Review: gloATL’s “Liquid Culture”

Up close and personal, especially in a crowd

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“I like large parties,” remarks a character in The Great Gatsby. “They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” You could say that the dance company gloATL just threw a very large party, one that took place over the course of 15 days at multiple locations with the entire city of Atlanta on the guest list. “Liquid Culture; a physical installation series of 5 Utopia Stations” was a series of free dance performances given in Atlanta’s public places on five separate evenings during a two week period in mid-July. With 20 dancers performing for a total of seven hours before an open audience, “Liquid Culture” was a sprawling, ambitious undertaking. But as with the parties Mr. Fitzgerald so clearly admired, this big work was perhaps most remarkable for its flashes of intimacy, near-privacy, that only such large affairs can provide.