By Heidi Kurpiela

There are those who only know rhythm as the frantic beat of their own heart as they fidget at a dance club, in one place, to a rap song. Then there are those who know rhythm as they glide on stage in Rockwell Hall, all alone, to no music, to no sound.

During a recent campus performance Buffalo State College dance instructor Janet Reed and her dance company of six girls performed “Inner Dimension/Hidden Places” a “variety pack” of dances sampled from ballet, jazz, modern and African dance.

As much as the dance styles ranged from classical to way-out there modern, the song choices varied even more (Bjork, Seal, etc…). Even the dancers – white, black and Asian – were diverse. This troupe, according to Reed, is “Martin Luther King’s dream. If you could find me a Spanish girl who could dance I’d stick her in here too!”

Take Annette Alston for example, a 37-year-old mother of two, whose extended family takes up most of the second row, and been dancing with Reed for 20 years now. Then there’s Buffalo State senior Yukiko Sato, who moved here from Japan in 1998, and is bubbly like a tiny bottle of champagne as she bounces around the dressing room, hugging the other dancers.

“If I had never met Janet,” she says, “I would never have stayed in Buffalo.”
Reed says “Hidden Places” reflects where she is now.

“We start out soft, then go into funky mode, then we get angry and loud,” says Reed.

For every change in mood there is a change in outfit and hair to correlate.

They rocked out in Lycra dance skins and 4-foot Pocahontas braids to bongo drums like they were pouncing through a rainforest. They tip-toed in flowing pink and periwinkle skirts to Bjork’s haunting voice like they were petals swirling within an aurora borealis. Then they stomped River Dance style, barefoot and determined, grooving to the sound of…well, nothing. (At one point there was no music at all.)

“Sometimes,” says Reed, “your own breath can give you rhythm.”

Other articles about Janet Reed and Dancers:

http://www.dancespirit.com/backissues/
oct00/allthatjazz.shtml

http://www.artvoice.com/sept19_sept25_2002/
pages/dance.html

http://www.artvoice.com/feb28_march6_2002/
pages/janetreed.html