Created for The Foundry (2005)

Choreography by: Alex Ketley

Poetry and System: Carol Snow

Lighting: Jacob Petrie

Performed by: Andrea Basile and Justin Flores

San Francisco Bay Guardian
December 2005

Ten Dance Events that Resonated for 2005

"Alex Ketley, who tried the impossible: making dance from verbal grammar."

Dance View Times
August 2005

"Ketley devised an elaborate dance vocabulary analogous to verbal language in which each move had its syntactical correspondence. The loosely structured “Syntax” — appropriate to Snow’s assemblage of poetry—was beautifully performed by two ODC dancers, the gorgeous Andrea Flores and Justin Flores. It proved to be an engrossing, eminently playful experience. You witnessed the mind at play, bodies at play. The piece skimmed over the top of its elaborate substructure like a dragonfly over a sun speckled pond. Ketley’s sophisticated use of space — with large scale trajectories complementing piled on formations in which details just about tumbled over each other—nicely contrasted with Snow’s more evenly animated in-place reading. One of the work’s major pleasures also came from witnessing close up two superb dancers working with such commitment and competence on physically and intellectually challenging tasks."