Last Friday and Saturday, the CFA Theater featured the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange as the first event of the Breaking Ground Dance Series. The fluidity with which the dancers performed throughout the three pieces prompted one of the audience members to ask, “How do they move their bodies like that?”

A selection from “How to Lose a Mountain,” the first performance, came from Cassie Meador’s work-in-progress examining humankind’s relationship to the energy we use in our daily lives. It began with an old man (one of the two dancers in the group over 70 years old) sitting in a chair holding a hand of cards while a woman behind him reached over his shoulder and took them from him, throwing them on the ground. As the dance progressed and all the cards hit the floor, they began to fight over the chair until at the end both of them were standing on the chair together.

The second—and most abstract—of the three dances was “Blueprints of Relentless Nature,” finished in 2009 by Keith Thompson. The work featured four dancers in front of a screen projecting topographical landscapes made entirely of color and examined different forms of sustainability.

The third work of the evening was “Drift,” completed in 2008 by Meador. Unlike the other two works, “Drift” included dialogue and a set in order to express its message. It featured an old man and woman talking about how they moved away from their farm, only to find when they visited it later that it had become unrecognizable, eventually turning into a Piggly Wiggly supermarket. At the same time, an employee talked about how the supermarket is supposedly going to be shut down, and wondered aloud about where the food she eats and sells comes from. For example, why the peaches she eats come from the West Coast, rather than Georgia where “Drift” takes place. “Drift” traces the progressions of this plot of land from a farm to someone else’s house to the Piggly Wiggly to a church and then finally back to nature. The work also discusses at length the origin of our food and both the monetary and human costs that go into producing it.

In all of the performances, each movement was precise and seemingly effortless, whether it was a walk across the stage or the lifting of another dancer into the air.

The two elderly dancers added an interesting dimension to the performance. Given the rigors of dance, it is uncommon to see active performers at that age. While their range of motion was understandably more limited than their more youthful counterparts, they moved with the same careful precision and displayed obvious strength. In “How to Lose a Mountain,” the elderly man lifted up the woman with whom he was fighting over the chair without even the least strain apparent.

Whether it was the synchronized dancing to Right Back Where We Started From, the seventies pop hit by Maxine Nightingale in the middle of “Drift,” a comedic response to the Piggly Wiggly employee realizing aloud that “we need to go back to nature,” or the carefully evolving action of “Blueprints,” the care that went into the choreography was evident.

During the talk following the Friday night performance, both choreographers spoke about the research they had done to develop their pieces. “How to Lose a Mountain” was conceived when Meador wondered where the energy for her Washington, D.C. home originated and traced it to the coal from a mountain in West Virginia. As part of her research for the piece, she intends to walk the 500 miles from her home to this mountain in order to learn more about nature and share her own knowledge with people she meets along the way.

The performance—presented by the Dance Department and the Center for the Arts and co-sponsored by the College of the Environment—tied in nicely with the annual Feet to the Fire first year experience that kicked off during New Student Orientation and featured a “Feast or Famine” theme this year.  All three of the dances provided a different look at the food and energy-related issues plaguing our world today, and although they didn’t necessarily provide clear solutions, they did act as a call for thought and renewed focus on the issues—definitely among the most challenging in the world today.