Dietrich Group – D.A. Hoskins’ Portrait

reviewed by Paula Citron
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Portrait
Dietrich Group
Choreographed by D.A. Hoskins
Performed by Danielle Baskerville and Robert Kingsbury
At the Theatre Centre until Sunday
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Choreographer D.A. Hoskins’ latest work, Portrait, examines the impulse to create. The show is a two-hander superbly performed by Danielle Baskerville and Robert Kingsbury. Their interaction is the metaphor for the symbiosis between the artist and his imagination.

Hoskins’ tools include film, song, music, text, and a tasteful use of nudity. Everyday movement alternates with passages of choreographed dance.

The work is an inventive series of vignettes, some of them extremely droll, that are all about close encounters. The end of each episode is marked by the performers snapping back into reality, just as in life, reality steps in to interrupt an artist at work. The satiric elements remind us that there is as much struggle as joy in artistic creation.

The two excellent performers completely understand Hoskins’ love/hate relationship with the act of creation. The delight of Portrait is linking each vignette back to the impulse to create.

D.A. Hoskins’ Portrait continues at the Theatre Centre until Sunday.