Reviews 1987
I just want to talk about the King dances, which I’d never seen. What seems so novel now in these early solos is the striking boldness and bareness of gesture, the plain conviction, the possibility of unambiguous statement. We’d have to be fools to make dances like this nowadays. But what a gift it is to be able to honor the real thing! The body is pulled as a matter of course between the tensions of earth and sky, exaltation and despair, pride and humility. It is never simply a clever kinetic object.
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Postcards from the Seaside
December 29
William Douglas’s five dances, performed under the overall title...and the Air, were a surprise. Set to an original score by Daron Hagen (performed live by cellist Robert LaRue, soprano Karen Noteboom, and pianist Eric Sawyer), they had a lucid, uncluttered elegance. Douglas’s style isn’t lavish or particularly juicy; expression is concentrated in the clean, intentional but unforced probing of the limbs, in the poise of the head, and the odd, but effectively selected gestures. A Canadian working here since 1983, Douglas turned to dance after receiving a degree in architecture, and he has a clear eye for an airy spatial composition. But what makes his dances so unlike anything else I’ve seen recently is their unusual dignity, without the slightest stuffiness. Nothing is hasty, thoughtless or irrational. But nothing is done as an exercise either.
According to Douglas, the dances are based on images from the Nova Scotia seashore, but very few of those images are translated literally. In Travelling in Darkness, to a text sung a capella by Noteboom, Douglas dances a lonely, soberly athletic solo dedicated to his father, filled with chest-forward dives, jumps with deep landings, side-to-side tossings, and, sometimes, the dry tap of knees, elbows, knuckles hitting the floor. Once, he sinks, unacknowledged, against the onstage singer. Though much of the movement suggests the actions of swimming, Douglas fractures its normal rhythmic flow and turns his phrases into gray thoughts. Mingled with a sense of mourning and frustration, there’s an odd neutrality, a reticence, to his performance, an avoidance of any overstatement - as if his heart were locked in a box somewhere else.
Herons, to spare, melancholy music, is plainly based on close observation of those strange, refined birds, and the gestures are sometimes quite literal, but it wrests specifics of ornithological behavior into a quietly fascinating dance of exquisite patience. The trio of dancers - Bill Coleman, Valerie Striar, and Paula Swiatkowski - all tall and appropriately stalky - make careful back extensions and wheel in slow, slow turns. Posed with the perfect arrogance of un-self-consciousness, they balance with their torsos twisted and their arms folded very close to the waist, likes sadhus who’ve been waiting 20 years for enlightenment and are content to wait 20 more. One arm stretches delicately upwards as the gaze drops, and one foot makes gentle tracings on the floor. They rest their arms, turning them upwards, crossed at the forearms, and let their relaxed claws open daintily. In motion, they pause in attitude, drift into unison, zigzag at moderate speed in a pattern of leaps and flashing arms.
Hands, next, is for two shorties in multi-colored outfits - robust Amy Schwartz and Peter Smith - who won’t leave each other alone. Hooking together like a bent-nail puzzle, they grapple with the cheerful temerity of chums. Nothing in the choreography points toward any alteration in this spunky relationship, but it is misleading when the accompanying song suddenly deepens in feeling and the pair is unaffected. They pull and push, act fresh. They know they can get away with anything. At the end, he snaps the end of her nose. So there!
Paula Swiatkowski (in heart earrings and a salmon leotard, her blond hair in a brush) and Valerie Striar move with a kind of refined, rambling lightness in Girls and Dogs, a whimsical, almost lazy charmer. Like a conversation that drifts from subject to subject, their gestures don’t quite finish or fill out. Douglas, in a sort of Dalmatian-spotted unitard, jumps this way and that, bounds with softly flopping arms. Whatever happens seems incidental. The girls and “dogs” are just in the same place at around the same time, and the dance teases us alternately with their contrasting qualities. Douglas and Peter Smith (in large black and brown spots, on white) jump and scamper and roll over each other, turn, squat and kick their feet in the air. Subtle and warm, the humor is gently ironic too, as in the way Douglas, belly-down, sets his chin on the back of his hand with a blase, uppercrust air. The girls just take it easy.
In the final piece...and the Air, for all six dancers, in citrus-popsicle colored unitards, Douglas shows an equivalent light touch and keeps many flavors separate as effectively as a McD.L.T. The pulled-up, erect stance the clean, often a balletic line of the dancing, the dignified use of space, the lack of untoward pressure give it - like Douglas’s dances overall - a classical gentility and composure.
At the Cunningham Studio (December 2 to 5).
William Douglas’s five dances, performed under the overall title...and the Air, were a surprise. Set to an original score by Daron Hagen (performed live by cellist Robert LaRue, soprano Karen Noteboom, and pianist Eric Sawyer), they had a lucid, uncluttered elegance. Douglas’s style isn’t lavish or particularly juicy; expression is concentrated in the clean, intentional but unforced probing of the limbs, in the poise of the head, and the odd, but effectively selected gestures. A Canadian working here since 1983, Douglas turned to dance after receiving a degree in architecture, and he has a clear eye for an airy spatial composition. But what makes his dances so unlike anything else I’ve seen recently is their unusual dignity, without the slightest stuffiness. Nothing is hasty, thoughtless or irrational. But nothing is done as an exercise either.
According to Douglas, the dances are based on images from the Nova Scotia seashore, but very few of those images are translated literally. In Travelling in Darkness, to a text sung a capella by Noteboom, Douglas dances a lonely, soberly athletic solo dedicated to his father, filled with chest-forward dives, jumps with deep landings, side-to-side tossings, and, sometimes, the dry tap of knees, elbows, knuckles hitting the floor. Once, he sinks, unacknowledged, against the onstage singer. Though much of the movement suggests the actions of swimming, Douglas fractures its normal rhythmic flow and turns his phrases into gray thoughts. Mingled with a sense of mourning and frustration, there’s an odd neutrality, a reticence, to his performance, an avoidance of any overstatement - as if his heart were locked in a box somewhere else.
Herons, to spare, melancholy music, is plainly based on close observation of those strange, refined birds, and the gestures are sometimes quite literal, but it wrests specifics of ornithological behavior into a quietly fascinating dance of exquisite patience. The trio of dancers - Bill Coleman, Valerie Striar, and Paula Swiatkowski - all tall and appropriately stalky - make careful back extensions and wheel in slow, slow turns. Posed with the perfect arrogance of un-self-consciousness, they balance with their torsos twisted and their arms folded very close to the waist, likes sadhus who’ve been waiting 20 years for enlightenment and are content to wait 20 more. One arm stretches delicately upwards as the gaze drops, and one foot makes gentle tracings on the floor. They rest their arms, turning them upwards, crossed at the forearms, and let their relaxed claws open daintily. In motion, they pause in attitude, drift into unison, zigzag at moderate speed in a pattern of leaps and flashing arms.
Hands, next, is for two shorties in multi-colored outfits - robust Amy Schwartz and Peter Smith - who won’t leave each other alone. Hooking together like a bent-nail puzzle, they grapple with the cheerful temerity of chums. Nothing in the choreography points toward any alteration in this spunky relationship, but it is misleading when the accompanying song suddenly deepens in feeling and the pair is unaffected. They pull and push, act fresh. They know they can get away with anything. At the end, he snaps the end of her nose. So there!
Paula Swiatkowski (in heart earrings and a salmon leotard, her blond hair in a brush) and Valerie Striar move with a kind of refined, rambling lightness in Girls and Dogs, a whimsical, almost lazy charmer. Like a conversation that drifts from subject to subject, their gestures don’t quite finish or fill out. Douglas, in a sort of Dalmatian-spotted unitard, jumps this way and that, bounds with softly flopping arms. Whatever happens seems incidental. The girls and “dogs” are just in the same place at around the same time, and the dance teases us alternately with their contrasting qualities. Douglas and Peter Smith (in large black and brown spots, on white) jump and scamper and roll over each other, turn, squat and kick their feet in the air. Subtle and warm, the humor is gently ironic too, as in the way Douglas, belly-down, sets his chin on the back of his hand with a blase, uppercrust air. The girls just take it easy.
In the final piece...and the Air, for all six dancers, in citrus-popsicle colored unitards, Douglas shows an equivalent light touch and keeps many flavors separate as effectively as a McD.L.T. The pulled-up, erect stance the clean, often a balletic line of the dancing, the dignified use of space, the lack of untoward pressure give it - like Douglas’s dances overall - a classical gentility and composure.
At the Cunningham Studio (December 2 to 5).
Scrambled Brains
December 22
Bare-chested and wearing a black skirt, Brian Moran - who currently dance with Stephanie Skura - opened the concert of solos he shared with Daniel McIntosh with Space, an improvisation to mostly Indian music. In a beam of light, gazing upwards, Moran sways and twists with a gentle sinuousness rooted in the wide plie of Hindu and Southeast Asian dance. The side-to-side shifting of the knees provides a kind of sensual undercurrent. Then, with the music’s quicker impulse, his step springs, he prances. His rocking movements surge into ecstatic contortions, with arms flinging, fingers conjuring. There’s a curious pungency to the movement, a kind of self-intoxication, as if Moran were trying to shake loose some obstruction deep inside. If he could only set it free, the clapper within him would make his body go bong.
Short and not sweet at all, Crack/Duck is a fierce, outrageous anti-drug lesson. A high-impact cartoon. Maoran is naked, frenzied, wearing a green duck mask. He scrambled around, furiously lights matches, runs, trembles violently. The music is raucous and screechy; a beam flashes here and there like a searchlight. Squatting before a small frying pan and four eggs, he stops. “This is your brain,” he says angrily, holding an egg. O, perfect form. “This is the drugs,” he lifts the pan. “This is your brain on drugs,” he says, breaking the egg in the pan, and repeats the whole ritual three times. Then he bites into the last egg, lets it fall out of his hand to burst on the floor in front of him. His body explodes in convulsions. Someone has to drag him off.
A Scar is Born is more a first draft than a piece. Sullen, Moran walks in a slouch, opens a can of beer and sips it, picks up a handyman’s light lying on the floor, and, for a second, turns it on his face where we see a long curved scar. He gives a crude precis of A Woman’s Face, with Joan Crawford - she’s bad because she’s disfigured - and tells several versions of how he got his scar (carved by a subway mugger, in a car smashup like James Dean), then claims they’re all lies. He goes into a thumping, lurching, Quasimodo dance, with heavy jumps and thrashing arms. Resentment and anger color the whole performance, but it doesn’t develop. For a moment there, with Joan, I thought he was going to riff on the idea of beauty as good and ugly as evil. Nope.
Daniel McIntosh has been working with video since 1981. Crouched, in Eyes, he twists, turning in on himself, in front of a white rectangle, like an unsettled animal with no room to pace in its cage. From this swiveling, constricted beginning, to which the piece returns, Eyes develops in an arbitrary way. In sudden darkness, McIntosh carries a video monitor showing cheerfully burgeoning abstract images. He set the monitor down and dances in its flickering gleam. To quietly rattling music by Arthur Russell, he tangles himself in electrical cord, folds himself over the monitor and peers into it with primitive fascination - a prisoner of the tube.
In his sleeveless black outfit for Action, McIntoch looks to me like a cat burglar. Jumping vertically from a crouching position under a downspot, he looses soft kicks as he jumps, and comes to rest only gradually on landing. He moves into space with swinging, pitching, hurling motions that can knock him off balance. He prowls on all fours, takes softly writhing, spidery leaps, stumbles into a sort of lunge as limp as a gummy worm. I like the asymmetry of his dancing, the erratic way he tosses his arms outward and leaves them in momentary suspension, his weird delicacy. But, for example, he seems to fall slightly before he must, before his stretch reaches its extremity. So, the movement seems a little soggy and needlessly willful, and the momentum keeps faltering.
Generally there’s a soft edge to Moran and McIntosh’s brand of loose-limbed abandon that ultimately tames the movement. You want their energy to carry them beyond themselves, but - just as three out of five pieces return to their opening statements - it recedes instead of breaking loose.
At Movement Research, Ethnic Folk Arts Center (December 5 to 7).
Bare-chested and wearing a black skirt, Brian Moran - who currently dance with Stephanie Skura - opened the concert of solos he shared with Daniel McIntosh with Space, an improvisation to mostly Indian music. In a beam of light, gazing upwards, Moran sways and twists with a gentle sinuousness rooted in the wide plie of Hindu and Southeast Asian dance. The side-to-side shifting of the knees provides a kind of sensual undercurrent. Then, with the music’s quicker impulse, his step springs, he prances. His rocking movements surge into ecstatic contortions, with arms flinging, fingers conjuring. There’s a curious pungency to the movement, a kind of self-intoxication, as if Moran were trying to shake loose some obstruction deep inside. If he could only set it free, the clapper within him would make his body go bong.
Short and not sweet at all, Crack/Duck is a fierce, outrageous anti-drug lesson. A high-impact cartoon. Maoran is naked, frenzied, wearing a green duck mask. He scrambled around, furiously lights matches, runs, trembles violently. The music is raucous and screechy; a beam flashes here and there like a searchlight. Squatting before a small frying pan and four eggs, he stops. “This is your brain,” he says angrily, holding an egg. O, perfect form. “This is the drugs,” he lifts the pan. “This is your brain on drugs,” he says, breaking the egg in the pan, and repeats the whole ritual three times. Then he bites into the last egg, lets it fall out of his hand to burst on the floor in front of him. His body explodes in convulsions. Someone has to drag him off.
A Scar is Born is more a first draft than a piece. Sullen, Moran walks in a slouch, opens a can of beer and sips it, picks up a handyman’s light lying on the floor, and, for a second, turns it on his face where we see a long curved scar. He gives a crude precis of A Woman’s Face, with Joan Crawford - she’s bad because she’s disfigured - and tells several versions of how he got his scar (carved by a subway mugger, in a car smashup like James Dean), then claims they’re all lies. He goes into a thumping, lurching, Quasimodo dance, with heavy jumps and thrashing arms. Resentment and anger color the whole performance, but it doesn’t develop. For a moment there, with Joan, I thought he was going to riff on the idea of beauty as good and ugly as evil. Nope.
Daniel McIntosh has been working with video since 1981. Crouched, in Eyes, he twists, turning in on himself, in front of a white rectangle, like an unsettled animal with no room to pace in its cage. From this swiveling, constricted beginning, to which the piece returns, Eyes develops in an arbitrary way. In sudden darkness, McIntosh carries a video monitor showing cheerfully burgeoning abstract images. He set the monitor down and dances in its flickering gleam. To quietly rattling music by Arthur Russell, he tangles himself in electrical cord, folds himself over the monitor and peers into it with primitive fascination - a prisoner of the tube.
In his sleeveless black outfit for Action, McIntoch looks to me like a cat burglar. Jumping vertically from a crouching position under a downspot, he looses soft kicks as he jumps, and comes to rest only gradually on landing. He moves into space with swinging, pitching, hurling motions that can knock him off balance. He prowls on all fours, takes softly writhing, spidery leaps, stumbles into a sort of lunge as limp as a gummy worm. I like the asymmetry of his dancing, the erratic way he tosses his arms outward and leaves them in momentary suspension, his weird delicacy. But, for example, he seems to fall slightly before he must, before his stretch reaches its extremity. So, the movement seems a little soggy and needlessly willful, and the momentum keeps faltering.
Generally there’s a soft edge to Moran and McIntosh’s brand of loose-limbed abandon that ultimately tames the movement. You want their energy to carry them beyond themselves, but - just as three out of five pieces return to their opening statements - it recedes instead of breaking loose.
At Movement Research, Ethnic Folk Arts Center (December 5 to 7).
Waterloo
December 15
Two men and two women identically dressed in white ballet dresses charge in with splashing enthusiasm in
Mark Dendy’s Wave (1983). Bounding a rebounding with surging motion, their rebellious vigor is purely positive, youthful without being snotty or ill-mannered. For the men, it’s not about being pretend women, but about having fun wearing dresses, and doing at full steam the kind of swirly stuff that women get to do more often than men.
In Tide, a duet reworked this year from a 1985 trio, Sarah Perron and Chrysa Parkinson dance bare-breasted with a quiet, considered sensuality that is rather rare. They acknowledge their bodies without advertising themselves in any particularly sexual way; but they’re not pretending to be neuter beings whose sexual equipment doesn’t count. The movement is almost conventionally balletic, David Ferri’s lighting makes the dancers’ skin glow. In Tide, you can admire their lovely headlights without feeling like a pig. But there’s not much more going on. Similarly, Solo (a reworking of a 1982 piece called Face), which features Dendy jumping and crashing in loose, white parachute pants, is a picture of an unchanging condition that quantities of movement don’t alter.
In the past, I’ve delighted in Dendy’s extravagant humor, his brash way of matching headlong spurts of movement with collapse, his intuitive knack for pacing. He demonstrated a flip commitment to structure that sharpened his humor and controlled with wild fluctuations of his movement in aid of a specific, concise idea. But in his newest piece, Torn, he’s all over the place at the mercy of the gimmicks that have previously had such charm.
Torn is an episodic, panoramic cartoon view of war without a lick of sense. Its segments don’t fit together. The dance opens in “Africa” with a routine that might be the opening act for Mighty Joe Young. Dancers pose in an archaic freeze (in “Greece”?) while helmeted Athena postures in the middle. Nothing happens. For the “French Revolution,” Chrysa Parkinson glides around smirking in a pink-ballgown-and-powdered-wig cutout. She doesn’t even get her noggin chopped.
In the long “Civil War” section, Southern belle Joni Weaver waltzes and chitchats with her beau, the ideal soldier hero Gregg Hubbard, who, the audience notices, is black. Contemporary sounding descriptions of the wounded that might be journal entries are delivered with mechanical regularity and tonelessness. Between the Civil War and Vietnam (or Nicaragua, wherever), a youthful crew from the Fieldston School messes around representing football. Football? (OK, it’s a sport than enshrines violence, but it’s hardly in the same league as the Blue and the Gray, or Uncle Sam and the Commies.)
In the “Today” section - with people in camouflage shorts, shirt, G-strings - the dancers climb on each other as if making themselves into war machines and mowing each other down. Chisa Hidaka - a sort of Martha Graham personification of nuclear war - strides through in a black outfit lettered with Einstein’s famous equation. A Christ figure in a red loincloth mopes around on the sidelines, The dancers, meantime, rip each other’s hearts out, kiss and make up, and resume killing. They lie in dead heaps as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” tootles, and rise from the dead holding their hands over their hearts.
Dendy simply flounders with an enormous subject he hasn’t begun to come to terms with. He means to parody patriotic sentimentality, mealymouthed virtue, the glamour that masks the gore, but he’s only assembled a shapeless grab bag of generalities. He tries to suggest war’s insane horror, but a stage battle is always pretty jolly, the kind of circus any eager young man might run off to join.
At P.S. 122 ( November 20 to 27).
Two men and two women identically dressed in white ballet dresses charge in with splashing enthusiasm in
Mark Dendy’s Wave (1983). Bounding a rebounding with surging motion, their rebellious vigor is purely positive, youthful without being snotty or ill-mannered. For the men, it’s not about being pretend women, but about having fun wearing dresses, and doing at full steam the kind of swirly stuff that women get to do more often than men.
In Tide, a duet reworked this year from a 1985 trio, Sarah Perron and Chrysa Parkinson dance bare-breasted with a quiet, considered sensuality that is rather rare. They acknowledge their bodies without advertising themselves in any particularly sexual way; but they’re not pretending to be neuter beings whose sexual equipment doesn’t count. The movement is almost conventionally balletic, David Ferri’s lighting makes the dancers’ skin glow. In Tide, you can admire their lovely headlights without feeling like a pig. But there’s not much more going on. Similarly, Solo (a reworking of a 1982 piece called Face), which features Dendy jumping and crashing in loose, white parachute pants, is a picture of an unchanging condition that quantities of movement don’t alter.
In the past, I’ve delighted in Dendy’s extravagant humor, his brash way of matching headlong spurts of movement with collapse, his intuitive knack for pacing. He demonstrated a flip commitment to structure that sharpened his humor and controlled with wild fluctuations of his movement in aid of a specific, concise idea. But in his newest piece, Torn, he’s all over the place at the mercy of the gimmicks that have previously had such charm.
Torn is an episodic, panoramic cartoon view of war without a lick of sense. Its segments don’t fit together. The dance opens in “Africa” with a routine that might be the opening act for Mighty Joe Young. Dancers pose in an archaic freeze (in “Greece”?) while helmeted Athena postures in the middle. Nothing happens. For the “French Revolution,” Chrysa Parkinson glides around smirking in a pink-ballgown-and-powdered-wig cutout. She doesn’t even get her noggin chopped.
In the long “Civil War” section, Southern belle Joni Weaver waltzes and chitchats with her beau, the ideal soldier hero Gregg Hubbard, who, the audience notices, is black. Contemporary sounding descriptions of the wounded that might be journal entries are delivered with mechanical regularity and tonelessness. Between the Civil War and Vietnam (or Nicaragua, wherever), a youthful crew from the Fieldston School messes around representing football. Football? (OK, it’s a sport than enshrines violence, but it’s hardly in the same league as the Blue and the Gray, or Uncle Sam and the Commies.)
In the “Today” section - with people in camouflage shorts, shirt, G-strings - the dancers climb on each other as if making themselves into war machines and mowing each other down. Chisa Hidaka - a sort of Martha Graham personification of nuclear war - strides through in a black outfit lettered with Einstein’s famous equation. A Christ figure in a red loincloth mopes around on the sidelines, The dancers, meantime, rip each other’s hearts out, kiss and make up, and resume killing. They lie in dead heaps as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” tootles, and rise from the dead holding their hands over their hearts.
Dendy simply flounders with an enormous subject he hasn’t begun to come to terms with. He means to parody patriotic sentimentality, mealymouthed virtue, the glamour that masks the gore, but he’s only assembled a shapeless grab bag of generalities. He tries to suggest war’s insane horror, but a stage battle is always pretty jolly, the kind of circus any eager young man might run off to join.
At P.S. 122 ( November 20 to 27).
Partners
December 1
Terry Creach and Stephen Koester have been devising their sleek and acrobatic duets since 1980 and they’ve developed an extraordinary and exemplary partnership. Their dancing together is secure, unshowy and essentially low-key, based on a tacit and near absolute physical trust. Lifts, leans, carries, collapses are part of their discourse, and the drama of their style comes from the fluctuations of their dependency. Because there’s freedom - as in any contact improvisation - to use any part of the partner’s body to lean on or swing from or push off, the configurations of the dancers’ bodies (and the relationships they evoke) tend to be angled, informal, unclimactic. The economy of their style streamlines the flow of movement.
Suspect has a slightly ominous atmosphere, colored by occasional taped tough-guy shamus remarks, with an edge of belligerence and a sense of isolation in the solo sections. Koester’s alone at first - he turns sharply, keels backward, slides, rolls. Caution underlies his muted attack. Creach establishes a fierce presence of whipping power - jumping turns, slashing legs, going head over heels, briefly stopping in odd, splintered poses Together they become instantly mellower, their assertiveness transformed.
As a matter of course, they seem to be dancing on a dare. Unlike, but fairly matched, they seem magnetized, drawn toward each other by some impersonal, centripetal force.
Creach walks on his hands, leans on Koester’s hip, lifts him around his body. Clear, agile, they dive to the floor, somersault, slide, roll. Koester dangles with his legs wrapped about Creach’s neck. The scooting, sliding, dodging, carrying, clinging dynamic has a musical flexibility of phrasing and a spur of the moment lightness. Careful or abrupt, they meet at glancing angles, rebound, and veer apart. When they stick together, the tactile authority of their contact gives it a significant sobriety. There’s no nonsense in their dancing; it’s as deadly serious and reticent as high-stakes poker.
Bebe Miller subtly melds her own style with Creach and Koester’s in Butte (set to one of Bach’s suites for solo cello), and casually combines both with sketchy cowboy elements. Wearing western shirts and fake moustaches, Creach and Koester achieve brilliantly fractured balances, sail into high-stepping moves, essay some ticklish scrambles, wriggle their legs into extension, hook up in curious, crabbed lifts. They topple vaguely drunk or gutshot from precarious poses. They climb each other’s bodies. Far from a waterhole, I guess, a limp Koester dangles from Creach’s shoulders after pointing out something on or beyond the horizon. They reel forward with such propulsion that - like cartoon characters whose racing feet turn into wheels - their legs whirr to catch up to their bodies. Their dancing is full of near stumbles, trips and moments when they get stuck like mice in a glue trap.
The final piece, Open Borders, is in three sections - a quartet for Kevin Campbell, Francisco Camacho, Nathaniel Lee and Patrick Rawlins; a duet for the choreographers, and a sextet for everybody. The set (designed by Power Boothe) is a crucial element in the piece, a high, horizontal plank fence, with diagonal as well as vertical supports. But Lynn Steincamp’s parti-colored unitards that end below the knee are oddly circusy, unflattering, obtrusive. Movement that happens on the fence is more striking by force of design than movement in space. The men swing smoothly up onto and off it, sometimes captured in the curve of someone’s arm on the way down. They angle themselves against the fence and freeze, walk up it diagonally, and swing away. The slanted positions are particularly bold against the strong horizontals of the planking.
In the duet, “Couple,” Creach and Koester seem particularly unpredictable in terms of rhythm and dynamic. In the final part, Tom Farrell’s rumbling, clanging score generates a pleasant suspense. It’s interesting, too, to see Creach and Koester engaged with other dancers whose moves and holds seem more manipulative and, in a way, more eager. The contrast throws into relief the finesse of the duo’s partnership, their comfort with each other and the audience.
Creach and Koester achieve a distinctive balance of antagonism and cooperation. Their interdependency is always quite moving in a completely unsentimental way. Asking for help, accepting it, depending on getting it when you need it, all these are supposedly hard for men to acknowledge. But in these works, on a physical as well as a psychic level, these elements are absolute constants of the dancing.
At Dance Theater workshop (November 12 to 15).
Terry Creach and Stephen Koester have been devising their sleek and acrobatic duets since 1980 and they’ve developed an extraordinary and exemplary partnership. Their dancing together is secure, unshowy and essentially low-key, based on a tacit and near absolute physical trust. Lifts, leans, carries, collapses are part of their discourse, and the drama of their style comes from the fluctuations of their dependency. Because there’s freedom - as in any contact improvisation - to use any part of the partner’s body to lean on or swing from or push off, the configurations of the dancers’ bodies (and the relationships they evoke) tend to be angled, informal, unclimactic. The economy of their style streamlines the flow of movement.
Suspect has a slightly ominous atmosphere, colored by occasional taped tough-guy shamus remarks, with an edge of belligerence and a sense of isolation in the solo sections. Koester’s alone at first - he turns sharply, keels backward, slides, rolls. Caution underlies his muted attack. Creach establishes a fierce presence of whipping power - jumping turns, slashing legs, going head over heels, briefly stopping in odd, splintered poses Together they become instantly mellower, their assertiveness transformed.
As a matter of course, they seem to be dancing on a dare. Unlike, but fairly matched, they seem magnetized, drawn toward each other by some impersonal, centripetal force.
Creach walks on his hands, leans on Koester’s hip, lifts him around his body. Clear, agile, they dive to the floor, somersault, slide, roll. Koester dangles with his legs wrapped about Creach’s neck. The scooting, sliding, dodging, carrying, clinging dynamic has a musical flexibility of phrasing and a spur of the moment lightness. Careful or abrupt, they meet at glancing angles, rebound, and veer apart. When they stick together, the tactile authority of their contact gives it a significant sobriety. There’s no nonsense in their dancing; it’s as deadly serious and reticent as high-stakes poker.
Bebe Miller subtly melds her own style with Creach and Koester’s in Butte (set to one of Bach’s suites for solo cello), and casually combines both with sketchy cowboy elements. Wearing western shirts and fake moustaches, Creach and Koester achieve brilliantly fractured balances, sail into high-stepping moves, essay some ticklish scrambles, wriggle their legs into extension, hook up in curious, crabbed lifts. They topple vaguely drunk or gutshot from precarious poses. They climb each other’s bodies. Far from a waterhole, I guess, a limp Koester dangles from Creach’s shoulders after pointing out something on or beyond the horizon. They reel forward with such propulsion that - like cartoon characters whose racing feet turn into wheels - their legs whirr to catch up to their bodies. Their dancing is full of near stumbles, trips and moments when they get stuck like mice in a glue trap.
The final piece, Open Borders, is in three sections - a quartet for Kevin Campbell, Francisco Camacho, Nathaniel Lee and Patrick Rawlins; a duet for the choreographers, and a sextet for everybody. The set (designed by Power Boothe) is a crucial element in the piece, a high, horizontal plank fence, with diagonal as well as vertical supports. But Lynn Steincamp’s parti-colored unitards that end below the knee are oddly circusy, unflattering, obtrusive. Movement that happens on the fence is more striking by force of design than movement in space. The men swing smoothly up onto and off it, sometimes captured in the curve of someone’s arm on the way down. They angle themselves against the fence and freeze, walk up it diagonally, and swing away. The slanted positions are particularly bold against the strong horizontals of the planking.
In the duet, “Couple,” Creach and Koester seem particularly unpredictable in terms of rhythm and dynamic. In the final part, Tom Farrell’s rumbling, clanging score generates a pleasant suspense. It’s interesting, too, to see Creach and Koester engaged with other dancers whose moves and holds seem more manipulative and, in a way, more eager. The contrast throws into relief the finesse of the duo’s partnership, their comfort with each other and the audience.
Creach and Koester achieve a distinctive balance of antagonism and cooperation. Their interdependency is always quite moving in a completely unsentimental way. Asking for help, accepting it, depending on getting it when you need it, all these are supposedly hard for men to acknowledge. But in these works, on a physical as well as a psychic level, these elements are absolute constants of the dancing.
At Dance Theater workshop (November 12 to 15).
Women’s Rites
November 24
The Dia Foundation on Mercer Street is clean and white, a pleasant, loft-type space with platforms for the audience and wretchedly designed folding chairs. That’s where I caught the third program of this fall’s “Salon Project,” a series that features performances followed by snacks and socializing with the artists.
In Kid Upset, reworked from a group piece of a year or two ago, Jane Setteducato delivered a coolly factual routine of curving, swinging, wriggling motions while talking, in part, about her religious upbringing. The natural rebelliousness and cynicism in the text (“I just didn’t feel like a soldier of Christ; I didn’t see too many of them around either”) justify the combination in the movement of emotional denial with he sexual mechanics of a swiveling pelvis, the unecstatic rolling of the head, and the rounded but unembracing arms that open and close vertically to neutralize the space near the vulnerable front of the body. The text substitutes for development in the dancing; the several repeated movements - the curving gestures, backward slides, sideways swings - never become more than a supple, mechanical litany whose elements remain affectless even when they are more dynamically stressed. It’s as if Setteducato put together two stable chemicals that can’t interact.
Mostly sitting, Muna Tseng slides and poses on the floor in a long, mummifying, narrow-skirted white gown in Water Mysteries (Part I). She’s glamorous but crippled or incomplete. With no distinct purpose, interrupted by periodic blackouts, she makes a sinuous fishlike progress around the stage - kneeling, pushing herself backwards, swinging her legs around while keeping them locked firmly together like a mermaid’s tail. Eventually, she heaves herself into a galvanized tub. She slips off the gown, and in the sheer shift she wears underneath, wets herself down and soaks. With the long, sopping, transparent shift clinging to her body, she stands, then walks slowly along a row of eight or nine glass bricks like stepping stones. Tseng’s image of transformation is quite beautiful, and baptismal water is a convincing magical agent, but what is the meaning of the change or cure? Was it lucky or inevitable? What is the price?
Tseng’s Monkeys (Part II) also contains vivid images embedded in an unilluminating context. In dim light, blindfolded and carrying a candle, Tseng walks on tangents cued b Felicia Norton’s periodic “psst” from shifting locations. They meet, embrace, and blow out the candle. Then, in bright light, they pursue an ambivalent relationship both tender and careless, nurturing and distractedly cruel. Norton approaches Tseng, who’s sitting on the floor, and enfolds her from behind. When Tseng drops her head forward on her chest, Norton pushes it back up too sharply, again and again. Norton starts to pick Tseng up, but lets her legs suddenly escape her grip. Arms wheeling, Tseng rushes to Norton and when she’s caught, clamps her legs around Norton’s waist like a creature desperate for a moment’s comfort. Intermittently, their relationship keeps evaporating.
Though it gradually rambled, Susan Osberg’s States was a beautifully phrased, moody piece in a number of episodes, danced by the choreographer with an evanescent grace. Over black tights, she wears a maroon velvet dress, which flares when she spins, along with black shoes and bright green socks. With her shortish blond hair, her look is up-to-date downtown, but fanciful and rather delicate. Osberg’s hands weave a twisting route around her as she sways softly. They curl into airy descriptions, Then shell pause without warning like a deer in a field. When the dynamic shifts, the focus moves to intricate footwork, as playful as a samba. Osberg’s arms can be almost Indonesian in their delicacy. Soft turns swoop into plie, offhand leaps flow lightly backwards, gentle rolls and whirls are almost vaporous. Ceaseless turns in a big circle with her arms flat out are ribbon-smooth.
Like much of the music choreographers choose lately, K Leimer’s score is often chimy. Its watery buoyancy gives Osberg support, but its lack of rhythmic definition doesn’t challenge or engage her. If she had selected something less accommodating, she might have given States a little more sinew. But the meandering quality of the movement and its general levity are part of its considerable charm.
Completing the program were three dances by Michiyo Tanaka that aspire at best to conventional prettiness.
At the Dia Foundation (November 10).
The Dia Foundation on Mercer Street is clean and white, a pleasant, loft-type space with platforms for the audience and wretchedly designed folding chairs. That’s where I caught the third program of this fall’s “Salon Project,” a series that features performances followed by snacks and socializing with the artists.
In Kid Upset, reworked from a group piece of a year or two ago, Jane Setteducato delivered a coolly factual routine of curving, swinging, wriggling motions while talking, in part, about her religious upbringing. The natural rebelliousness and cynicism in the text (“I just didn’t feel like a soldier of Christ; I didn’t see too many of them around either”) justify the combination in the movement of emotional denial with he sexual mechanics of a swiveling pelvis, the unecstatic rolling of the head, and the rounded but unembracing arms that open and close vertically to neutralize the space near the vulnerable front of the body. The text substitutes for development in the dancing; the several repeated movements - the curving gestures, backward slides, sideways swings - never become more than a supple, mechanical litany whose elements remain affectless even when they are more dynamically stressed. It’s as if Setteducato put together two stable chemicals that can’t interact.
Mostly sitting, Muna Tseng slides and poses on the floor in a long, mummifying, narrow-skirted white gown in Water Mysteries (Part I). She’s glamorous but crippled or incomplete. With no distinct purpose, interrupted by periodic blackouts, she makes a sinuous fishlike progress around the stage - kneeling, pushing herself backwards, swinging her legs around while keeping them locked firmly together like a mermaid’s tail. Eventually, she heaves herself into a galvanized tub. She slips off the gown, and in the sheer shift she wears underneath, wets herself down and soaks. With the long, sopping, transparent shift clinging to her body, she stands, then walks slowly along a row of eight or nine glass bricks like stepping stones. Tseng’s image of transformation is quite beautiful, and baptismal water is a convincing magical agent, but what is the meaning of the change or cure? Was it lucky or inevitable? What is the price?
Tseng’s Monkeys (Part II) also contains vivid images embedded in an unilluminating context. In dim light, blindfolded and carrying a candle, Tseng walks on tangents cued b Felicia Norton’s periodic “psst” from shifting locations. They meet, embrace, and blow out the candle. Then, in bright light, they pursue an ambivalent relationship both tender and careless, nurturing and distractedly cruel. Norton approaches Tseng, who’s sitting on the floor, and enfolds her from behind. When Tseng drops her head forward on her chest, Norton pushes it back up too sharply, again and again. Norton starts to pick Tseng up, but lets her legs suddenly escape her grip. Arms wheeling, Tseng rushes to Norton and when she’s caught, clamps her legs around Norton’s waist like a creature desperate for a moment’s comfort. Intermittently, their relationship keeps evaporating.
Though it gradually rambled, Susan Osberg’s States was a beautifully phrased, moody piece in a number of episodes, danced by the choreographer with an evanescent grace. Over black tights, she wears a maroon velvet dress, which flares when she spins, along with black shoes and bright green socks. With her shortish blond hair, her look is up-to-date downtown, but fanciful and rather delicate. Osberg’s hands weave a twisting route around her as she sways softly. They curl into airy descriptions, Then shell pause without warning like a deer in a field. When the dynamic shifts, the focus moves to intricate footwork, as playful as a samba. Osberg’s arms can be almost Indonesian in their delicacy. Soft turns swoop into plie, offhand leaps flow lightly backwards, gentle rolls and whirls are almost vaporous. Ceaseless turns in a big circle with her arms flat out are ribbon-smooth.
Like much of the music choreographers choose lately, K Leimer’s score is often chimy. Its watery buoyancy gives Osberg support, but its lack of rhythmic definition doesn’t challenge or engage her. If she had selected something less accommodating, she might have given States a little more sinew. But the meandering quality of the movement and its general levity are part of its considerable charm.
Completing the program were three dances by Michiyo Tanaka that aspire at best to conventional prettiness.
At the Dia Foundation (November 10).
Lunching With Clothes On
September 15
Keith Young, who brought his fierce elegance, clarity and restrained intensity to Twyla Tharp’s company from 1980 to 1984, has come some way as a choreographer since the concert I saw a year ago April. Two of the four very different pieces presented under the misleading rubric “Civilizations” were substantial, though the other two, In Depths and Three Ring, seemed equally popular with the first night audience. Three Ring is on a circus theme - naturally - and successfully mingles Howard Fireheart, who tumbles and juggles and picks up dropped balls or pins on a forward roll, with the other springy, insouciant dancers who prance and saunter through. But it has not other particular virtues, save an oddly slinky trio for three men, and a generally fine cast of performers. Fireheart’s the only one with the intrinsic privilege of making a mistake, the only one who’s not being cute and overselling thin material.
The throbbing vibrations of the music (by Bernie Worrell, Steven Jordan and Charlie Drayton) are boingingly regular. The cloying score for In Depths (by James Papoulis, who worked with Vangelis) is also throbbing, lush, mysterious and numbingly regular. In Depths is pure hypnotic show-biz, an aboveground submarine ballet, with the floor-bound dancers wearing outfits (by Byron Suber) that escaped from some Hollywood tropical number. In groups of three and two, often delicately linking their extremities, the dancers move in place or creep around, silkily executing swimming movements, sometimes in rippling sequence. The water is warm, and of an oozy consistency. The slow, curving movements, caressingly paced, are vaguely erotic. For the unnecessary second phase of this Atlantean love ritual, the dancers return, on their feet, wriggling their shoulders and sensuously flapping their arms. In Depths would be a perfect piece for one of those resort bars I’ve only seen in spy movies that boast an aquarium in which boozing customers can observe nubile maidens disport underwater.
A hectic impetus is the key to She Holds Up Half the Sky, a fast, demanding dance for five women that certainly might be a tribute to women’s strength and versatility. It’s all sleek, abrupt dancing, marked by sharp attacks, abrupt poses, quick alert encounters, in a blizzard of entrances and exits. The dancers - Lisa Gillette, Shari Nyce, Wally Wolfgruber, Helaine Worrell and Susan Quinn Young - thrust their shoulders, snap around, kick their legs up to their noses, shoot their arms and legs out in spiky designs. Suber’s short, shining, silky dresses - with matching panties - fly up to expose the dancers’ torsos when they drop down quickly, and puff out into perfect cones when they spin. Though the piece is too long, John King’s piercing, percussive guitar strumming overlaid on itself, keeps its intensity from flagging.
Young’s new Luncheon on the Grass draws a certain inspiration from Manet’s painting Dejeuner sur l’herbe. No naked lady or formal gents, but there is a picnic of sorts going on and the composer-musician (Kirsten Vogelsang, on stage on a black pedestal) plays the cello. The dancers are dressed in white costumes, with a casual, period feeling; the women’s rolled-up shorts and bodices have an antique charm, and the men wear vests, no shirts and pale-gray striped pants. The movement is often slow and luxurious, but a sense of wry amusement and idle pleasure underlie it. Three dancers - Frey Faust, Young and luminous, appealing Wally Wolfgruber - are seated on the floor, Susan Quinn Young balanced behind them (at the end, the piece resolves into much the same picture). Faust helps Wolfgruber vault over his head; then she soars in Young’s arms, and goes over Faust once more.
There’s a kind of smoldering languor in the slow vaults characteristic of the piece The cooperative women are passed about. In this atmosphere, it’s as if the dancers were slightly flushed with wine or lazy, amorous inclinations. Faust is up on Young’s back. The men toast, roll and vault over each other Everyone sits around, rolls, laughs with giddy restraint, mimicking long instrumental laughter in the music. Faust and Susan Quinn Young have a sinuous extended duet in which neither dominates. She springs to fit herself nicely on his hip; he undulates, balancing on one leg as she lies on the floor beneath him; he pumps her body up and down, swings her with her legs wrapped around his waist. Sensuously, they hook into each other in curving, glancing shapes. When they break up, she playfully grabs at his hands as he rolls off. Young whirls Wolfgruber, holding the arc of her scything body on one arm. There’s a whimsical, beautifully tuned duet for the men, in which they deftly vault and lift over each other. Tricky, acrobatic, inventive, it has an oddly knowing, secretive quality that’s quite different from the slightly more conventional tone of the man-woman duets. Behind them, the women thoughtfully reach out their legs and fit their bodies into each other.
Throughout the program the dancing was excellent. Lisa Gillette, Wolfgruber, Faust, Young, and Quinn Young were particularly vivid, but Helaine Worrell, Shari Nyce , Wesley Robinson and Calvin Jackson were nice too.
At the Kitchen (August 25 to 29).
Men &#@$%*!!
May 5
Diana McWilliams chopping into a stone-hard log of what looked like red oak, spinning chips all over the Kitchen, had a direct force that nothing else in Cydney Wilkes’s Towers came close to. Framed by the fierce woodcutting and two introspective solos by Wilkes, Towers concerned three women (Floria Tosca, Scheherezade and Anne Boleyn, danced by Felice Wolfzahn, Rosa Rodriguez and KJ Holmes) and their oppressive relationships with men (all played by Richard A. Epstein).
The three women, wearing black, establish a kind of communality in a trio of smoothing arm gestures, slow, rocking shifts of weight, sudden half-turns. Then Epstein establishes his character in a stiff, aggressive prowling solo - periodically punching his fists downward and driving his foot into the floor, striking out with blunt, warding-off gestures. The women have been facing away; now they strip down to white outfits and help Wolfzahn into a mauve top with white trim across her breasts, She’s joined by Epstein, in wide white cuffs and a ribbon binding his hair. Genteel but overpowering, and casually cruel, he escorts her, then grabs the back of her hair. She wriggles out. He gets an armhold around her neck, teases her, twists her from side to side. She pushes him away; he hurls her around. Then she tries a mollifying tactic: she takes his hand, sits in his lap. Later, with a knife obtained from the woodcutter, she coolly stabs him. But as she rolls his body over, he reaches up and stabs her too. The three women mingle, fling each other around, gently vault over each other and roll. Together, they’re naturally happy, helpful to each other; with the man, they can find no meeting ground. His presence divides them, and in a way, contaminates their small community.
Dressing up for each duet is a modest ritual in which the women prepare each other for the sacrifice. Epstein and Rodriguez both wear mauve turbans and sashes. She’s on her knees near him, rolls, reclines seductively. Not quite the rat he played in the first section, he’s still clearly master. He pushes her head forward, pulls it up. He enfolds her, leads her. While he “sleeps,” she dances for herself. And later, when he reaches for her, she pushes him away, and again, more strongly, though he gradually overwhelms her by his insistence.
It’s always hard for me to fully imagine the predicament of women who cannot (or will not) walk out of a bad situation, though the historical aspect of Towers makes that impossibility easier to grasp. But because there’s no apparent feeling other than possessiveness, submissiveness, anger in the male-female relationships, their evil seems too unmitigated, too much of a set-up. Also, since the impulsion within the piece’s sequences always seem to come from Wilkes’s schematic determination of the situation, not from any immediate action, the dancing seems somehow secondhand, substitute, merely illustrative. Holmes is in a gold bodice, Epstein in some kind of fur shoulder piece. Much less submissive than either of the other women, she paces like a caged animal; he glares. He chases her, jumps into her arms, onto her back, in the beginning of a rough, extended Contact duet. She jumps over his shoulders, rams him. They shove each other down. She stumbles backward over his fallen body; when he offers his hand to help her up, she uses his own force to tumble him into another fall. Then she’s left alone, playing chess against herself. He joins her for a moment, taking black, and exits. The woodcutter carries Holmes away in her arms. Perhaps it’s a rescue, but maybe she’s going to whack Holmes’s head off.
Nelson Zayas and Linda Mancini make a thoroughly unlikely but terribly witty duo in Zayas’s One Man’s Drink. They slump on neighboring chairs in the middle of a long row (like in the movies), apparently unaware of or indifferent to each other. She yawns, then wiggles her foot. He eyes it. She stops. Then very pointedly she starts again, moving her foot sharply every which way in a contained but rococo provocation. He grabs for the foot, but, oops! it’s not there. The episode is expertly timed, and very funny. And it sets the style for subsequent incidents - a cheeky, patient, teasing quality that suddenly takes an outrageous turn, misfires, explodes.
Deadpan, he pushes toward her, and she slides away to avoid him, and they slide at an accelerating rate from seat to seat, and jumping from up to down and down to up till she mistakenly plunks herself in his lap. Beside each other again, he places his hand on her knee; she removes it, repeating the action, until, at a frenzied speed, their arms and legs whip them into a clinch that seems to leave them momentarily dumbfounded. Several spotlights come up, and coolly Zayas tries some of them out - bathing in their pleasant glare, preparing himself, mouthing words, speaking soundlessly into the wings. He gets more and more excited and flamboyantly argumentative. From her seat, Mancini tries to get his attention, again with soundless speech, then approaches him and begins to follow the gesticulations of his hands with her head, eloquently nodding and bobbing, with an intriguing foolishness a lot like the earlier foot business.
Zayas and Mancini are a brilliant mismatch: he’s skinny, a string bean; she’s juicy, with meat on her, and can move as if she’s got no bones. He looks forlorn, like Buster Keaton at his most misunderstood. She has a quality of total innocence combined with the practical savvy of a gum-chewing waitress or secretary from a ‘40s B movie. She can fling herself, fall, roll, pop up with no warning, no sense of premeditation. Magical in his awkwardness, he can get his head and limbs so lopsidedly angled that it seems incredible that he doesn’t fall over. There’s sometimes a mechanical quality in the way parts of his body seem to go their own independent ways, as if each has its own mini-brain and there’s no consultation with the mainframe. He has a repertoire, too of delicate, otherworldly gestures, like hypnotic finger movements that seem as sensitive as the adjustments of an insect’s antennae.
For the closing number, leave it to Zayas to have unearthed an old-timey sounding song, “One More Kiss Dear,” written for and dropped from Blade Runner, and sing it - wearing a blue tuxedo jacket over his undershirt, accompanied by Dan Froot (in penciled-on mustache) on sax - in a dreamy, near-falsetto reminiscent of the Ink Spots. A nostalgic whiff of sophistication redolent of those dear dead days.
At the Kitchen (April 9 to 12).
Diana McWilliams chopping into a stone-hard log of what looked like red oak, spinning chips all over the Kitchen, had a direct force that nothing else in Cydney Wilkes’s Towers came close to. Framed by the fierce woodcutting and two introspective solos by Wilkes, Towers concerned three women (Floria Tosca, Scheherezade and Anne Boleyn, danced by Felice Wolfzahn, Rosa Rodriguez and KJ Holmes) and their oppressive relationships with men (all played by Richard A. Epstein).
The three women, wearing black, establish a kind of communality in a trio of smoothing arm gestures, slow, rocking shifts of weight, sudden half-turns. Then Epstein establishes his character in a stiff, aggressive prowling solo - periodically punching his fists downward and driving his foot into the floor, striking out with blunt, warding-off gestures. The women have been facing away; now they strip down to white outfits and help Wolfzahn into a mauve top with white trim across her breasts, She’s joined by Epstein, in wide white cuffs and a ribbon binding his hair. Genteel but overpowering, and casually cruel, he escorts her, then grabs the back of her hair. She wriggles out. He gets an armhold around her neck, teases her, twists her from side to side. She pushes him away; he hurls her around. Then she tries a mollifying tactic: she takes his hand, sits in his lap. Later, with a knife obtained from the woodcutter, she coolly stabs him. But as she rolls his body over, he reaches up and stabs her too. The three women mingle, fling each other around, gently vault over each other and roll. Together, they’re naturally happy, helpful to each other; with the man, they can find no meeting ground. His presence divides them, and in a way, contaminates their small community.
Dressing up for each duet is a modest ritual in which the women prepare each other for the sacrifice. Epstein and Rodriguez both wear mauve turbans and sashes. She’s on her knees near him, rolls, reclines seductively. Not quite the rat he played in the first section, he’s still clearly master. He pushes her head forward, pulls it up. He enfolds her, leads her. While he “sleeps,” she dances for herself. And later, when he reaches for her, she pushes him away, and again, more strongly, though he gradually overwhelms her by his insistence.
It’s always hard for me to fully imagine the predicament of women who cannot (or will not) walk out of a bad situation, though the historical aspect of Towers makes that impossibility easier to grasp. But because there’s no apparent feeling other than possessiveness, submissiveness, anger in the male-female relationships, their evil seems too unmitigated, too much of a set-up. Also, since the impulsion within the piece’s sequences always seem to come from Wilkes’s schematic determination of the situation, not from any immediate action, the dancing seems somehow secondhand, substitute, merely illustrative. Holmes is in a gold bodice, Epstein in some kind of fur shoulder piece. Much less submissive than either of the other women, she paces like a caged animal; he glares. He chases her, jumps into her arms, onto her back, in the beginning of a rough, extended Contact duet. She jumps over his shoulders, rams him. They shove each other down. She stumbles backward over his fallen body; when he offers his hand to help her up, she uses his own force to tumble him into another fall. Then she’s left alone, playing chess against herself. He joins her for a moment, taking black, and exits. The woodcutter carries Holmes away in her arms. Perhaps it’s a rescue, but maybe she’s going to whack Holmes’s head off.
Nelson Zayas and Linda Mancini make a thoroughly unlikely but terribly witty duo in Zayas’s One Man’s Drink. They slump on neighboring chairs in the middle of a long row (like in the movies), apparently unaware of or indifferent to each other. She yawns, then wiggles her foot. He eyes it. She stops. Then very pointedly she starts again, moving her foot sharply every which way in a contained but rococo provocation. He grabs for the foot, but, oops! it’s not there. The episode is expertly timed, and very funny. And it sets the style for subsequent incidents - a cheeky, patient, teasing quality that suddenly takes an outrageous turn, misfires, explodes.
Deadpan, he pushes toward her, and she slides away to avoid him, and they slide at an accelerating rate from seat to seat, and jumping from up to down and down to up till she mistakenly plunks herself in his lap. Beside each other again, he places his hand on her knee; she removes it, repeating the action, until, at a frenzied speed, their arms and legs whip them into a clinch that seems to leave them momentarily dumbfounded. Several spotlights come up, and coolly Zayas tries some of them out - bathing in their pleasant glare, preparing himself, mouthing words, speaking soundlessly into the wings. He gets more and more excited and flamboyantly argumentative. From her seat, Mancini tries to get his attention, again with soundless speech, then approaches him and begins to follow the gesticulations of his hands with her head, eloquently nodding and bobbing, with an intriguing foolishness a lot like the earlier foot business.
Zayas and Mancini are a brilliant mismatch: he’s skinny, a string bean; she’s juicy, with meat on her, and can move as if she’s got no bones. He looks forlorn, like Buster Keaton at his most misunderstood. She has a quality of total innocence combined with the practical savvy of a gum-chewing waitress or secretary from a ‘40s B movie. She can fling herself, fall, roll, pop up with no warning, no sense of premeditation. Magical in his awkwardness, he can get his head and limbs so lopsidedly angled that it seems incredible that he doesn’t fall over. There’s sometimes a mechanical quality in the way parts of his body seem to go their own independent ways, as if each has its own mini-brain and there’s no consultation with the mainframe. He has a repertoire, too of delicate, otherworldly gestures, like hypnotic finger movements that seem as sensitive as the adjustments of an insect’s antennae.
For the closing number, leave it to Zayas to have unearthed an old-timey sounding song, “One More Kiss Dear,” written for and dropped from Blade Runner, and sing it - wearing a blue tuxedo jacket over his undershirt, accompanied by Dan Froot (in penciled-on mustache) on sax - in a dreamy, near-falsetto reminiscent of the Ink Spots. A nostalgic whiff of sophistication redolent of those dear dead days.
At the Kitchen (April 9 to 12).
Fresh Eyes
June 2
For the first time in a long while, or maybe ever, Susan Rethorst presented a new work to a score - a text by herself and Ann Carlson (performed by Carlson the night I saw it) and even some music. It made a substantial difference to Rethorst’s work - not that What She Knew was any less oblique and mysterious than usual. Carlson’s natural, bright delivery, her direct address, her “descriptions” of what’s happening or might be happening onstage, let the audience know immediately that it was okay to find humor in the piece. I’m always slow to realize this because Rehorst (and her performers) are always so grave-faced. (Uh oh, watch out, it’s Art.) The text provided a friendly perspective which seemed to include Carlson’s own wishes and thoughts and preferences, and as intermediary, Carlson’s fresh way of recounting her enthusiasm and occasional amazement made the piece public property in a delightful way.
Rethorst’s dances are often full of humor, but it’s wry and oddly personal in the way it strikes. One or two people laugh quietly, here and there. Rarely are there the kind of visual or kinetic jokes that everybody gets - though What She Knew has some of those too, particularly a clever routine for Rethorst, Nelson Zayas, and a couple of feather dusters. The movement is delivered carefully but without insistence by Susan Braham, Vicky Shick, Zayas, Rethorst and Carlson, too. Unstretched and gentle, divertingly clumsy, curiously descriptive of unknown events and inclinations, it seems lightly held, though not lightly valued. Without being at all tentative or uncertain, the dancers sometimes seem to be dreaming movements and gestures that dart and glide, wiggle and wander in the direction of things larger and more specific.
Dancing closely, Braham and Rethorst mesh, comment and disagree compatibly. “Oh, I see...” says Carlson, “they were twins... The reflection was just imperfect enough to make them look identical.” Typical of the way the text works, the remarks refocus attention on how Braham and Rethorst are subtly similar and different at that moment. It makes us pay attention to something that, apparently self-evident, we may be taking for granted, and have, perhaps, stopped noticing. And her attitude reminds us to be alive to the nascent questions stirring in our minds.
Sometimes the text is fanciful in its observations, other times the speaker’s responses are immediate, concrete in their interpretations. There’s a sense of excitement and novelty that contrasts intriguingly with the self-absorption and circumspect assurance of the dancing. “They made their arms important,” says Carlson. “Then her leg got jealous...took a stand, took a leap.” That’s one very direct way of reading the steps. “I wish the next part would start like this!” she exclaims, and waves a glittering wand with a flourish. That’s not what happens. Or maybe she’ll try to embrace the whole shape of the moment in explaining what we’re seeing: “You know how the threads get caught in the sewing machine and they all get caught and you just have to cut them off? It’s like that!”
At the Kitchen (May 14 to 17).
James Byrne’s program at Dance Theater Workshop - half a dozen dance-video collaborations - was a fine showing. In his droll, dizzying Inside Eyes (choreographed by Victoria Marks), Byrne gets inside the dance, swooping along with the arms and legs, getting his lens blocked by hands that zoom straight at it. He has an affinity for natural forms and primeval images, and enjoys juxtaposing and confusing images of the large and small.
In Meditations on the Northern Shore (with composer Bradley Sowash), it’s easy to mistake a crooked finger for the junction of naked arm and shoulder. Small, naturally eroded basins of sloshing water are intercut with features of a craggy shore. The colored stones that water washes over may be cobbles or tiny pebbles - there’s no knowing. In the opening of Fields (choreographed by Susan Hadley), toes dig into the earth like some convulsive organism. In this body, this place, Unnamed, Wendy Morris’s hooked fingers walking through grass blades can be mistaken for a crab. She convulses in a vast puddle of mud, is covered with crusted dirt that identifies her face in close up with the desolate, world’s-end landscape she inhabits.
In Lament, with Eiko and Koma, shot in a greenish black-and-white, Byrne keeps the performers pristine, sculptural and remote. His camera shifts us from the near to the long view with slow overlays, but the doubling of the figures creates complicated images, rife with illusions, that are several steps from the purity of Eiko and Koma’s original visions. Fields, a heavy but stirring ritual performed by suit-clad men and women in barren furrows, had a primitive and alien beauty - as if the bodysnatchers were trying to ascertain the meaning of a communal human activity through careful reenactment - but the setting itself seems too literal. In brief sections transplanted to an urban concrete desert, Fields seems to have much more resonance.
In his spectacular Reel 5 Take 2: Set and Reset (by Trisha Brown), made in one long take, Byrne’s camera eye chooses a single, very personal track through Brown’s rampant jungle of supple movement, often cutting away huge chunks of the dance. The space sometimes rocks like the deck of a ship and the dancers may be gulped offstage as it tilts. Familiar spectacular moments barely graze the screen: Stephen Petronio whips Brown right out of view in a horizontal flight we never see. Or, running forward, Petronio is snatched sideways out of the frame by a pair of unidentified arms. Byrne’s choices stress the bumpy meetings, the confluences of similar movement, a sense of communal fun and challenge that is downplayed in live performances. Reel 5 Take 2 is a ruthlessly subjective, intensely savored experience. But it is pure Set and Reset, too.
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 11 and 18).
For the first time in a long while, or maybe ever, Susan Rethorst presented a new work to a score - a text by herself and Ann Carlson (performed by Carlson the night I saw it) and even some music. It made a substantial difference to Rethorst’s work - not that What She Knew was any less oblique and mysterious than usual. Carlson’s natural, bright delivery, her direct address, her “descriptions” of what’s happening or might be happening onstage, let the audience know immediately that it was okay to find humor in the piece. I’m always slow to realize this because Rehorst (and her performers) are always so grave-faced. (Uh oh, watch out, it’s Art.) The text provided a friendly perspective which seemed to include Carlson’s own wishes and thoughts and preferences, and as intermediary, Carlson’s fresh way of recounting her enthusiasm and occasional amazement made the piece public property in a delightful way.
Rethorst’s dances are often full of humor, but it’s wry and oddly personal in the way it strikes. One or two people laugh quietly, here and there. Rarely are there the kind of visual or kinetic jokes that everybody gets - though What She Knew has some of those too, particularly a clever routine for Rethorst, Nelson Zayas, and a couple of feather dusters. The movement is delivered carefully but without insistence by Susan Braham, Vicky Shick, Zayas, Rethorst and Carlson, too. Unstretched and gentle, divertingly clumsy, curiously descriptive of unknown events and inclinations, it seems lightly held, though not lightly valued. Without being at all tentative or uncertain, the dancers sometimes seem to be dreaming movements and gestures that dart and glide, wiggle and wander in the direction of things larger and more specific.
Dancing closely, Braham and Rethorst mesh, comment and disagree compatibly. “Oh, I see...” says Carlson, “they were twins... The reflection was just imperfect enough to make them look identical.” Typical of the way the text works, the remarks refocus attention on how Braham and Rethorst are subtly similar and different at that moment. It makes us pay attention to something that, apparently self-evident, we may be taking for granted, and have, perhaps, stopped noticing. And her attitude reminds us to be alive to the nascent questions stirring in our minds.
Sometimes the text is fanciful in its observations, other times the speaker’s responses are immediate, concrete in their interpretations. There’s a sense of excitement and novelty that contrasts intriguingly with the self-absorption and circumspect assurance of the dancing. “They made their arms important,” says Carlson. “Then her leg got jealous...took a stand, took a leap.” That’s one very direct way of reading the steps. “I wish the next part would start like this!” she exclaims, and waves a glittering wand with a flourish. That’s not what happens. Or maybe she’ll try to embrace the whole shape of the moment in explaining what we’re seeing: “You know how the threads get caught in the sewing machine and they all get caught and you just have to cut them off? It’s like that!”
At the Kitchen (May 14 to 17).
James Byrne’s program at Dance Theater Workshop - half a dozen dance-video collaborations - was a fine showing. In his droll, dizzying Inside Eyes (choreographed by Victoria Marks), Byrne gets inside the dance, swooping along with the arms and legs, getting his lens blocked by hands that zoom straight at it. He has an affinity for natural forms and primeval images, and enjoys juxtaposing and confusing images of the large and small.
In Meditations on the Northern Shore (with composer Bradley Sowash), it’s easy to mistake a crooked finger for the junction of naked arm and shoulder. Small, naturally eroded basins of sloshing water are intercut with features of a craggy shore. The colored stones that water washes over may be cobbles or tiny pebbles - there’s no knowing. In the opening of Fields (choreographed by Susan Hadley), toes dig into the earth like some convulsive organism. In this body, this place, Unnamed, Wendy Morris’s hooked fingers walking through grass blades can be mistaken for a crab. She convulses in a vast puddle of mud, is covered with crusted dirt that identifies her face in close up with the desolate, world’s-end landscape she inhabits.
In Lament, with Eiko and Koma, shot in a greenish black-and-white, Byrne keeps the performers pristine, sculptural and remote. His camera shifts us from the near to the long view with slow overlays, but the doubling of the figures creates complicated images, rife with illusions, that are several steps from the purity of Eiko and Koma’s original visions. Fields, a heavy but stirring ritual performed by suit-clad men and women in barren furrows, had a primitive and alien beauty - as if the bodysnatchers were trying to ascertain the meaning of a communal human activity through careful reenactment - but the setting itself seems too literal. In brief sections transplanted to an urban concrete desert, Fields seems to have much more resonance.
In his spectacular Reel 5 Take 2: Set and Reset (by Trisha Brown), made in one long take, Byrne’s camera eye chooses a single, very personal track through Brown’s rampant jungle of supple movement, often cutting away huge chunks of the dance. The space sometimes rocks like the deck of a ship and the dancers may be gulped offstage as it tilts. Familiar spectacular moments barely graze the screen: Stephen Petronio whips Brown right out of view in a horizontal flight we never see. Or, running forward, Petronio is snatched sideways out of the frame by a pair of unidentified arms. Byrne’s choices stress the bumpy meetings, the confluences of similar movement, a sense of communal fun and challenge that is downplayed in live performances. Reel 5 Take 2 is a ruthlessly subjective, intensely savored experience. But it is pure Set and Reset, too.
At Dance Theater Workshop (May 11 and 18).