8 Minutes Critique - London, England

It takes 8 minutes for light to travel about 80 million miles from the sun to earth. This factoid is what inspired Alexander Whitney to create the piece 8 Minutes. Whitney worked with many people through the two-year process to create a piece that exemplified the traveling of light in our solar system.

Whitney started his journey by working with a physicist to understand more about the sun and light coming to earth. This physicist helped Whitney to gather imagery and facts for him to base his choreography off of.

As the process continued, a lighting designer and American composer were added to the mix to help create a full experience. An LED screen was used in the back of the stage showing images of the sun, stars, and other various lines and shapes which related to each part of the piece. This was a great concept on Whitney’s end but was not executed in the best way it could have been. When there was an interesting image of video being shown on the LED screen, the dancers were lost in the foreground. Focus was split between the screen and the dancers rather than having one enhance the other.

Putting the screen aside, the choreography and its execution perfectly depicted what one would think of when talking about the traveling of light. A lot of the movement was fast with many extensions and flourishes but it all seemed to flow effortlessly on the dancers’ bodies. Quite often, there were amazing lifts being performed throughout each section of the piece. Many of them made me want to try them out myself.

The most impressive section of the piece, however, was a time lapse. If you were to take a time lapse video of yourself for three days and play it back, watching how much and how quickly your body moves, that is how the dancers performed. I could not figure out at first whether there was some video trickery in play during this section or if the dancers were truly this good. Of course, it was the latter of the two in this situation. The LED screen displayed a fast-moving landscape, just as fast as the dancers were moving.

I was thoroughly entertained by this performance on October 7th at the Laban Theatre. I highly suggest everyone see their performance when they begin to tour around the United Kingdom, Europe, and hopefully the United States.