All Together Now: Dance Takes Over the Perelman Arts Center

Inside the glamorous, gleaming marble cube that is the Perelman Arts Center, all the reconfigurable theater space is right now occupied by dance productions — “The March” and “Is It Thursday Yet?” From a dance lover’s perspective, it’s quite impressive that the Perelman would devote its new building to dance for a few weeks. Unfortunately, the productions themselves don’t rise to the opportunity.

For “The March,” one of the theaters has been arranged in-the-round, with three levels of steeply tiered seating surrounding a circular stage. The show itself is a three-parter. Three choreographers share the same distinguished, multigenerational cast of dancers (whom the program identifies as women and femme) for three works, each investigating the idea of unison, of moving together in time.

In the first piece, Donna Uchizono’s “Big small feat,” the unison sections are purposefully low-key. Although the dancers occasionally yell like cheerleaders, their motions are mostly small and delicate: a shifting between basic positions of the feet, a light hammering of heels into the ground. The way that four older dancers sometimes join in and other times supervise gives the whole thing the look of a ritual for novices in some order or coven. The performers all look up at the audience with weird smiles, and the tone is unstable, oscillating indecisively between surreal and sentimental.