I'll be honest — I walked into UCSB's Hatlen Theater expecting a faculty showcase that would feel more like a department obligation than a night worth writing about. That assumption didn't survive the first piece.
The concert opened with what the program listed as "Threshold," choreographed by lecturer Maya Torres. Two dancers spent the first four minutes tangled in a kind of slow-motion negotiation — hands gripping forearms, bodies leaning away from each other like magnets flipped the wrong direction. Torres has talked before about her interest in how power shifts between bodies in contact, and here she made that idea feel dangerous. When one dancer finally released and the other stumbled forward into empty space, a woman behind me whispered "oh" out loud. That's the kind of involuntary response choreographers dream about.
Then there was professor David Keane's jazz piece, which had absolutely no business being as fun as it was. Five dancers in matching burgundy pants hit a Count Basie arrangement with the kind of crisp, attack-the-floor energy you usually reserve for competition stages. Keane's known for blending jazz vocabulary with pedestrian movement, and there was a moment mid-piece where a dancer stopped mid-pirouette, pulled out an invisible phone, and checked it — the audience lost it. It was goofy and sharp and a little mean, and it worked perfectly as a palette cleanser after Torres's emotional opener.
The interdisciplinary pieces were where things got uneven, though. One collaboration with the music department featured a live cellist onstage with three dancers, and the execution felt cramped — the cellist kept glancing up nervously, and the dancers seemed unsure whether to acknowledge her or treat her as furniture. The intention was interesting (score and body as equal voices), but in practice it read as two rehearsals happening simultaneously. Not every experiment lands, and honestly, that's fine. I'd rather see a department take a visible swing than play it safe with another lyrical modern piece set to Bon Iver.
What did land was faculty member Ren Ishimoto's closing work, a solo performed by guest artist Alejandra Campos. Campos moved through a rectangular patch of light for twelve minutes, and I can't tell you what it was "about" because it resisted that question entirely. There were extended stillnesses broken by sudden, violent bursts — a torso snapping sideways, a knee folding inward at an angle that made me wince. The sound design was mostly silence with occasional low hums that vibrated in my chest. When Campos stopped and walked offstage without a bow, the audience sat frozen for a beat too long before the applause started. That gap — that moment of not knowing the performance was over — felt like the most honest thing I've seen on a dance stage this semester.
A few things worth noting from an editorial standpoint: the program had no bios for any of the choreographers, which felt like a missed opportunity for audience members unfamiliar with the faculty's work. And the lighting across the evening leaned heavily on dramatic side-lighting that looked gorgeous but occasionally left dancers' faces completely invisible. Small production gripes, but they'd be easy fixes for the next run.
UCSB's dance department doesn't get the attention it deserves in the broader Southern California dance conversation — everyone's too busy covering UCLA and CalArts. But nights like this make a case for paying attention. The faculty aren't just teaching technique; they're actively making work that challenges what the campus stage can hold. That matters for students watching, and it matters for the rest of us, too.
