Comments (0) Best Betting-Person's Dance Venue - 2011
The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Ave.
Long Island City, NY 11101
718-482-7069
The place is so downtown it's in Long Island City. Catching a dance show at the tiny white-brick space is not like buying tickets to Swan Lake. You don't know what you're going to get, and it might not be anything you'll recognize as dance. It might even suggest the facile ruminations on philosophy, politics, and dance-insider arcana that many choreographers say their work is about. But you can find that elsewhere. What you see at The Chocolate Factory won't look like the last thing you saw there. And despite insignificant production budgets, the place won't look quite the same, either. Recently, you might have been one of 12 people admitted to each showing of Beth Gill's Electric Midwife, clustered together to best appreciate the perfect symmetry of the dance. Gill brought out the geometry of the back wall and windows, the resemblance to a face. Or you might have sat alongside an elevated platform, gazing up at the glamorously feral women of RoseAnne Spradlin's beginning of something as they prowled relentlessly. The theater was hung with mirrors, and it no longer felt safe. 5-49 49th Avenue, Queens, 718- 482-7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org (11101)
