Half a Great Show: Malashock Dance’s “Without a Net” at WOW

Though the circus artists mostly occupied center-stage in “Without a Net,” the dance smartly complemented them, setting an edgy European-circus mood. I was primed to see something weirder at the midpoint in the 80-minute program, when my half of the audience switched places with folks who’d been at the “Side Show.” Weird, it was.

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The “Point Loma Pause” as Art: Ikaros at the WOW Festival

It’s called the Point Loma pause: the 10 or so seconds when a plane roars over Point Loma, and you have to stop mid-sentence. Every time it happened during “Ikaros,” the piece that Third Rail Projects created for the WOW Festival, the three performers went into stillness and looked up. I looked up, too, seeing this everyday occurrence as if with fresh eyes; marveling at the miracle of flight.

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“4×4 TJ Night” Kicks Off WOW

When the Tijuana dance company Lux Boreal made Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch in 2008, I wrote that they were raising the bar for dance in Tijuana. And, whether or not it’s Lux Boreal’s influence (I suspect it is), the six mostly-from-Baja works in “4×4 TJ Night,” curated by the company, were super, the best of them showing complexity and wit, as well as serious technical chops.

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