Photo by Wally James

Maggie Lasher is, in a word, vibrant. From the lights and fire that she weaves into her dance performances to the colors she dons around Houston, everything Maggie touches in Houston's art scene seems to glow.

Maggie currently serves as a dance professor at Houston Community College as well as the artistic director of her own company, China Cat Dance. After getting an MA in dance from Case Western University, obtaining an MFA in dance at Sam Houston State, and spending two years teaching in San Antonio, Maggie landed in Houston in August 2010.

Performing came to Maggie early, at a dance studio in her hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona. She always knew she wanted a career in the arts, although in her youth, she "hadn't really fleshed that out, besides 'movie star.'"

High school and college saw Maggie involved in performance art in a number of ways, including costume design, acting, tech theater, choreography, and teaching movement to pre-kindergartners. It was at Sam Houston State that Maggie brought together her various interests into one entity - China Cat Dance.

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This week marks the last run of classes at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center's 1202 Calumet address. The company is moving to its new residence at 2808 Caroline, and the studios will be christened with free dance classes at the center's open houses on June 1 and 2. Every dancer loves new marley floors and air conditioned space, but it's still sad to say good-bye to the place where so many people learned to dance.

My own personal history with the Met began almost two years ago. After taking a summer modern dance course at Houston Community College, I began performing with the school's African Dance and Drum Ensemble directed by Julie Bata, who also happened to be the instructor of that summer modern session. African was great, but my body missed those triplet sequences, leg swings, Limón falls, inversions and spiral twists that I had started to train with on a daily basis. A quick online search for adult modern classes brought me to the Met, and there I found Studio A.

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Photo by Simon Gentry

Dancers come Up for Air in site-specific dance work.

The Setup:
For most native Houstonians, Hermann Park and the Mary Gibbs and Jesse H. Jones Reflection Pool are as familiar to us as our own backyards. On May 18, during two afternoon performances, Recked Productions transfigured the space into a site-specific dance, Up for Air, that melded the realms of the heavenly and the earthbound, the natural and the man-made.

The Execution:
Erin Reck's site-specific project couldn't have happened on a more perfect day. It was the kind of bright Saturday afternoon that precludes a Houston summer. Standing at the Sam Houston Monument end of the pool, it was possible to witness the performance from its first steps. Dancers in white trickled along the sides of the water, teetering along the edges in contracting shapes of repose. They peered into the water in suspended balance and examined the space above their reflections. Their flighty flocking suggested birds of the long, stately variety.

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Photo by Christy Pessagno

Dancers of Shen Wei Dance Arts perform Rite of Spring.

The Setup:

On May 18, in the Wortham Center's Brown Theater, a stage typically reserved for the artists of Houston Ballet, the Society for the Performing Arts presented Shen Wei Dance Arts and the company's riveting reinterpretation of The Rite of Spring.

The Execution:

Shen Wei's Houston engagement came 11 days before the 100th anniversary of the infamous Paris premiere of Vaslav Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring. Wei's reimagining of the Igor Stravinsky score is a decade old, but it's great to be able to see it so shortly after another major staging of the piece for comparison's sake. (I'm referring to, of course, Houston Ballet's spring engagement of Stanton Welch's version.)

Shen Wei strips the Stravinsky music of narrative theatricality and instead uses a minimalist, almost geometric sensibility to the choreography. Ten dancers take positions on opposing sides of a grid-like floor painting and then move onto it like pieces on a chest board. One by one, the dancers move into one another's space, causing them to react by readjusting their space on the grid. Then the music begins and the careful, strategic placements go haywire.

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Photo by Amitava Sarkar

Dancers of Ad Deum Dance Company.

The Setup:
On May 17, Ad Deum Dance Company presented its Spring concert, The End Is the Beginning, at Houston Community College's Spring Branch campus. The program featured work by Artistic Director Randall Flinn as well as choreography by Durell R. Comedy, Cheryl Cutlip, Steve Rooks and Joanna Tan.

The Execution:
Ad Deum is a Christian faith-based organization, and knowing this makes it feel a bit on the nose to say that the company is most compelling when giving praise, but it's true. The second half of the program drew from the company's previous spring concert, which featured a series of stunning, heartfelt dances set to familiar hymns. Of special note is Stella Almblade's moving manifestation of Lizz Wright's rendition of "Amazing Grace." The gorgeous technical lines are blended seamlessly to movement that is reminiscent of African-American praise dance; this is a dance of a woman who understands her own corruptions, yet rejoices in the beauty of each and every forgiven blemish.

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For Joseph Walsh, there was never any question of what he would be when he grew up. His older sister was a dancer, and by the time Joseph was three years old he was accompanying her to Nutcracker performances. "I remember being backstage and the snow ended," he says. "I started rolling around in endless piles of snow, and it was the most fun I ever had. From then on, I asked my parents if I could start taking classes."

Lessons in tap, jazz and Modern followed before he started to zero in on his ballet training.

The moment that solidified his path to a professional dance career came at age 14 when he performed at the Lincoln Center in New York City. "It was the first time I performed for more than 200 people at a time." The feeling of being on a stage of such magnitude was one close to euphoria, one he's been chasing ever since.

Since joining the professional company in 2007, Joseph's had the opportunity to dance a wide range of roles. One of his favorites includes his part in Sir Kenneth MacMillian's Manon. "It was the first three-act ballet I had to carry with a female lead. I was one of those things like the Lincoln Center performance where I had to get over this mental stage fright and realize I got this. When the performance was over, it was so satisfying."

He's also recently had acclaimed performances in Stanton Welch's The Rite of Spring and La Bayadere, but it was his leading role in last June's Rome and Juliet that captured our hearts. As Romeo, he displayed the refined elegance and gentle power that has come to characterize his dance.

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Ten years ago, the modern dance troupe FrenetiCore presented to the world their first full-length performance, and to celebrate their decade of dance, they reimagined this piece in a grand production this past Friday night. The Sacred Harp, which was choreographed by FrenetiCore's Artistic Director, Rebecca French, was presented as a free performance at Miller Outdoor Theatre. The troupe drew quite a crowd, especially given that it was a chilly evening and that their standard audience fills up their (small in comparison) 100-plus-seat theater. It was impressive.

The show focuses on a small Southern town in the early 1900s replete with overtly hyper-religious views and rampant racism. The town's folk are a lively bunch, as illustrated through their fun-loving "hootenanny" style of dance, but when a young white woman and a black male become lovers, racial lines are drawn. The white people of the town find themselves in an angry position where hostility and violence conquers. The black man is killed, leaving his young lover alone and pregnant.

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Photo by Gabriella Nissen

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake

Houston dance enthusiasts are lucky in that not only do we have Houston Ballet to satisfy our desire for classical story ballets, but we also have a contemporary ballet company that creates cutting-edge work that's pushing the boundaries of dance art in Dominic Walsh Dance Theater. This fall, the company heads to New York City's Joyce Theater to participate in Ballet v.60. The annual festival brings together choreographers and companies that present work outside the large-scale ballet establishment and provides them the opportunity to showcase progressive work in New York for minimal cost. The invitation to DWDT marks the first time the much loved Houston-based company will perform at the festival.

The program that will be presented at the Joyce will consist of three audience favorites: Camille Claudel, Afternoon of a Faun and Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake.

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Photo by Simon Gentry

Dancers in Kiki Lucas' The Vessel.

The Setup:

On April 11 and 12, Houston Metropolitan Dance Company presented The Vessel, a three-piece program, on the Wortham Center's Cullen stage. The dances by Peter Chu, Jason Parsons and Resident Choreographer Kiki Lucas explored the senses of sight or sound or both.

The Execution:

The Vessel is also the name of the concert's most successful piece, which belongs to Lucas. Inspired by Artistic Director Marlana Doyle's work with a deaf student, the dance follows ten-year-old Bailey Flowers as she explores the world through dance. The images are beautiful. Dancers writhe around a barre, limbs reaching into delicate shapes and spirals. Three musicians are encased in a Plexiglas box, their music muffled, but the eye registers the visual grace of their performance. A video projects the Flowers' fragmented reality, a reality that is no less beautiful and wondrous without sound. It's a heart-tugging assertion, that the imagination, regardless of privations, will seek other ways to play.

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Photo by Sabrina Motley

Malavika Sarukkai.

The Setup:
On the evening of April 5, Asia Society presented Malavika Sarukkai's Darshan: Seeking the Divine at The Brown Foundation Theater for the Performing Arts. Sarukkai is a master is the classical Indian dance form of bharata natyam, and her program consisted of four solo pieces inspired by Indian mythology and folk art.

The Execution:
It is possible to see bharata natyam in Houston, and even take classes in the form at a number of Indian arts institutions, but it is a rarity to witness it in its top form. From the moment Sarukkai begins dancing her first piece, "Stillness and Movement," the audience is enraptured by those gorgeous splayed hands and stunning Hindu poses, both signatures of the style. She explores the possibilities of movement and the tension of stillness, but what is most evocative in this dance is her use of gesture to convey the poetic devices of choreographed symmetry. Her hands and understated facial expressions suggest a story, but she is really calling attention to the beauty of bharata natyam technique.

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