Suite Donuts by Chafin Seymour

Relaxed lopes invert into barrel turns and floor hugging street dance riffs. Without pointing at the hinges joining modern dance to vernacular forms, Seymour Chafin’s vocabulary registers as natural, unstressed and clear.

Co-commissioned by the American Dance Festival and the Limon Dance Company, and presented by the Joyce Theater, new-comer Chafin Seymour’s Suite Donuts suits the Limon family. Set to an appealing score, Chafin expertly melds  compositions by Miguel Atwood Ferguson to Erik Satie and Slum Village and mounts them to a resourceful movement vocabulary.

In the opening minutes, a lone male dancer senses the space around him through inquisitive, free flow motions punctuated by gestural comments.  Solitary for only a couple of moments, a communal line of dancers fan out behind him. 

Suite Donuts invites company members into its fresh, fluid, rhythmically concise movement tracings organized around slouchy shoulders, playful lifts and stylish floor patterns.

Dressed in loose, long sleeved shirts and draw pants of warm blues, reds, tans and white by costume designer Keiko Voltaire, the high contrast lighting by Brandon Sterling Baker sharply edges the dancers’ silhouettes — conferring a bit of mystery or even dreaminess to the atmosphere.

Seymour has a knack for making dances feel youthful yet fully mature. His traditional dance training supports concise choreography that can soar or drop down into  some serious funk.

During these days of over-zoomed audiences, Seymour uncannily pulls the audience  in through the screen. Let’s hope this is only the first of many commissions by Seymour for the Limon Dance Company.
EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis