dancing with Hoop

source: thefivepointsstar
Gabrielle Revlock brings us back to physical delight and the amazement of physics with her hula hoop dance. In and out of the hoop she goes, shimmying it up and down and around in a rather incredible sequence. It’s almost as if the hoop is carving space, and certainly we become hyper-aware of different parts of her body as she moves the hoop. In her little white romper, a cross between old-fashioned gym suits and something a goddess would wear for frolicking, she seems playful, but as you can see from the photograph, she has some serious skills. My companion wished for more ritual meaning in the work, but I thought the motion and the space brought enough joy that anything else would have been superfluous.
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source: vimeo
Gabrielle Revlock, dancer/choreographer, is “a gifted comedian.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2010) She has received support from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the nEW Festival, New Edge Mix, and SCUBA National Touring Network for Dance. From 2010-12 she was a Resident Artist with the Susan Hess Choreographers Project and from 2012-13 a LAB Fellow through FringeArts (formerly the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.) Her work has been shown across the US by presenters including ODC (San Francisco), The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Joyce SoHo (NYC), Dance Place (DC), Philadelphia Dance Projects, Velocity Dance Center (Seattle), Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Danspace Project (NYC), and the Korzo Theater (The Hague, Netherlands). Bryn Mawr College and Vassar College have commissioned works by Revlock. In 2010 she received a Rocky [Philadelphia Dance Award] for her signature piece “Indivisibility” performed with a hula hoop and her collaboration with Nicole Bindler, “I made this for you”, won a finalist prize in the 2011 A.W.A.R.D. Show! Her work in dance-for-camera has been presented twice at Motion Pictures, a festival curated by Philadelphia Dance Projects. Her most recent film, “turn out, turn up” was commissioned by Dances Made to Order and shown in Philadelphia, New York and Seattle as part of Kinetic Kino. Most recently she directed and edited “So You Think You Can’t Understand Contemporary Dance?” for thINKingDANCE as part of No Idea is Too Ridiculous supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. As a dancer, she was a company member of Jeanne Ruddy Dance for nine years, performing the works of Suzanne Linke, Mark Dendy, Peter Sparling, Jane Comfort, Robert Battle and Jeanne Ruddy. As a freelance dancer she has performed for many local and international choreographers including Lucinda Childs, Isabelle Chaffaud and Jérôme Meyer (Netherlands), Sean Feldman (UK), Willi Dorner (Austria), Katsura Kan (Japan), Meg Foley, Susan Rethorst, Christopher Williams, Sylvain Émard, Jumatatu Poe, Lisa Kraus, Myra Bazell, Leah Stein, and Matthew Neenan for the Opera Company of Philadelphia. Interested in performance as a social art form, she is also the creator of Wear Your Wig to Work Day, a holiday occurring annually the last Friday in January.
“Revlock marries her extension with a heartfelt wildness, seamlessly shifting characters and states.” – The Dance Insider