Freestyle Poling...? Any thoughts?

[PV-ATL]

Hey Gang,

I found the following article in the local newspaper's "Lifestyle" section. It made me chuckle. Any thoughts?

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Dance event at Beltline's Historic Fourth Ward Park
By Cynthia Perry
For the AJC

There’s movement in Historic Fourth Ward Park’s gently curved, sloping pathways, waterfalls and lake that flows between granite walls like a river through a canyon.

Sunday afternoon, Crossover Movement Arts, a Decatur-based contemporary modern dance company, plans to make that motion visible, to help park visitors experience the serene, sweeping new public space more fully than they would on an ordinary day.

Using Freestyle Poling, a dance form created by Crossover artistic director Blake Dalton, dancers will spin long, wooden poles as they meander along the park’s graceful bridges, ramps and stairways. With a parkour sensibility, they’ll vault onto ledges and terraces, leap across boulders and wedge themselves, almost inverted, against planar stone surfaces. A live soundscape by the experimental jazz trio Zentropy will reverberate off basin walls.

The participatory public art event, “Freestyle Polers Take the Fourth Ward -- An Art on the Beltline Performance,” is one of about 66 art installations and performances geared toward inviting Atlanta’s visitors and residents to explore the developing system of parks, trails and proposed transit along a 22-mile corridor, an old railway line that encircles the central city.

A poling class, free and open to the public, will begin in the park’s amphitheater at 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Poling experience is not required, but people who are physically fit will get the most out of it. Comfortable, non-constricting clothing is recommended.

Afterward, class participants may join dancers in an event Dalton described as “half like a dance performance and half like watching tai chi in the park.” Starting at 4:30 p.m. at the park’s north end, they’ll traverse the area in a partly choreographed, partly improvised event that will culminate on the amphitheater stage, where Zentropy’s keyboardist, bass guitarist and percussionist will jam while Crossover Polers show off their most daring moves.
Dalton, a former hard-core musician who’s now mainly a martial artist and contemporary modern dancer, explained that Freestyle Poling developed from his studies in martial arts, including Chinese Ba Gua and Brazilian Capoeira, with influences from traditional West African and Ethiopian dance forms as well as his dancers’ inventiveness.

Dalton hopes Freestyle Poling’s spinning patterns and swooping level changes will make viewers and participants more aware of the park’s intriguing sightlines and perspectives.

“We want to bring up a heightening of the senses. You don’t necessarily think about how the air feels on your skin until your pole is slicing through it or churning it as if it’s water,” Dalton said. “It’s that way of, like, really catching a little bit of flight.”

Cynthia Bond Perry is dance critic at ArtsCriticATL.com.