AdShock | 2004

Photo: JJ Tizou

Power Transfer Station on Front and Spring Garden Streets
Philadelphia Fringe Festival

The Philadelphia Inquirer
September 9, 2004
By Merilyn Jackson

In his new work, AdShock, Brian Sanders surpasses all he has ever done. He and his dancers are still airborne, but more “dancey” and still tinkering with mind-blowing ways to use the odd industrial found-object and the most fantastical spaces. For this, he and set designer Pedro Silva have transformed an old transfer station into an eerie, Edward Hopperish mise-en-scene with corporate undertones.

A meeting starts with five in business suits, hooked to a boardroom table upon and around which they dance and perform extraordinary acrobatic feats – glyphic poses, backbends and leaps. Soon enough, dance frees them (Sanders has a dazzling duet with Adrianna Carey), and they are down to their skivvies or less.

To catch all the work’s metaphors you’d have to see it often. The performers play with a pair of doors that swing both ways, the women hold the men up, Sanders hangs in a very moving crucifixion pose from a grid. And then, wheee, the water dance begins. You’ll be dying to get down on the oleaginous floor and slide along with them to whatever bliss they have found. Theis is as brilliantly conceived and performed a movement work as I’ve ever seen.