Seymour and Dancers’ Rat-Race and LINEAGE MVMT’s Solistice; June 27, 2026, 8pm & June 28, 2pm – Donofrio Dance Collective’s BETTY and Ricky Medina’s Mighty Praise; July 2, 2026, 8pm – Maggie Ogle’s Thresholds; July 3, 2026, 8pm – Cora Laszlo’s Gambiarra Imaginary Solutions for Love; and July 5, 2026, 2pm-
Tanz Tanz Revolution’s (TTR) Sonder and Katie Tuchi’s DOUBTING THOMAS.
For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit the Odyssey Ensemble Theatre’s website.
Written by Brian Fretté for LA Dance Chronicle.
Featured image: Dance at the Odyssey – Sakura Amano, Erin Co, Mikayla Knestrick, and Ellington Persley. in “Vestibule” choreography by Kate Myers – Photo by Gunindu Abeysekera.
