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By Ann Moradian
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Published on September 15, 2025
Cherylyn Lavagnino's "La Mar Emocional." Photo: John Eng
Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance's 25th Anniversary Season
Choreography: Cherylyn Lavagnino in collaboration with the dancers
Lighting Design: Mark London
Music: Chopin, Martin Bresnick, ‘Josephine the Singer,’ Scott Killian, Rachmaninoff
Costumes: Karen Boyer, Christopher Metzger
Dancers: Alexis Branagan, Dervla Carey-Jones, Erin Gallagher, Gwen Gussman, Barrington Hinds, Ramona Kelley, Christine McMillan, Michael Miles, TaraMarie Perri, Joshua Palmer, Philip Strom, Arianna Tsivkin, Claire Westby
The DiMenna Center for Classical Music
July 8 - 9, 2025
Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance celebrated its 25th anniversary season this summer. With three original scores by Scott Killian and two by Martin Bresnick, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music is a great venue for this company. Mark London lights this spacious hall beautifully, focusing our attention and creating a sense of intimacy.
Killian’s use of piano and violin for La Mar Emocional tugs at the heart without resorting to sentimentality. Pointe-shoed feet strike and stab. Arrow-like arms dart in contrast to Killian’s fluid, pulsing music.
Barrington Hinds stands out as a powerful mover, with a fluid torso spiralling and rolling in deep side arcs and backbends. Three men hold my attention, grasping hands as they weave around and through one another. The diversity of body types is refreshing as legs and torsos swirl, extend, and plunge.
In RU, the men contract, hand to gut, as heads snap forward in a whiplash bow. TaraMarie Perri inhabits the space with the entirety of her being, each movement committed, full, and gracious.
Costumes by Christopher Metzger enhance this work, blending East and West smoothly in gradations of saffron, red, and white for the women, and a simple brown-grey for the men.
A strong performance by Christine McMillan in an excerpt from The Winter’s Tale helped me overlook the garish costumes, which were distracting.
Triptych, performed with passion, offers the recurring theme of a hand tenderly touching the head of another dancer, or the earth.
Lavagnino welcomed us, telling us in her curtain remarks that we do not need to understand the work but asked that we bring ourselves to the experience, which I did faithfully. Observing dance in this way is usually rich with insights into not only the dance, but also into oneself. What I found was a deep need for a reprieve from the world and a yearning to inhabit another universe for a while. I am grateful to TaraMarie Perri for the few moments when this happened.
