STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY

If you want to see a lot of Stephen Petroniop’s distinctive, slash-and-whip style, head to the Joyce Theater this weekend for his latest New York season (March 6-11) for a big gulp.  

The drawing card this season is a guest performance by Wendy Whelan.  In a three-minute solo “Ethersketch I,” from Petronio’s dark 2003 “Underland,” Whelan – whose day job is being a Bessie-Award-winning star of New York City Ballet – nimbly wends her way through Petronio’s complex extensions, balances and unlikely twists.  Ubiquitous Whelan seems comfortable in this alien style, finding the dynamic flashes while maintaining riveting composure.   She sparkles in a golden top and short shorts by Karen Erickson in the tantalizing, too-brief cameo. 

“City of Twist” (2002) with an instrumental score by Laurie Anderson is typical Petronio – a series of fraught solos, woven together with comings and goings in smaller groupings by the cast of seven, wearing skimpy, high-fashion, skin-baring togs by Tara Subkoff/ Imitation of Christ.  The dancers seem self-involved, detached from each other, passing with glancing contact on their individual trajectories.  

Petronio’s dancers are always wonderful to look at, flexing and stretching honed limbs in elaborate spirals around compact torsos.  Veteran Petronio muses Gino Grenek and Amanda Wells set the tone with Davalois Fearon, Barrington Hinds, Julian De Leon, and newer-comers (to me) Jaqlin Medlock, Nicholas Sciscione, Natalie Mackessy, Joshua Tuason, Emily Stone, Joshua Green reinforcing it with authority.

Photo: Julie Lemberger. Petronio Company in The Architecture of Loss

The world premiere “The Architecture of Loss” reveals a more compassionate side than we’re used to from Petronio, who revels in slash-and-whip movement.  A spare, melancholy, original score by Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurosson, featuring electronics, bass, aquaphone, banjo and vocals, with violist Nadia Sirota, and pianist Nico Muhly, provides an appropriately austere cushion for the emotionally rooted, restrained dancing.    

Dressed in Gudrun & Gudrun’s chocolate and off-white knitted tunics, washed by resident lighting designer Ken Tabachnick in warmth, and backed by a triptych projection by Ravi Rajan of cloud-like paintings by Rannva Kunoy, austere tableaus, melt and reform; people come an go, mutually consoling.  Two duets form the heart of the work.  In one, lanky Tuason patiently tames De Leon’s puppy-like restiveness.  The other features Wells, repeatedly melting into, stretching from, and climbing onto powerful, gentle Green, who handles her firmly, gently, like a loving protector.

Photo: Julie Lemberger. Joshua Green, Amanda Wells in The Architecture of Loss

Petronio opens the program in a zebra-striped John Bartlett suit, thanking to the Joyce, his performing alma mater for 20 years, and paying homage to whom he calls the two “pillars” of his artistic influence, claiming facetiously to be their “bastard child” – Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton, both of them founding members of the Judson Dance Group.  Petronio was the first male dancer in Brown’s then all-woman troupe, and Paxton is credited with “inventing” contact improvisation.  Quite a lineage!

Photo by Julie Lemberger: Petronio and Sciscione in Intravenous Lecture

Then he performs an un-notated, improvisational piece, given to him by Paxton, “Intravenous Lecture” (1970/2012), which with Petronio’s recounting its genesis as a protest against Paxton’s being forbidden to show nudity in a dance for NYU.  While Petronio talks, he gets injected with saline IV by a registered nurse.  Then, he undertakes gay equality rant in the form of an overly footnoted verbal and physical anecdote, about getting busted in London in the ‘70s – where he and “noted choreographer” X were having a substance-fueled love affair – for wearing a provocative T-shirt (which just happened to be a $400 Vivian Westwood design) in public. 

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

CRYSTAL PITE/KIDD PIVOT

Crystal Pite, whose company, Kidd Pivot, operates from Vancouver and Berlin, is already an international name in dance, but her troupe just made its New York debut February 23-24 – two nights only, alas – at BAC.  Pite’s evening, titled The You Show, consists of four duets – perhaps one too many – the last of which includes her full nine dancer company.  

Fine dance makers are not so rare, but the true choreographic gene is given to few, and Pite seems so blessed.  With her dancers, she creates intense movement that paints highly kinetic pictures, which are at once specific and abstract.  The details of the movement are less important than the emotions it taps.  The work is rife with “wow” moments, when the movement embodies the emotion with such consonance you can’t imagine another choice. 

“A Picture of You Falling” (2008) begins with a disembodied voice speaking, as a rolling spotlight traverses the stage.  In the ensuing solo for the woman (Anne Plamondon), she sometimes illustrates the words with her gestures but mostly physical impulses jolt her body through space, lunging, lurching, spinning, falling.  Her partner (Peter Chu) lurks in the shadows like a ghost.  Robert Sondergaard’s active lighting design chases the dancers with spotlights or goes black or flashes bolts of lightning, adding to the dramatic tension.

In Chu’s solo, it is hard to tell whether his convulsive, percussive, twitching motion is causing or caused by Owen Belton’s sound score of clicking locks, meshing gears, footsteps, and slams.  When the partners get together, they can’t seem to find a comfortable connection with each other – falling in or out of love, or into oblivion. 

“The Other You” demonstrates most clearly Pite’s brilliance at translating intellectual concept into vivid movement. Eric Beauchesne represents an individual being manipulated by conscious and unconscious motivations.  After manipulating his own body like a puppeteer with a remote control, he confronts his own image (Jiri Pokorny) in an imaginary mirror.  The men, who look remarkably alike in black coats and white shirts by costumer Linda Chow, wrestle to prevail, one over the other.  Finally, Beauchesne wins the battle, banishes his adversary with a push toward Pokorny’s foot that energizes the air between them and accomplishes its goal without any physical contact.

In “Das Glashaus,” Yannick Matthon and Cindy Salgado are survivors of some roiling disaster – an earthquake, hurricane, sunami.  Bursts of strobe light and sounds of shattering glass frame their desperate attempts at escape from whatever the horror is surrounding them.  Sometimes it’s hard to see them in the shadowy darkness, but their angst is clearly overwhelming. 

l-r: Spivey, Garcia in A Picture of You Flying

And the final work, “A Picture of You Flying,” contains some transcendent, real-life version of Computer Generated Imagery, where three women (Ariel Freedman, Plamondon, and Salgado) become the exoskeleton of Jermaine Maurice Spivey – who plays a wannabe superhero – and four men (Beauchesne, Chu, Matthon, and Pokorny) do the same for Sandra Marin Garcia, his distaff antagonist.  Funny as Spivey’s portrayal is, his opening monolog needs trimming.  And you just can’t top the battle of “transformers” for inventiveness and wit, so putting the lovers through their unrequited romance after the battle is redundant, not to mention bizarrely anti-climactic.  Still, as Cedar Lake Company has already discovered, Pite is a choreographer well worth watching.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM 2

The Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble (a.k.a., DTH2) made its New York debut at the Joyce Theater (February 7, 9, and 10), performing an eclectic program that ranged from neoclassical to contemporary.  The school has continued during the “hiatus” of the main company, offering high quality ballet training to a diverse range of students.  And  DTH alumnus Keith Saunders directs the Ensemble, which is a proud representation of the training at the school. 

DTH, now under the direction of Virginia Johnson – protégé and muse of founder Arthur Mitchell, the company is getting its financial (and artistic) affairs in order and gearing up to return.  Right after intermission, in fact, “En Avant,” a documentary by Gabrielle Lamb about the school and company served as tribute and preview of DTH’s imminent reawakening. 

The opening ballet, “Six Piano Pieces (Harlem Style)” (2011) by David Fernandez, serves to introduce half of the company’s sixteen dancers, clad in Vernon Ross’s mix-and-match “business casual” clothing.  It’s a formulaic trifle for four couples, set to an eponymous piano score by Moritz Moszkowski, energetically played, live, by Melody Fader.  Despite its uninspired choreography, it does show off the dancers’ clear, unmannered style.  DaVon Doane’s springy jumps with soundless landings, Flavia Garcia’s rock-solid turns and steady balance, and Ingrid Silva’s sparkling personality stand out.  

In Christopher Huggins’s “In the Mirror of her Mind,” Alexandra Jacob Wilson as the protagonist shows disarming dramatic flair and breathtaking physical fearlessness.  Three male foils (Frederick Davis, Jehbreal Jackson, and David Kim), perhaps figures in her dream, toss her around like a rag doll in Huggins’s inventive roughhousing lifts.  Nonetheless, her courageous serenity makes us admire and celebrate her.  Natasha Guruleva’s earth-toned costumes give each dancer individual character and enhance the tone of grounded elegance.

Balanchine’s 1955 “Glinka Pas de Trois” represented the company’s nod to the classic style.  The dance is seldom performed, which is a shame, because its lightning fast allegro variations with intricate direction changes constantly surprise.  Ashley Murphy, Stephanie Williams, and Samuel Wilson dance it with authority and brio in sparkling crimson tutus by Natasha Guruleva; only the man’s black tights and top oddly lacks the same éclat, but Wilson’s steady partnering and unforced virtuosity are praiseworthy.

Donald Byrd always demands that his dancers go balls-to-the-wall in their dynamic attack.  Although his new “Contested Space” may be at least a third too long, it is a stunner.  More than a mere battle of the sexes, the ballet is a complex contest between genders and also individuals, striving for room to breathe.  The physical aggressiveness that can so easily reads as hostility, when treated by other contemporary ballet sensibilities, becomes more like a heated intellectual debate made grippingly physical in the resilient bodies of this affable young cast. 

Byrd’s unique, refreshingly un-generic movement style often derives from having dancers solve physical tasks, which the choreographer then pushes to the limit of kinetic commitment.  Thus, Byrd makes the DTH2 dancers look like seasoned pros, and the dancers perform with clear, consistent focus but without succumbing to the viciousness that Amon Tobin’s relentlessly abrasive score inflicts on it.  

At moments in the other pieces, the dancers’ transitions and eloquence of line are not always consistent, but Byrd makes them move with total commitment and luscious recklessness.  They hold back nothing.  This is the kind of work that DTH needs to be doing more of.   Peter D. Leonard’s lighting throughout is simple and effective.  If this is a taste of what’s to come from DTH, we can’t wait to see more.

(Unfortunately, the company was not able to supply photos of small enough resolution to reproduce)

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

STREB ACTION VIRTUALLY KISSES THE ARMORY CEILING

After seeing one of Elizabeth Streb’s extreme action performances, people still ask, “But is it dance?”  The second in a series of major dance performances at the Park Avenue Armory (December 14-22), “Kiss the Sky,” again poses the question.  Well, in my book, dance is motion, structured.  If we must, let’s grant that it’s human motion – which, for some, it need not be.  Anyway, just because Streb has reinvented the way bodies can move – she uses them as missiles – doesn’t make her work “not dance.”   

The vast drill hall is filled with vertical and horizontal trusses with their stabilizing cables anchored to massive, 6-foot cubes of concrete.  Jumbo projection screens above banks of bleachers, three on either side, flash a rotating “STREB” like Times Square billboards and later real-time and prerecorded details of the action they’re performing, along with Streb’s notations of the sections in her notebook.  On big mats that cover the ground, dancers in red, superhero body tights practice headstands and flop over on the floor like fish out of water.  

The show is organized into eleven scenes.  DJ/MC Zaire Baptiste prowls the floor in a suit, studded with tiny light bulbs – I want that suit!  As he announces each of the dancers’ names, they zoom down a zip line from towers at opposite ends of the space, sisty feet up, and slams, face first, into a thick tumbling mat that’s hanging about ten feet off the ground at the opposite end.

Then for the next hour, these intrepid athletes put them through a series of punishing physical actions that seem guaranteed to induce vertigo, concussion, and organ damage. In “Swing,” they do just that, hanging from two suspended hula-hoops, two, three, and four at a time, bouncing off a mini-trampoline to catch the hoop in mid-swing, then dropping to the mat in a belly-flop.  

In “Popaction,” they bounce around in a unison phrase on the floor; they flip their lying bodies over repeatedly in horizontal pirouettes, shoot their feet through their hands going  from prone to supine, toppling over forwards and backwards without bending like dominoes.  “Instant Flight” has teams of four, pull cables to yank a pair of harnessed dancers into the air by the smalls of their backs or their bellies.  

“Ascension” has nine of the dancers endlessly climbing a nineteen-foot ladder that their weight causes to rotate constantly like a slow-motion propeller, sending them upside down as soon as they’ve reached the top and counterbalancing each other on a vertical, spinning ladder.  Choose your metaphor. 

In “Human Fountain,” thirteen daredevils (the nine, so-called “action engineers” of the company plus four additional performers) sail through the air from three levels of platforms, stacked nearly three stories high, in swan dives, half rolls, and front flips; they crash land on the mats below.  Between bouts of diving, they stand still or pace easily on the platforms to “cool down.”  The pauses are not only a welcome respite for the audience from the vehemence, but probably also a necessary break for the dancers’ organs to recover from the bashing they’re subjecting themselves to. 

In “Wave,” they tumble, splash, and skid on their bellies across a shallow pool, smack in the center of the space.  And “Kiss the Water” is bungee diving action, where two guys repeatedly drop downward towards the water and rebound to the scaffolding above, before their cohorts slosh into the pool and shoot them horizontally and diagonally in the direction of the audience, like Superman in flight. 

Call Streb Action dance or what you will, it provokes re-examination of your precepts about dancing – and more.  It’s as glitzy as a circus with all the accoutrements – music and sound design by David Van Tieghem with Brandon Wolcott, roving spotlights (lighting design by Robert Wierzel), events staged double to play to both sides of the stadium seats at once, sleek costumes (by Andrea Lauer), and jumbo TV screens to capture what you can’t or don’t see.  

It is not meant to look slick and graceful, no Cirque du Soleil.  Seeing and vicariously experiencing the massive effort is part of the point.  But the emotional tension that all the energy, power, and courage of the performers creates is pretty profound.  See for yourself till December 22.

Photos by Stephanie Berger  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

KYLE ABRAHAM – “LIVE!: THE REALEST MC”

Currently, there seems to be an upsurge in gender identity as choreographic subject matter.  Tere O’Connor’s “Cover Boy” was conceived around issues of closeted gayness.  Also performing the same weekend (December 8-10), Kyle Abraham’s “Live!: The Realest MC” is inspired by the story of Pinocchio, who wanted to be a “real boy” and an earlier solo “Inventing Pooky Jenkins.”  

Abraham’s work is personal and autobiographical but not self-indulgent.  Recent suicides by involuntarily “outed” young men, like Tyler Clementi in New Jersey last year, reminded Abraham of an unhappy adolescence, when he feared that because his voice didn’t sound like the other male students around him, he would be “found out.”  

“I prayed that I could go unnoticed,” he states.

Presented at the Kitchen in West Chelsea, “Realest MC” alternates between highly crafted, hip-hop-inflected passages for the troupe’s two men and four women in various groupings and Abraham solo.  The half a dozen cast members understand Abraham’s style and expressive intentions to a tee.  They embody the quick-twitch hip-hop and ballet/postmodern scaffolding, on which the choreographer hangs his vision.  

The rear curtain of the stage is made up of vertical strips, like king-sized vertical window blinds.   A film by Brooklyn-based Carrie Schneider intermittently counterpoints the live dancing – boys, running through ghetto streets, some, edited into repeating loops.  The projection occupies a horizontal rectangle at the lower right of the rear wall, so it doesn’t overwhelm the live performers.  

Included in the film is a hilarious segment that shows an earnest but clueless white woman teaching a hip-hop class and trying to pass herself off as authentic.  Abraham, too, takes an onstage lesson from a disembodied voice on how to do a hip roll. 

Besides Abraham, the clearest physical reflection of his stylistic vision is a show-stealing solo by Chalvar Monteiro.  He whips through intricately technical combinations – his pirouettes stop in a balance, then drop into a waacker’s squatting walk with voguing arms, and a sassy, booty-swinging stroll.  Switching seamlessly and dazzlingly between vernacular extremes is of the essence of Abraham’s sensibility.  

Monteiro also exhibits his girlie persona in a funny duo with hyper-macho Maleek Malaki Washington, as they illustrate recorded instructions being “real” hip-hop.  Interpreting the same instruction Monteiro shifts into one hip with his arms framing his waist, while Washington plants his feet and folds his arms defiantly across his chest.  

Dan Scully’s exciting lighting design amplifies the quick movement and extreme moods of the choreography, shaping the environment around the dancers with such immediate responsiveness that you get a sense of the quick-cut editing of a music video.  Scully’s light keeps the stage is as brilliantly alive as the dancing. 

In one solo, Abraham ambles to a microphone and in a deep, “butch” voice accosts us with an aggressive “Yo!  Howy’all doin’?” greeting.  Gradually, his gravelly, macho inflection dissolves into a sobbing little boy, crying over and over, “they held me down,” describing the bullying he suffered as a boy.  Then, as he backs away from the mike, his voice drops back to the lower range, and it begins to sound like, “They help’d me now!”

Photos by Paula Court

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

COVER BOY - TERE O’CONNOR DANCE AT 25

Have you ever watched children, watching a movie?  You can see traces of every imaginable emotion flicker across their faces.  That’s kind of what happens with Tere O’Connor’s dancers’ whole bodies in his new opus, “Cover Boy,” seen on Thursday, December 8, at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, the opening of its run, December 8-11, 13, and 15.  Celebrating his company’s 25th anniversary, O’Connor is a choreographers’ choreographer, and the audience is dotted with notable dance makers and connoisseurs.

l-r: Niall Jones, Michael Ingle, Paul Monaghan, Matthew Rogers

The hour-long piece features four hauntingly beautiful young men: tall, dark, muscular Michael Ingle; wiry, African-American Niall Jones; fair, fine-boned Paul Monaghan; and lithe, red-headed Matthew Rogers, all dancing in a way that is touchingly devoid of the narcissism that is by its nature implicit in most dancing – exhibiting physical prowess and looking cool doing it.  

To a knowing eye it’s clear these four are technically adept, but O’Connor’s process intentionally gets them to move as if they’re not dancing but just behaving; they become vessels for the myriad emotions and states of being that surge through them.  The piece, according to O’Connor, “embraces the gifts of marginalization” and celebrates the joys, triumphs, and hardships of what he calls “otherness.”

l-r: Niall Jones, Paul Monaghan, Matthew Rogers

A wing-like canopy, designed by Swiss/USA architectural firm Aptum Architecture (Roger Hubell and Julie Larsen), hovers above the dance floor, at once protective and threatening.  The structure, made of cardboard to look like concrete, consists of series of trapezoidal panels, each pierced with a rectangular hole, which allows Michael O’Connor’s imaginative light design to cast colorful shadows alternately on the floor and on the vaulted ceiling of the church.  

A sparse but rich musical score by James Baker, a long-time collaborator of O’Connor’s, highlights momentous beginnings with a delicately pop-inspired soundscape, augmented, auspiciously and sparingly, with vocal chord clusters by the dancers that echo throughout the resonant space.  

The dancers shuffle towards us from the rear, then back up into four corners, muttering and making small hand gestures at chest height.  They hurl themselves to the ground, laughing, and rise to repeat it but this time screaming instead: same motion, opposite emotion.  

l-r: Matthew Rogers, Niall Jones

Rogers cuddles Jones in his lap, as the other two watch them.  While Rogers and Jones lovingly lick his neck, Ingle chats nonchalantly with Monaghan.  They all stride the fashion runway, becoming more effeminate with each pass.  They kiss on the mouth. Rogers strokes the sweat off Jones’s hand and places it around his own neck, encapsulating at once desire and denial.  

Although Monaghan looks like a pre-Raphaelite cherub, it’s Rogers who becomes the apparent center of gravity.  He does an extended solo that appears to reach sexual climax then a series of poses on the ground; you can imagine the post-coital cigarette.  He does a beautifully modulated series of mutual lifts in a duet with Ingle.  His three mates let their hands rove over Rogers’s passive body.  Jones croons a nonsense ballad that whispers, “Watch me.  Watch me.”

When the four return to their corners and flap their arms and a leg like angels in flight, they virtually transcend terrestrial bonds; the lights dim to a dusky blue, and when they restore, the men meet in a pose with uplifted hands joined.  They reconsider, drop the pose, and then restore it, reconciled, as the lights go out.

Photos by Tere O’Connor 

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

MARTHA CLARKE’S ANGEL REAPERS

The two best known aspects of Shaker life were their elegantly simple furniture and the fact that they were celibate.  The latter being the primary reason for their extinction.  “Angel Reapers,” playing at the Joyce Theater, November 29-Deceber 10, is a rendering of playwright Alfred Uhry’s Shaker tale, choreographed and directed by Martha Clarke.

First off, who but Clarke could manage to introduce a healthy dose of full frontal nudity into a story about a clan who never had sex?   Secondly, one has to ask what was Uhry’s contribution, since the piece has little dialog and even less of a plot.  The program lists characters’ names, and some of the performers indicate their roles.  Brigit Huppuch as Mother Ann Lee leads the service as the Shaker Eldress.  And you might infer that Brother Moses, played by Whitney V. Hunter, the only black person in the cast, is a runaway slave.  But there’s no way to tell that Brother Jebez Stone (Patrick Corbin) is supposed to be a cabinetmaker or Peter Musante, as Brother Brother William Lee, is Huppuch’s brother.  

The austere opening of the piece is handsome with the five men and five women, sitting at worship, led by Huppuch.  But instead of giving us verbal descriptions of the dos and mostly don’ts of Shaker life, Clarke perhaps misses an opportunity here to identify her characters, if indeed she means for us to know them as individuals.  

Her hour-long still life schematically shows the dissolution of trust in the community, when married couple (Gabrielle Malone and Andrew Robinson) are tempted to break their vow of celibacy and a young couple (Isadora Wolfe and Luke Murphy) actually do give in to their carnal impulses in a special, centerstage glow, provided by Christopher Akerlund’s astute lighting. 

Movement was a pervasive force in Shaker life, being their primary means of suppressing sexual urges.  Clarke and her stellar cast have devised some intricate foot stamping rhythms and contrapuntal patterns that erupt at several moments along the way.  The piece would be strengthened by more such choreographic eruptions.  

A program note quotes a passage by early 19^th century writer William Rathburn that vividly describes the hissing, groaning, writhing, laughing, jumping, and drumming of Shaker religious services.  Less restraint would make Clarke’s elegant homage more gripping.  We never really get a sense of the messiness, the urgency, or the turmoil of the Shakers’ exorcism of the evil spirits that, according to Rathburn, “makes a perfect bedlam; this they call the worship of God.”

 Photos by Rob Strong

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

THE INFERNAL COMEDY

Written and directed by Martin Haselböck “The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer” is very theatrical for a music concert – which is basically what it is – but not quite theatrical enough to qualify as opera.  Seen as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival (November 17-19), the conceit of this hybrid performance is a posthumous celebrity book signing and reading by Jack Unterweger of his autobiography.  Shameless self-promoter Unterweger urges us to “buy my book: ka-ching!” while admitting that everything in it is a lie, because he’s been incapable since birth of telling the truth.  

John Malkovich plays the charming guy behind the monster and vice versa to a tee, and he proves to be quite an adept physical actor.  He clasps one of his paramours by her waist on bended knee, listening to her belly as she sings and feeling her up, or strangling another with her own brassiere – his weapon of choice – while on his back and dragging her on top of him.  

Unterweger was an Austrian serial killer, who was convicted in 1974 of the murder of Margaret Schafer.  After serving fifteen years of a twenty-five year sentence, the ostensibly model prisoner was paroled and hailed as an example of successful rehabilitation.  He became a celebrity personality and while lecturing about his rehabilitation, he went on to murder at least nine more women, including three in Los Angeles, was re-arrested and convicted, and in 1994 hanged himself in prison with an improvised rope made of shoelaces and his sweat pants waist cord.  

Speaking in a spasmodically Austrian accent – ostensibly modeled after ex-movie star/ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s – Malkovich does stand-up comedy pretty convincingly.  He rails at the classical music behind him – which he doesn’t like – the manager of his book tour, and so forth.  But he can’t resist the women.   

Music director Martin Haselböck leads an ensemble of period instruments in the late classical, early romantic musical selections by Gluck, Boccherini, Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn, and von Weber, selected to reinforce the emotions of the protagonist, whom we could hardly call hero.  

The sopranos are vividly diverse in their vocal personalities and characterizations, and they gamely submit to Unterweger’s manhandling, while maintaining crystalline tonality.  Tall, lanky, blonde Kirsten Blaise in a sexy, aqua-blue gown, belted with a bangle, is at once elegantly gawky and vocally assured, singing a florid Vivaldi aria.  Marie Arnet, in a black, strapless gown, has a lustier timbre; she represents an earthier character.  And Louise Fribo, in a tiered, sparkly purple and black dress, is the most flamboyant of the three.  Her coloratura is faultless, and her acting, the most assured.

In the Howard Gilman Opera House, the 32-piece Wiener Akademie orchestra, conducted by its director Haselböck, sounds slightly muffled – not at all muddy but not satisfyingly loud, in comparison to Malkovich’s slightly amplified voice.  The singers fare better, since they sing entirely in the downstage portion of the stage; their voices ring clear and true, executing the florid arpeggios of their impassioned arias.  

Interestingly, the super titles display only for the first portions of most of the arias – enough for us to get the idea – then go off, so as not to distract our attention from the onstage business, which indeed is deftly staged by Sturminger with input from Malkovich, who was originally slated to direct, but wisely realized that to both direct and star would be one job too many.

Photos by Richard Termine

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© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

CHUNKY MOVES

Since 1995, the Australian dance company Chunky Move has gained a reputation for daring collaborations and boundary stretching projects like “Glow,” which translated the movement of a dancer into a kinetic, electronic carpet, and “Tense Dave,” which took place on a constantly revolving stage.  For his final work as founding artistic director Gideon Obarzanek has collaborated with California artist Reuben Margolin on a work titled “Connected.”  This new dance-installation made its New York premiere at the Joyce Theater (November 2-6).  

San Francisco-based Margolin comes to his propensity toward undulating mobiles via a Harvard degree in English, study of painting in Italy and Russia, and a fascination with how to combine the logic of math with the sensuousness of nature.   Margolin’s sculpture for “Connected” consists of a rhomboidal grid of 100 strings hung from a frame at the top of the stage; each string ends in a metallic plug about five feet off the floor.  Upstage is a rectangular frame, through which the strings pass, and behind that what looks like an upended roulette wheel.  

The first third of the hour-long piece consists of the five stalwart dancers, Sara Black, Ross McCormack, Marnie Palomares, Harriet Ritchie, and Joseph Simons, alternating between dancing generic postmodern movement and preparing the sculpture by snapping magnetized connectors to the metallic plugs to articulate the grid.  

When the dancers attach the strings to their bodies, they can manipulate the grid with their movements.  As they advance, it rises; the shift of an arm makes one side lift; extending a leg backward dips its center.  It’s like watching an animated, 3-dimensional flow chart of the dancers’ motion.  Coordinated teamwork shapes the grid into a dome. 

Then, all the strings are attached to McCormack and he does a duet with Palomares, manipulating both the canopy and his partner, while both of the latter yield to his control.  This portion of the work clearly manifests the connection between man and machine, and it’s fascinating to try to correlate the motion of dancers to that of the sculpture.

After this section, the dancers attach the strings to the wheel, and the grid undulates overhead as a background to the fairly mundane action on stage below – portraying museum guards in gray suits and ties, telling anecdotes about an art theft on their watch, and then taking off the suits and dancing bare legged in the shirts and ties.  Their movement at times suggests mechanical circuitry.  

By exploring the unique environment of the sculpture somewhat cursorily, and then allowing it to become mere scenery for uninspired, pantomimic dancing, Obarzanek misses the chance to turn the symbiosis of dancer and machine into a poetic treatise.  Instead, he cops to conventional dance “entertainment.”  At the end, the dancers lie down close together under the grid, and it descends and hovers over them, like an alien craft, preparing to probe or beam them up.

Lighting by Benjamin Cisterne adds sculptural dimension to the space but fails to illuminate the subtle details of Anna Cordingley’s spiffy black costumes against the black backdrop.  Composers Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox provide a rich but appealingly sparse sound atmosphere.

Photos by Jeff Busby

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© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

SPLICE: DUETspaceQUARTET

Dance New Amsterdam’s Splice program pairs two choreographers on a single program, which gives the audience a chance to sample two different artistic points of view, while giving both enough time to explore their esthetics sufficiently.  For this program of dances by Joanna Kotze and Benn Rasmussen, the theater had to be completely rearranged at intermission.  In the first half, the audience straddled two sides of the stage, and for the second, we watched from the conventional front.  Both artists’ work offered substantial rewards, although the first was more successful overall. 

In “Between You and Me” – which began its life as part of the 2010 RAW Material project – the pairing of Joanna Kotze and Francis Stansky is inspired: she’s tall, lithe, and willowy, he is sturdy, compact, and tightly wound.  The original concept of this collaboratively made duet was an investigation of how we, the audience, perceived two simultaneous solos.   

Trained in architecture, Kotze wanted somehow to divide the space, so we could choose which dancer to watch.  Her solution was a row of nine clear light bulbs, mounted on five-foot poles – a kind of luminous picket fence, devised by her and artist Jonathan Allen – thatbisects the stage.  The dance has been expanded to thirty-minutes and now has 27 lights in three rows as a set: to the tall center-stage standards, she has added two rows of two-foot high ones, placed toward the outer edges of the space, creating two wide corridors for dancing.  

Kotze and Stansky begin, doing their own arrangements of the same movement materials, each facing an opposite front, so we can see at once the front and back views.  Then they change sides of the stage, so we can see the other view of each dancer, and we also become more aware of how differently the same movement looks on such disparate physiques.  

As they brush past each other passing between the poles, they become aware of each other and gradually begin to move as a couple.  Once the two become one, their interaction is tender, as if it were a spiritual relationship, even though the movement remains fully physical.  

Kotze’s vocabulary is richly articulated and dynamically unexpected; from a moment of equipoise, she’ll suddenly lurch in the least likely direction and manage to catch herself without crashing to the ground.  Despite her feather-light frame, she exerts great weightedness and animal coordination.  Like a cat, she always lands upright.  Stansky, too, moves his compact body with feline agility.   His gruff beard, gives him the look of a carpenter, but he has a keenly gentle sensibility.  He looks as if he could snap his partner like a twig, but his touch is as delicate as a new father with his infant child.  

Their duet passages move from one side of the space to the other and beyond the outer ranks of lights, using the entire space.  Snippets of popular music punctuate the dance – Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, Mike Keonig, and Broken Social Scene.  But in one spot, the Stones’ music accompanies what looks like a reference to Shakespeare’s R&J balcony scene.  He woos her, as she stands on a chair.  This “narrative” moment, as it is happening, it seems a little inconsistent with the otherwise highly refined, abstract texture of the piece, but in retrospect, it becomes wryly funny.

Stansky gets to exert the force of his energy in an extended solo that ranges throughout the space, while Kotze clusters the lights around the columns in the room, clearing the floor.  She bobs and weaves with a prizefighter’s intricate footwork, making what is essentially a set change into a sweet jig that counterpoints the breadth of Stansky’s movement.  

Finally, when the floor has been cleared of obstacles, the two race wildly around like mustangs, that have been let out of their stalls.  They relish the freedom to move with carefree abandon through the unencumbered space and we empathically romp with them.    

The other half of the program is a quartet by Benn Rasmussen for himself, Arletta Anderson, Julia Kelly, and Edward Rice.  “Black Ground” is also performed without musical accompaniment.  

Oddly for Rasmussen, who’s been researching improvisational performance for a few years, this is a thoroughly choreographed dance with narrative implications.  A book serves both as a sound source, when it’s slapped on the floor, a connector of people, as they passed it amongst themselves, a prop pillow to rest their heads on, and a mysterious symbol, when a second book appears.  

Rasmussen’s costumes make the dancers appear to be two couples, one contemporary and the other Victorian, perhaps.  Since it is nowhere explained or made explicit in the dance, it just looks as if one couple is well dressed and the other not.  In this venture into conventional choreography, Rasmussen leaves too much unexplained for us to make sense of the contemplative, somewhat flat texture of the dancing.  Carrie Wood did most effective lighting for both dances, both sculptural and dramatic.  

Photos by Erika Latta

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011