A moving opening for dance group

TAMPA -- Moving Current, the modern dance collective now in its sixth season, has developed into something special. Founders Erin Cardinal and Cynthia Hennessy have drawn around them a group of choreographers, dancers and designers who produce some pretty adventurous work and, most importantly, communicate an infectious sense of joy in movement.

Moving Current has often brought in guest choreographers of note, and its season-opening program, seen Saturday afternoon in Theater 2 at the University of South Florida, featured a premiere by Michael Foley, a widely traveled dancer and choreographer who is a visiting assistant professor at USF.

Foley's Unkilted, a Celtic number that opened with a spotlight on the choreographer in a red plaid kilt, had wonderfully flashy dancing by him, Cardinal, Jody Kuehner, Christine Lockhart and Lisa Tobias to a pumped-up reel by fiddler Ashley MacIsaac (all music was on tape). From the standpoint of polish and wit, Foley's piece was the high point of the program, but the other choreography was just as proficient and perhaps took more chances.

Hennessy's Unseen Eyes, which opened the program, featured a stunning duet by Foley and Cardinal and a truly unsettling scenario to anyone who hasn't cleaned out their bedroom closet lately. A half-dozen figures emerged from among the hanging clothes in an oversized closet as the sensuous duo danced on, oblivious to the eyes watching them. Can a piece be good-natured and ominous at the same time? Well, that's what Unseen Eyes felt like.

Tobias and Hennessy had a comic duet in Tobias' Not You? Hennessy was the bossy scold and nemesis of Tobias, an effervescent free spirit, who had a dashing solo to cool jazz.

Three of the five works on the program featured photography or video. The most effective use of such imagery was in Sanctuary, a solo choreographed and performed by Frankie Hart. With Scott Wheeler's photography from the Everglades covering the back wall of the theater, Hart's performance captured the nature theme in idiosyncratic but elegant fashion. The dance was well-meshed with the Gregory Hicks score and Brian Macke's spare set design of vases of water and plants.

Aerial dance is all the rage nowadays, thanks to Cirque du Soleil and other boundary-breaking artist-acrobats, and Cardinal's Wood had six performers tangled up in ropes hung from the flies. The Cardinal-designed costumes (Mao jacket-like tops and loose-fitting black pants) were sharp, but Henry Hsiao's indistinct video distracted from the performance, and the movement -- swinging from ropes and all -- seemed strangely earthbound.

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