Rainbow Dance Theatre – Current Productions available for Touring

Mystery and Magic

Mystery and Magic is Rainbow Dance Theatre’s biggest show.  Combining dance with visual illusion, Mystery and Magic is filled with humor, pathos, and non-stop surprises.  Creating the “illusion” of a mega-production with simple theatrical devices, Mystery and Magic can be presented in a wide variety of theatrical venues.  The evening is made up of three remarkable dances, each of which combine dance and illusion in a unique way.

The hilarious Man of my Dreams literally takes traditional ballet for a ride on scooters and a “Segway”.  It features RDT principal dancer Latoya Lovely as a woman dreaming of her perfect man.  This outlandish dream takes on a surrealistic humor as the wedding party (each dancer clad as half bridesmaid, half groomsman) performs “ballet” while traversing the stage on scooters and the groom performs an outrageous, nearly impossible duet with a member of the wedding party on a “Segway”.  The dream continues in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion as the bride and groom grow to amazing proportions to dance a “pas de deux” culminating in a surprising finale where groomsmen become footballs, bridesmaids are linesmen, and the groom falls from the “sky” into the outstretched arms of his astonished bride. 

Mixed Bag presents a sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant look at humanity and its overwhelming production of and infatuation with garbage. Garbage bags are used as both set and costume pieces that create mythic garbage bag monsters, models wearing garbage bag haute couture, and an otherworldly landscape of garbage bag walls, pillows and birds.  Pop cans and bottles become plumage for two men, skins for a writhing line of “snakes”, and ultimately the entire body for a ten foot tall twenty-first century “man” puppet.   

In Big Bang, illusion is employed to create a dark “sea” where creatures float past, in and around each other while slowly becoming more and more complex.  As dawn emerges, dancers in twos and threes become a wide range of animals, both known and unknown.  Dinosaurs fight to the death, spiders crawl about, elephants stampede, and apes quizzically investigate the new bipedal creature in this ever-changing world.  Combining a tour-de-force of pull-out-the-stops dancing with unique partnering and the mystery of illusion, Big Bang delivers both an entertaining and artistically rendered view of science to audiences of all ages.

“Even my usually kinetic 2-year-old son sat still in my lap for an hour during the performance, watching with wonder and nodding his head to the music.” (Isamu Jordan, Spokane Spokesman-Review)

The Roots of Hip Hop

Through dynamic performances, intriguing vignettes, and audience involvement the performers trace the history of African-Americans from their home in Africa through their days of slavery up to the present, thus illustrating in a tangible way how traditions retain their connection to the past while adapting to new cultural influences.  The program includes RDT’s urban ode, Street Suite, its popular One Village, Many Tribes and the finale from The Sorcerer’s Crossing featuring costumes by Djibril Sane of The National Ballet of Senegal, as well as several traditional West African dances. Popping and locking, club, freestyle, and break dancing are all featured in the Hip Hop dances included in the first act of the concert.  Additional vignettes illustrate voguing, hamboning, and stepping. Audience participation throughout the show and a fast-moving pace keep young viewers engaged, while the informative history and highly-charged dance performances add another layer of interest for adult audience members.

The Roots of Hip Hop can be also be presented in a one-hour format which includes dance performances, verbal narrative and audience participation and can be performed in a variety of “low-tech” venues including gymnasiums, outdoor stages and smaller auditoriums.

Rainbow Dance: Classic

Rainbow Dance Classic features dances from the RDT repertory choreographed between 1991 and 2006.  Set to classical and other melodic scores, these dances highlight both the lyrical and athletic strengths of the RDT dancers.  Perfect for large theaters and smaller alternative venues alike, Classic is an evening that will transport the audience through the exuberance of dance at its best.

Two works featured on the concert are set to classical music scores.  Man of my Dreams, described above, is set to The Beautiful Blue Danube by Johann Strauss.  The Lisa Variations, described by New York dance critic Elizabeth Zimmer as “extraordinary” and “captivating from the first moment that the curtain opened until the final [exit]” is set to The Goldberg Variations by J. S. Bach.

Two additional works, one for men and one for women, illustrate the versatility of the RDT dancers.  Audience favorite Yogaboyz highlights the amazing strength and stamina of the “Rainbow” men.  From its peaceful beginning to its dynamic ending, Yogaboyz pushes the envelope on the balance, flexibility and strength required in the practice of yoga by using the physical principles of East Indian yoga but in positions requiring two and sometimes three dancers to balance, lift and stretch as one.  The lyrical  Dreamscape #1 melds influences from Hawaiian dance with modern dance and contemporary theater into a lively yet poignant look at women’s lives in the human community as one woman looks back through her past which comes to life before her eyes.

Rounding out the concert is RDT’s popular dance One Village, Many Tribes, termed by Sheryl Dare of the Honolulu Advertiser “a pull-out-the-stops celebration of … dancing”.  With an original music score by Hawaii’s most renowned world-beat band, Cabaseke, One Village, Many Tribes heats up the stage with Caribbean rhythms, melodies and movement and weaves them into a physical expression of the unifying nature of dance among the world’s people.