Elegance and Obstruction
Heron Takes Dance in New Directions
Minneapolis Observer, May 2004 (excerpt)

Scott Heron is a boldly "impure" movement artist, a genre- and gender-bender who was founding member of New York's Circus Amok. This ragtag troupe, which performs for free in the parks of New York every summer, infuses the traditional circus ethos with a healthy dose of avant-garde weirdness and political passion.

Heron, an accomplished juggler, acrobat, and wire-walker as well as a dancer, likes to enrich his dance work with zany, utterly unpredictable performance-art moves. For his solo at the Bryant Lake Bowl show, he'll perform "3x Donovan," which he describes as "a suite of dances to Donovan's music." To the strains of the etherial Welsh pop bard, Heron will incarnate female characters. "The first one is this ragged, dark, ugly, sad woman who has a comb stuck in her hair," he says. "I try to get someone in the audience to help me. They hurt me and I scream. Then I'm sort of a superhero girl who knows how to draw--and I do live drawings of the audience. Then a sort of absurd romp with lots of costumes, and props taped to my body. The end is ecstatic."

I ask Heron if he is satirizing modern dance by adding so much playful decor. "No," he replies quickly. "In that piece I dance my heart out...It's easy to focus on the trappings that surround the dancing, but at the same time we are very committed. We are dancers!"...