Solomons Says

Philadelphia-based hip-hop innovator, Dr. Rennie Harris, most notably turned hip-hop movement in all its many styles into a new language for dramatic expression.  RHAW, an hour-long hip-hop show at the New Victory Theater (May 14-26), mixes moves from B-boying, popping, locking, waacking, and voguing styles into a new language that is as definable as ballet but speaks to a whole new generation of viewers.  

The title is an acronym for Rennie Harris Awe-inspiring Works, and Harris bills himself as “Dr. Rennie Harris,” as if to elevate hip-hop culture to academic respectability.  And he calls himself the founder, director, and CEO of his company Puremovement, of which this show is kind of a subsidiary.  Raphael Williams and Crystal Frazier are listed as RHAW’s artistic director and assistant.   

The agile crew keeps revealing more facets of their dancing chops; they crouch low, whipping legs around like mix-masters, twirl on their back and shoulders, swing their legs high like gymnasts on the pommel horse.  From a standing start, they jump into the air, spin 360-degrees, and land, catlike, on their feet; they twitch their muscles and move like mechanical robots slow as molasses and lightning fast.  They flap their arms overhead in that new-fangled semaphore called voguing in startling unison.  

Some of the short pieces are excerpted from larger works and some choreographed by others and staged by Harris.  The New Vic presents family-friendly attractions.  But Harris’s work does not talk down to youngsters and can be appreciated equally by audiences of all ages.  The dozen performers – half men, half women – dance with the natural joy of kids who’ve found a passion, and their unforced joy makes it easy to see why they’re so inspirational for other youngsters seeing them.  

In the opening “Continuum” (conceived in 1997), the cast members introduce themselves by showing us their personal specialties in the center of a circle of the others – the cipher, as it’s called – then they exit the stage and return for another round.  Harris gave women equal stature with men in hip-hop.  What had been a guy’s game with a few token women became egalitarian with Harris’s introduction of narrative and specific story telling to the form.

In the large group unison passages, six or eight dancers will be steaming along, and out of nowhere someone will do a series of aerial flips, forward or backward, or dive into a one-handed handstand with feet pumping in the air as easily as if they were arms, or do a scary slide on the top of his head.  The virtuosity feels more like simply an eruption of exuberance than an applause-grabbing stunt. 

The recorded music pumps so loudly you can’t even hear when the audience applauds for a spectacular moment or the end of a section.  Lighting by David Todaro keeps the mood changing simply but effectively, including some mysterious specials that pick Harris and Brown out of the darkness on their journey across the stage at the start of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” excerpt, set to the famous Queen music.   

A big projection tells us the title of the show, as we enter the theater, and a colorful “peace” sign announces the excerpt from “Peace and Love” in the second half of the show.  In other places, the cyclorama blazes with color, silhouetting the dancers against it.  And the finale is titled “R.H.A.W. Bows.”  But it takes a while to realize it is the curtain calls, since the volume of the music and the steps, which now pull out all the stops, are indistinct from the rest of the proceedings. 

The performers, who don’t flaunt even their most gasp-inducing stunts, each have their own particular hip-hop gifts, and they deserve all the cheering they receive.  Namely, they are Amaryah Bone, Katia Cruz, Joshua Culbreath, Phillip Cuttino Jr., Neka French, Brandyn S. Harris (Rennie’s grown son), Mai Le Ho Johnson, Kevin S. Rand, Neha Sharma, Mariah Tlili, and Schafeek Westbrook.  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2013

The New York Theatre Ballet, founded and directed by Diana Byer, is one of New York’s treasures.  Most of the company’s young members have been trained assiduously by Byer, and they produce some of the most grammatically precise, crisp ballet dancing around; clear, musical execution supplants technical virtuosity.

In the troupe’s recent concert at Florence Gould Hall (March 22-23), the repertory is mostly sterling – Antony Tudor, revivals of two James Waring solos from the seventies, a Richard Alston piece, and a new dance by Gemma Bond.  It’s a shame Victoria Miller’s lighting wasn’t better focused throughout.

Byer wisely reins her dancers in technically to do what they can do with professional confidence; they don’t outreach their grasp.  And the small stage at Gould Hall means they don’t have to strain to cover space.  Another inspiring aspect of the company is that it maintains works by Antony Tudor (1908-1987), whose ballets always put human relationships before virtuosic spectacle.

On this program, his “Dark Elegies” (1977) received a typically well-rehearsed, elegantly restrained performance.  Set to Gustav Mahler’s mournful “Kindertotenlieder” (Songs on the Death of Children), it begins with six women in Raymond Sovey’s puritanical dresses and babushkas – done in muted tones of gray, maroon, teal – in a somber arc onstage.  Another woman (Rie Ogura) enters from upstage and crosses to the center into the group.   Ogura is on toe, while the others dance flat.

NYTB in Dark Elegies

Gradually, inconspicuously, other dancers enter until a community of a dozen populates the stage, eight women and four men in all.  The Second Song introduces Amanda Lynch and Steven Melendez – the troupe’s most mature and physically powerful performer – as a bereaved couple.  The soloists in the other songs make less impression than the first two.  Marius Arhire, Elena Zahlmann, and Philip King dance assuredly but reticently. 

Gema Bond is a corps member at American Ballet Theatre, who’s being eyed as the next, all-too-rare, female ballet choreographer of promise.  Her “Silent Tales” is an odd affair, set to piano music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk.  A rolling blackboard announces its sections – “La Savane,” “Ballade Creole”; “Tournament Galop”; “O! Ma Charmante, Espargnez Moi!”; and “Finale.”  But the transitions between sections seem tentative, because each section has an inconclusive ending.  The audience doesn’t know whether to clap or not, each time the music ends, because we’re not sure what just happened.

NYTB in Silent Titles

The women dance variously on toe, in heels, and in soft shoes and wear gray tutus by Sylvia Taalsohn Nolan.  The tuxedoed guys keep their black shoes on throughout.  The movement is cleanest, when it’s balletic, but it’s always generic – a timid exercise.  Live pianist Michael Scales seems unable to hit the right notes, whether due to lack of practice or the music’s difficulty.  But the clunkers make the dancing hard to love.  

Richard Alston’s “A Rugged Flourish,” commissioned by NYTB in 2011 and set to Aaron Copeland’s 1930 “Piano Variations” is a formal essay for Melendez and six women, one of whom (Ogura) becomes his pas de deux partner.  The six women on toe wear bright, spring-like colors (Taalsohn Nolan’s costumes again), and flurry about in tidy patterns.  “Flourish” is youthful and pleasant, and with his technically crispness, serene presence, and unmannered performance, Melendez proves himself again to be the cream of the crop.

The program’s special treat is the revival of two solos by James Waring, a notable figure in downtown dance in the 60s and 70s, concurrent with the reign of the Judson Dance Theater.  Waring was known as much for the colorful, mosaic-like costumes he sewed for his dancers as for the dances themselves.  Although he taught ballet, his movement palette was much broader.

Steven Melendez in Feathers

“Feathers” was made in 1973 for Raymond Johnson, a fiery, black man, taken too soon by AIDS.  It is dedicated to Barbette, a French, transvestite trapeze artist.  Menendes, wearing a tunic dress and a feathered mask (by Taalson Nolan after Waring’s original), moves laterally in two-dimensional, archaic poses like Grecian friezes, and deep backward hinges.  Danced to selections by Mozart, the solo was staged by Ronald Dabney. 

Mayu Oguri in An Eccentric Beauty Revisited

“An Eccentric Beauty Revisited” (1972) is set to Erik Satie’s “La Belle Excentrique” for piano, four hands, and staged by Byer.  The costume – recreated by Taalsohn Nolan after Leon Bakst’s original costume for Nijinsky – has a crown and a short, stiff tunic in gold with red and blue highlights.  Mayu Oguri danced with clarity and verve.  Like most of Byer’s dancers, Oguri has the potential to be vivid with more stage experience and the daring to take greater ownership of her dancing.

photos by Darial Sneed

© Gus Solomons jr, 2013 

The final attraction of the Ice Hot Festival of Nordic Dance companies was Norway’s National Company of Contemporary Dance, Carte Blanche.  The company biography notes percentages of ownership by the country, county, and city, which makes it seem more like a business proposition than an undertaking of artistic passion.  That may help to explain the impression it gave that its dancers are not important as individuals but are simply cogs in a machine.  

“Corps de Walk” is an ensemble piece for the company’s dozen dancers, which is directed by Bruno Heynderickx.  It was created in 2011 by Batsheva alumna Sharon Eyal and her event producer husband Gai Behar.  Twelve anonymous ciphers of varied shapes and sizes move like rhythmic automatons throughout the hour-long dance, accompanied by various selections of pulsating disco, house, and rock music by the likes of Lichuk, David Byrne, Aphex Twin, Noize Creator, Coil, and others with a little Debussy for a change of pace.

The dancers wear nude-colored unitards (designed by Eyal and Behar), have their hair plastered back and colored blond – including the black male dancer – and wear blue contact lenses.  Lighting designer Torkel Skjærven articulates beams of white light with copious stage fog.  The light casts the dance in a kind of miasma; we feel like we’re inside some arcane video game.

Not only does the costume concept purposely make the dancers anonymous, the program fails to include any brief biographies or photos of them.  The dancers aren’t uniformly skilled or sufficiently drilled in some movement details, even though the visual exposure of their costumes makes accuracy and uniformity essential to the work’s impact.  

As the title implies, the dance is a study of group walking with recurring motifs and patterns that build a kind of persistence; it can become either hypnotic or soporific.  The tempo remains pretty even throughout, so the different selections of music simply put different shades of lipstick on the same old mouth.  Some of the patterning is effective, if not innovative.  The splicing lines, moving from opposite sides of the stage, forming and dissolving rows of threes and fours maintain the pace of action but give us little new information. 

The dance has a perversity about it, whether it’s meant to or not.  All that close-order unison, canons, crisp isolations, and endless walking must take a toll on the poor, anonymous dancers.  And some of them, while obviously fine technicians, get perfunctory wtih their dynamic snaps and pops.  Other dancers seemed unable to manage the demands for precision of the choreography.  Nowadays, it’s rare that the dancers are not uniformly expert, but it would not be surprising if the combination of anonymity and monotony had sapped their morale of this corps.

Photos by Erik Berg

© Gus Solomons jr, 2013

photo by Bjarke Ørsted

One remarkable thing about the Dansk Danse Teater (Danish Dance Theatre), directed since 2001 by British-born Tim Rushton, is that only one of the troupe’s dozen dancers is actually Danish – and she’s of African descent.  Denmark’s most widely acclaimed contemporary dance company brought Rushton’s “Love Songs” to the Joyce Theater, March 11-13, as part of the Ice Hot: Nordic Dance Festival.  

Rushton describes the hour-long dance as a “celebration of life” that uses jazz classics, originally sung by the likes of Ella (Fitzgerald), Louis (Armstrong), Billie (Holliday), and Sarah (Vaughan), all reinterpreted by Danish jazz artist Caroline Henderson.

`But nothing about “Love Stories,” including its title, veers far from the expectable. The movement involves sliding in socks (the new dance shoes), passionately swirling arms, crotch-baring hyper-extensions, and more than a tolerable amount of running onstage into place, doing a brief phrase, and running off again – all straight from the catalog of overused contemporary devices.  An oft-repeated motif involves dancers spinning with a leg lifted to the side and crooked over an arm. 

The first part of the piece involves people rising from a row of chairs, lined up across the rear of the stage under a starlit sky (lighting by Thomas Bek and Jacob Bjerregaard); they do fleeting duets that alternate with group passages.  Sometimes the pairings are in unison, sometimes in counterpoint.  The fleeting physical encounters aren’t long enough to establish any emotional connections.  Luca Marazia is a kind of host/ringmaster, prancing his miniature frame across the stage, always trying to belong. 

It’s a presentational celebration of the dancers’ considerable chops.  They do fast – or slow, depending on the song – difficult steps, which would be more compelling were there a greater variety of them.  Björn Nilsson gets dating advice from “the girls” in a recorded voice- over; all of the couples smooch – some fake it – to “My First Kiss.”

Then, after a curious, onstage costume change, upstage in semi darkness, there’s a change of emotional mood.  The new costumes (Charlotte Østergaard) are pretty similar to the ones before it – casual wear in neutral colors – except that now some of the women have shinier, semi-formal dresses and a few of the men sport suit jackets.  A series of extended duets in this part constitute the substance of the work.

In “All of Me,” lanky Milou Nuyens (Netherlands) and handsome Erik Nyberg (Sweden) toss each other around like rowdy teammates as much as lovers; she’s tall, strong, and about his height.  The old chestnut “My Funny Valentine” backs an interracial encounter between Maxim-Jo Beck McGosh (African-Danish) and partner Fabio Liberti (Italy by way of Rotterdam.)  He’s tall; she’s short.  She repeatedly sprints across the stage and hurls herself at him into flying catches that were gasp inducing last century, but are now routine.

The only couple that ignites emotional sparks is Ana Sendas and Stefanos Bizas (Portugal and Greece, respectively.)  The heartbreaking song “Lilac Wine” by James Shelton inspires the most eloquent choreography of the evening.  The two might be wrestling with a disintegrating love affair or reconciling after a split.  She scales his body in a series of simple but meaningful, aspiring lifts.   

Despite the talented cast, the piece lacks the emotional impact we’d like from such a nicely concise dance evening, a jazzy, jukebox suite that’s as pleasantly bland as the term “international” implies.  A strenuous running-in-place section to “Thanks for the Memories” creates rousing, if predictable, finale.  But it must be said, the Joyce audience ate it up.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2013

SPLICE (February 6-10), one of an impressive array of presentations offered by Dance New Amsterdam, presented works by Bradley Teal Ellis and Neal Beasley.  Their show alternates scenes by each choreographer.  The audience is free to wander throughout the space, and stand or sit on the floor and a few chairs clustered around the posts in the space.  Certain audience members have received tokens upon entering, and – in a throwback to the sixties – “audience participation” is once again more the rule than the exception in downtown productions.

Ellis, a cordial, young, Brooklyn-based improviser greets us and chooses three of the pre-chosen audience members to represent his family for a photo portrait.  First, there are the conventional shots – smiling family in different poses.  Then, Ellis puts black velvet cones over the heads of his ”parents” and a red S&M hood on his “brother,” who happens to be portrayed by a woman this evening.  The black cones are disturbingly reminiscent of KKK hoods.  

Family portrait from (american guilt)

With a bouquet of flowers in Mother’s arm, Old Glory in the hand of Father, and a picture frame held by Brother, the picture takes on sinister overtones.  In harsh silhouette, Ellis improvises on the floor in front of his ersatz family.  The fact that we can barely see the movement in Mandy Ringger’s bright back lighting only adds to the bizarreness of the scene.

Ellis calls his piece “(american) guilt.”  In its three other vignettes, he, David Rafael Botana, and John Hoobyar, dress in variations of white underwear, and all wear shiny, fabric hoods (by costume designer Bobby Frederick Tilley III) that split the difference between S&M and Kabuki.  

Inspired by the practice of DJs to demarcate life from performance by wearing masks, a program note explains, “…the performers are masked, [their] identities concealed from the viewer,” giving them permission, “to act out their own guilty conscience, pleasures and habits without judgment.”  

Ellis in (american) guilt

In the first vignette, assisted by an audience volunteer, whom they dress in a shimmery, black cloak and royal neck ruff that’s held up by helium balloons.  While he watches, the masked men, they bind and unbind themselves with a fat, golden rope that pussyfoots around the notion of bondage.  At one point, the pair winds the rope into a coil, in and out of which they suggestively pulse the free end of the rope.  Then, they fashion the rope into a crude noose.  That’s about as “guilty” as consciences get.  But the vices of this  anonymous trio are pretty tame.  

Beasley in his “every adam belonging to me” drags on a child’s red wagon, strews clothing on the floor from a big tote, strips naked, and puts on a fake beard and overalls that give teasing glimpses of his nudity underneath.  He wraps a ball of twine around two of the theater’s posts and an A-ladder to form a triangular cage, lit by a naked lightbulb.  

He’s accompanied by his own recorded voice, mixed with Beethoven’s Larghetto from the Violin Concerto in D major and ambient natural sounds.  Beasley speaks in a resonant announcer’s baritone text by him and Elizabeth Gilbert about the “history of America,” in which frontier heroes like Pecos Bill lose their pioneer spirit and become as civilized as Europeans.  

Beasley in every adam belonging to me

In the next part, Beasley dons a parka, white briefs, and a wig.  He clings desperately to the ladder, sliding at Butoh-like pace to the ground.  This time the recorded voice is garbled and angry; all that’s intelligible are frequent curse words.  And in the final section, Beasley again changes in full view into jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers and does the closest thing he’s yet done to a dance, while the recorded voice, over rain and thunder, describes a violent sexual attack.  The contrast between the text, which sounds autobiographical, and his gentle, angular movement is truly poignant.

Beasley in every adam belonging to me

Both these young artists are dealing with issues of taboo sexuality and danger, but Beasley moves us because he lets us relate to him as a human, and his intention seems more specific and clearly articulated.  In Ellis’s final section – a series of contact duets, rotating partners – the hoods come off; we finally can see them as people, not just sexualized avatars. 

photos by Ian Douglas

© Gus Solomons jr, 2013

According to Wikipedia – the ultimate authority on everything and everybody – the Peter Principle is a belief that where promotion is based on success and merit, the worthy will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability.

Through no conscious plan, I happened to see “Peter and the Starcatcher” and “The Old Man and the Old Moon” within a week of each other.  It’s hard to miss the similarities between the two shows.  Both have casts of youngish males (except for Wendy in “Peter”) and both intersperse music with text and lively action.  Both shows left me a little unsatisfied, due, it would seem, to a variant of this Peter Principle (pun too fortuitous not to be intended.)  

The former show began its NYC life at the New York Theater Workshop, an Off-Broadway venue in the East Village, and thence with glowing success, moved to the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway.  The latter production, created by a collaborative of recent Carnegie Mellon undergraduate drama graduates, calling themselves Pigpen Theater, is currently running at the gym at Judson Church – a recently established Indie theater in the West Village.  Both shows are slated to close in January.  

In “Old Man,” watching the earnest guys singing and playing their guitars, keyboard, drums, and an accordion; manipulating shadow puppets lit from behind sheets to act out an original myth of theirs, based on various world folklore, you think, “Promising” – vaguely Irish accents notwithstanding.  But in act two of the two-hours-plus production the pace begins to flag.  

Despite captivating bits, scattered throughout – shipwrecked sailors floating in a hot air balloon, bedeviled by an impish puppet dog, made out of a bleach bottle and a rag mop; or a shadow-puppet version of the Old Man, climbing his endless ladder to refill the leaky moon with light – the piece is desperately in need of trimming.

We know that finally the Old Man is going to find his itinerant wife, refill the leaky moon, restore the universe to balance, and live happily ever after, so get on with it. Whether because no one is listed as director to cut the fat and tighten the pace, or because these young actors have an exaggerated view of their own importance, the second act soon begins to drag.   

Photo by Joan Marcus. “The Old Man and the Old Moon,” l-r: Curtis Gillen, Alex Falberg, Dan Weschler, Anya Shahi, Matt Nuernberger, Ben Ferguson, Ryan Melia

Lydia Fine’s shadow puppets and miniature props are wonderfully detailed, and the multi-level stage design (by Fine and Bart Cortright) is physically challenging, though most of the action takes place on the floor level, which is visible to only the first row of the audience.  Fine and Cortright make use of flashlights, scoop lights, and a few conventional overhead instruments to create an atmospheric world of light and dark.

Pigpen Theater made a splash at the 2010 and 2011 NYC Fringe Festivals, which emboldened them to take on an extended run off-Broadway, which in my opinion may be premature: Peter Principle!  The lack of an objective outside directorial eye to make and keep the show’s tempo effervescent detracts from a potentially enchanting show.   

Photo by Joan Marcus.  Lydia Fine’s vessel on its sea voyage.

“Peter and the Starcatcher” is a pithier piece – a kind of prequel to “Peter Pan,” written by Rick Elice and based on a novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson.  Its characters are more fully fleshed out and authoritatively rendered than in “Old Man,” and the script is rich with hilarious punning and word play.  It is smartly staged and tightly paced by directors Roger Rees and Alex Timbers.  Its cast of 12 men and one woman (the effervescent Celia Keenan-Bloger as Wendy) do a splendid job with special mention for Matthew Saldivar’s Black Stache – a Groucho Marx-inspired villain who becomes Captain Hook, when in a show-stopping display of physical humor, he slams a trunk lid on his hand and severs it.  This is, hands down, the comic highpoint of the show. 

Photo by Joan Marcus. “Peter and the Starcatcher,” (center) Celia Keenan-Bolger and Adam Chanler-Berat and the cast

While I enjoyed “Peter” and laughed a lot, I kept feeling it was somehow not quite “big” or “brash” enough to fill a 1000-seat, Broadway house.  The intimacy of NYTW were apparently just right – right enough, in fact, to propel them into a Broadway run.  

On second thought, perhaps it’s only my expectation about what $120 a seat should be buying that leaves me less than sated.  It’s like relishing a delicious, thirty-dollar entrée, and then discovering it’s actually twice the price.

Maybe our expectations have escalated so that we need flying actors, complete with scandal, or ravishing people-as-puppets – i.e., Julie Taymore – or scenery whizzing in and out, up and down, or the cache of movie stars in limited Broadway runs of classic plays to give you that can’t-eat-another-bite, no-room-for-dessert satisfaction on Broadway.  I don’t know exactly how the economic model works on and off Broadway, but it’s not hard to guess that escalating production costs make the only financially sensible way to survive is a run on Broadway.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

Tropical storm Sandy wiped out the run of Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal in November, but the Joyce was able to reschedule the company for a 4-performance run, December 13-16.  Opening night was graced by the attendance of Pauline Marois, the premier of Quebec, surrounded by an entourage of security, and there was a full house to greet the Canadians.

The company’s dozen strong, well-trained, and appealing dancers give the first two pieces on the program more choreographic credibility than they deserve.  The opener “Zero In On” (2010) by Spanish choreographer Cayetano Soto, danced with obligatory acrobatics by petite red-headed Céline Cassone and all-American looking Kevin Delaney (he’s from Minnesota), and “Night Box,” a world premiere by Chinese dance maker Wen Wei Wang – a disco-flavored throwback to the sixties, which rehashes club moves in a miasma of projected film and flashing lights – are both less than profound, let’s say. 

The lighting is memorable, mostly for its activeness.  Soto designed the lighting concept for his muscle-bound duet, “Zero In On.”  Half the stage has light gray flooring and a lighting beam, hung on a diagonal that starts on the ground, upstage center, and soars to the top of the proscenium, downstage left.  It is hung with a few light instruments that “zero” our attention “in” on the dancers.  

Light designer Daniel Ranger makes the most of this odd configuration to keep the dancers interestingly lit.  They wear off-white leotards and shin warmers, covering all but bare thighs – also conceived by Soto – that turn tem into sexy pawns.  The dance’s predictably distorted neo-classic shapes and break-neck pace are driven – predictably – by Philip Glass music.  

“Night Box” involves the full company in an ode to urbanity.  Choreographer Wang seems awe-struck by the big city.   To a collection of techno music, heads bobble in unison in tight clumps; arms pump the air in arrant quotations from the disco lexicon that only music videos can still get away with.  During a duet, the others tiptoe across the stage in front, then in back of them.  There’s an obligatory aggressive men’s section, jazz runs, and strutting with attitude.  It’s an endless collection of clichés that fill time without payoff.

Lighting designer James Proudfoot flashes the lights and lowers and raises lighting pipes, which along with the film helps distract us from the banality of the movement.  The progression of scenes leads to a final, relatively quiet duet for the company’s star dancer, Cassone, who seems to be unwell, signaled by her frequent collapses into the arms of her partner.  Finally though, she walks towards us, as lights fade.

But the final ballet, “Harry,” also a world premiere by Israeli-American choreographer Barak Marshall sends you out of the theater thinking, at least momentarily, Wow that was a great show.  But on reflection you realize that for half the evening it was the performing that you recall, not the material.  

“Harry” is theatrical, darkly funny, and so accomplished in its craft that it reminds you what separates real choreography from just skillful dance making.  Marshall employs a mélange of musical selections – from Tommy Dorsey and the Andrews Sisters to Balkan Beat Box, Warsaw Village Band, and Wayne Newton – to further the journey of his hero, who is alternately a regular Joe and a mythic hero.

Harry undergoes the travails of a wayward god; he dies and is revived numerous times.  He limns TV’s The Bachelor, seeking the woman with the lid that fits his saucepan.  He faces a firing squad of powder-filled balloons.  The wronged women shoot their men dead, using similar balloon artillery.  We hear strains of ‘Stardust” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” as well as bits of Klezmer music.

Marshall inserts enough dancing to knit the dramatic scenes together.  And those dance passages reveal a unique vocabulary of gesturing and quick direction changes with rhythmic play that is constantly unexpected, surprising, and fresh.  A battle scene is a delicious etude of movement canons, and the women in close formation do hand signing – whether or not it’s actual sign language is immaterial.  It’s all purposely stylized to indicate deep emotionality without the actual wrenching of guts.

Marshall manages to combine text, narrative, and original movement into an irresistible mix.  At the end, the cast faces us, acknowledging that everything is going to be happily-ever-after.  There’s even a choreographed encore, which gets performed whatever the audience response.  On opening night, most of the audience was eager to see it.

Note: The dancer identities included here had to be inferred from program cast lists.  No dancer photos were included in press materials.  And the only photos available were of “Zero In On,” in which is a dancer who did not perform with the company.  That’s a shame, as the dancers deserve individual credit.  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Yannick Lebrun and Jacqueline Green in Jirí Kylián’s Petite Mort. Photo by Paul Kolnik

It’s a bit ironic that the centerpiece of the Alvin Ailey Company’s Family Matinee on December 8 is “Petite Mort,” which is French slang for orgasm.  But since most of the parents didn’t know that, what they and their kids enjoyed was a beautifully composed ballet, entertaining in its virtuosity and invention, and of course, performed with Ailey’s signature urgency and technical prowess.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Jirí Kylián’s Petite Mort. Photo by Paul Kolnik

The 1991 ballet by brilliant Czech choreographer Jiri Kilián begins with six muscular men in gold brocade Speedos, backing towards us with swords balanced on one finger.  After their precision swordplay, they sweep a swath of black silk to obscure the stage, and in the wake of its billow appear six women, sitting split-legged in front of the men.

The ensuing series of man-woman duets represent the most sensual of couplings and intertwining of human bodies imaginable.  Kilián – who has now largely abandoned choreographing for filmmaking – was a master of finding unexpected, surprising ways for men to lift women.  Here, the lifting often involves bodies passing between each other’s legs or men clutching the women’s inner thighs as handles for swooping them through space.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Jamar Roberts and Alicia Graf Mack in Jirí Kylián’s Petite Mort. Photo by Paul Kolnik

In contrast to Nederlands Dance Theater renditions of the ballet – whose dancers are mainly ballet trained – all the dancer pairings in this Ailey version, handsomely staged by Patrick Delcroix, put more emphasis on sensuality than linear purity, which adds welcome vitality and emotional immediacy to the dance.

All the couples – Belen Pereyra and Jermaine Terry, Rachel McLauren and Kirven James Boyd, Jacqueline Green and Yannick Lebrun, Linda Celeste and Glen Allen Sims, and Akua Noni Parker and Antonio Douthit – move seamlessly through their complicated mechanics.  But most breathtaking pair is Alicia Graf Mack and Jamar Roberts, both of whom are god-like in their height, elegance, and dynamic power.  It’s a gift to have Mack – this season’s poster woman – back in the company after a hiatus.

The program opens with the world premiere of “Another Evening” by in-demand, young dance maker Kyle Abraham, which is a setting of Dizzy Gilllespie’s classic “A Night in Tunisia,” in the epic recording by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.    

Abraham himself is a silky, quixotic mover, and the opening solo he’s given Jaqueline Green reflects the aspects of his style.  It combines street attitude with modern/ postmodernism, African, and club dance, and Green pulls it off in style.  She’s spot lit (Dan Scully’s lighting) and blue floor lights around the periphery obscure what’s beyond the rectangle of light.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Belen Pereyra and Antonio Douthit in Kyle Abraham’s Another Night. Photo by Paul Kolnik

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Hope Boykin and Aisha Mitchell in Kyle Abraham’s Another Night. Photo by Paul Kolnik

Other dancers enter from behind those lights at the back and sides – first two, then four, then more.  The structure of the piece and its use of space is typical of Ailey works we’re used to.  The dance is a fast-paced series of duets, solos, and group passages that maintain the music’s energy.  One African-esque unison phrase is either an homage to (or an unconscious appropriation of) Ronald K. Brown, who also contributes often to Ailey’s repertory.  Smartly, Abraham occasionally puts a brake on the hyperactivity by having a bunch of dancers stopping dead on one leg with the other foot hooked behind the standing knee, and the focus, arms, and trunks twisting and bending in unison.   

Abraham’s dances for his own troupe A/I/M (Abraham in Motion) are less predictably composed, but for his debut outing with the Ailey Company, he has proven that he knows what its audience expects.  New Ailey director Robert Battle is wisely trying to stretch the repertory into places stalwart Ailey fans have not yet been – as with “Petite Mort” and last season’s “Minus 16,” a choreographic tour de force by Israel’s most established choreographer Ohad Naharin.  Next time – and there should be one – Abraham should be more esthetically daring.

As a tidbit, opening the second act of the program, Kanji Segawa dances Battle’s “Takademe” (1999), a step-for-note matching of Sheila Chandra’s vocal percussion aria, “Speaking in Tongues II.”  Segawa’s rhythms and timing match Chndra’s vocal machinations with eerie precision: a showstopper.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Kanji Segawa in Robert Battle’s Takademe. Photo by James R. Brantley

And the perennial “Revelations,” ever-green after fifty-two years has become an interactive experience with the audience, who greets the next music with a cheer, applauds especially difficult-looking moves, and claps in rhythm to the final, “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.”

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Alvin Ailey’s Revelations with cast of 50. Photo by Christopher Duggan

In this matinee performance, children from the Ailey School and members of the Ailey II Company join the company in several sections.  The students have been well drilled, and the AIley II dancers are but a few seasons away, perhaps, from a place in the main company.  Since the 50^th anniversary of the dance, the cast has bloated to fifty.  At times, the stage is as crowded as a rush hour subway car.  In the finale, in fact, the dancing spills off the stage with couples dancing in the aisles. 

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

With the welcome return of power and water to my apartment after Storm Sandy’s havoc, I took myself to MoMA for the last weekend of this latest dance in the museum phenomenon that has recently infused museums with living art.  This one, called “Some Sweet Day,” curated by Ralph Lemon featured choreographers Sarah Michelson and Deborah Hay.  

In this large-scale project – inspired by the 50^th anniversary of the Judson Dance Theater, which bred experimental dance in the 60s – Judsonites Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Hay, paired with younger experimental counterparts, Jerome Bel, Dean Moss, and Michelson, respectively, displayed their artistic viewpoints for an avid public.

The works I saw on the final weekend posed interesting questions about the nature of artistic inspiration not just dance making.  First up was British dancer-turned-choreographer Michelson, who’s built a rabid following for her slick, persistent movement essays and, perhaps not incidentally, for her leading dancer Nicole Mannarino, a dancer of impressive stamina and presence.  

With the audience sitting and standing on two sides of the atrium and others watching from balconies above, Michelson builds her dance, “Devotion #3,” around a simple motif – hands clasped behind the back, Mannarino moves side to side, toes, heels, toes, then crosses one foot over the other – to which she adds small variations: a high kick, a deep lunge, arms flying overhead, hooking up her leg as if to gaze at the sole of her sneaker.  Between stints of ferocious action, she strides across the massive space and continues in another location.    

At the same time, James Tyson is doing similar movement material on the floor below – invisible to us in the atrium.  For a few brief seconds he joins Mannarino in the atrium, then exits, perhaps to continue on other levels.  His role is puzzlingly insignificant for the main audience, which by the end may not even remember his appearance, since Mannarino totally rivets our attention.

Hay’s “Blues” is based on her impression that the regular museum audience is overwhelmingly white.  She deploys a group of white women in black leotards – like the pioneers of modern dance, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, Valerie Bettis, etc. – who silently form and reform a circle in various locations throughout the atrium.  The audience migrates to surround each of their circles, while a dozen dancers of color, each wired with an earpiece and microphone taped to their faces, dance amidst them.  The dancers are responding improvisationally to the music in their ears, which is later revealed to be a song, made up by Hay in Paris that reminded her of the blues.  

The contrast between Michelson’s obsessive control and Hay’s laissez-faire approach, which allows maximum freedom for the performers, creates a relation between the two works, which are stylistically a galaxy apart.  

Seeing dance performed in a museum setting raises different questions about it than seeing it in a theater.  Without theatrical trappings – lighting, costumes, etc. – we’re less concerned with execution than artistic intention.  Michelson’s piece raises the issue of how complicit a dancer is in her own exploitation.  Hay’s work could be interpreted as a comment on racism, considering the hierarchy of roles of the white and black dancers in her cast.  The white women in black draw attention by mere dint of their silent presence, while the multi-racial performers in colorful clothing, excluded from the inner sanctum, must work harder to draw our attention.  At one point they surround the sacred circle but are not allowed inside it.  This might also refer back to the exclusivity of the Judson Group, which included no one of color, although some in the downtown community did share their esthetic point of view. 

Coincidentally, another movement artist performed in a museum – Arturo Vidich at the Museum of Art and Design.  His showing culminated a three-month residency there.  Far from a finished piece, Vidich presented studies for “The Daedalus Effect and other dilemmas,” improvisational ideas he’s been exploring in collaboration with a series of artists who made objects for him to interact with.  The finished piece will be presented later this season.

The showing (November 9-10) took place not in a spacious gallery but in the museum’s small basement theater.  The space is suitable for lectures and perhaps string quartets – the stage is too shallow to accommodate a grand piano – but hardly adequate for theatrical performance of any kind except maybe puppet shows.

Vidich distributes his sculptures around the space – an aisle, the front row on the left, there’s a loaf-like lump with curved wires supporting it like a daddy long-leg spider; In the right aisle stand two rectangular prisms, one with a silver helix hanging inside, the other with an LED lamp.  Spread across the stage is a two-foot high, blue cylinder with white cords radiating from holes near its top, a light on a stand, and a Vornado floor fan. 

As the audience enters, Vidich in salmon jeans and a gray T-shirt chats with friends or sits under the spider.  When the presentation starts, Vidich emerges from offstage right, pushing the podium and wearing a contraption on his back.  He proceeds to manipulate all the props, moving up one aisle and down the other, getting entangled treacherously in the hardware, toppling over, and extracting himself.

Onstage, bare-chested and wearing a monochrome facemask, Vidich dances his unique style that combines elements of modern dance, club dance, and world dance.  His body is a miraculous instrument, as beautifully proportioned as Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and even more muscularly articulated. 

He sinks to the ground and rebounds on steel-spring legs, stands on one high-arched foot while fluidly distorting his torso.  On the cramped stage, he twists himself into precarious balances and springs out of them with feline agility.  

Although this showing does not represent a finished piece, it has much more in common with artistic process than either of the pieces at MoMA.  Vidich’s showing, which showed more about process deserved a gallery setting, while Michelson’s and Hay’s pieces would feel completely comfortable on a theater stage.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

Tere O’Connor has highly refined notions about how to make dances, and he is devoted to old-fashioned compositional craftsmanship.  Although his inspirations range widely, his motion-based dances defy the artistic fashion of the moment.  His new dances at New York Live Arts (November 27-December 1) show him continuing to refine his choreographic vision, free of political undertones, literal connotations, and sometimes transitions.  

“Secret Mary” and “poem” unfold mysteriously and inevitably on NYLA’s big, bare, black stage, shifting from one series of motifs to another, as each is developed – or not – to the extent O’Connor needs to.  The dancers wear clothing assembled by James Kidd, and Michael O’Connor’s lighting combines subtle shifts and radical changes that effectively underscore the dancing.

O’Connor’s movement defies stylistic cubby-holes, although fast footwork passages and his decorative use of arms dancers’ make it obvious there’s ballet in his background.  He elicits kinetic contributions from his diverse dancers, and encourages them to move with precision but without affect.  His work thereby remains abstract, although it’s cast fills it with humanity moments of literal-ness.  

l-r: Tess Dworman, devynn emory, Mary Read, Ryan Kelly

In “Secret Mary,” danced without musical sound by Tess Dworman, devynn emory, Ryan Kelly, and Mary Read, some are more comfortable than others with O’Connor’s non-presentational-ism.  When reedy Read attempts to get floppy, her strong technical roots peek through; rather than embodying the quirkiness, she demonstrates it from outside in.  

On the other hand Dworman has a natural, pedestrian ease without blurring her shapes or dynamics.  Former ballet dancer Kelly immerses himself convincingly in O’Connor’s eccentric vision.  And androgynous emory, who deliberately erases – even in her program bio – all reference to gender, moves with confident determination and soft-edged clarity.

The dance moves along with minimal recapitulation; the mysterious journey progresses, sweeping us along in its wake.  O’Connor’s movement is its own message, but occasionally an image it evokes is ineffably literal.  Fussy hand gestures in places seem to indicate food preparation (O’Connor is a gourmet cook.)  And he final moment looks like a murder; it takes you aback, emotionally.  

The five dancers in the longer “poem” – Natalie Green, Heather Olson, Michael Ingle, Oisin Monahghan, and Silas Riener – inhabit the space for its entire 42-minute duration. No one exits, even when we are focused on a solo or duet; everyone is engaged throughout in an ongoing, evanescent life.  

l-r: Silas Riener, Michael Ingle, Natalie Green, Oisin Monaghan, Heather Olson 

Animated physical conversations give way to leisurely chats.  Olson and Green lounge on the ground, calling “switch” and shifting position.  In their duet, Olson and Ingle stand close together, arms in a high vee-shape, poking the air above and beside their heads.  The three men lie on their backs, shaping their legs into kaleidoscopic patterns.  

l-r: Silas Riener, Michael Ingle, Oisin Monaghan

O’Connor’s choices of dancers ranges broadly in degree of physical articulation from Ingle, who is more of a dramatic than lyrical dancer, to former Cunningham Company star Riener, who is hyper-refined technically and balls-to-the-wall athletic in his attack.  The onstage compatibility of such disparities serves to increase the power of O’Connor’s vision, and his disparate choices coexist compatibly.  

Photo by Ian Douglas

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

In her concert at Dance New Amsterdam (Ocyober17-20), Sunhwa Chung opens with a Korean traditional solo, “Of Love and Memories.”  Then, her company of eight Asian and white dancers performs her featured full-company works, “Epilogue,” “Arirang – We Go Beyond the Crossroad,” and “The City From the Sky: Coming Together,” along with three smaller dances, all in her brand of Western modern dance. 

In “Epilogue,” eight dancers carry folding chairs onto the stage, line them up, re-arrange them, and use them in various ways for support.  Dressed in street clothes, the dancers focus frontally; we don’t really know who they are to each other or why they are so agitated.  Music by Clint Mansell and Zbynek Matejo drives the action.

The premiere, “Arirang,” is a suite that reflects on Chung’s departure from Korea and assimilation to the United States.  The assimilation is apparent in the borrowed modern dance tropes that comprise her choreography.  Hands swiping across the face, crisscrossed arm shapes, side tilts in parallel passé, and falling rolls over the hips are among her favorite motifs; they recur persistently.  White blouses and black skirts, embossed with a large white donut shape make the women dancers seem like either a team or facets of the same person.  

After a sweetly defiant opening violin interlude by nine-year-old Sarang Chung West – Chung’s daughter and a rugby player on her school team – the tone of the work is consistently dark and intensely emotional; it remains on a single dynamic level throughout.  Live music by Korean percussionist Vongku Pak on traditional instruments has an evenness that matches the movement.  Lighting by Miriam Nilofa Crowe shifts sometimes abruptly to alter the stage space from mellow washes to shadowy streaks to diagonal pathways.  It’s effective if not very refined.  

We can see Chung’s grasp of compositional craft; a trio counterpoints a quartet, dancers use the full range of the limited space, they flow between levels, entrances and exits flow without seeming arbitrary.  In short, Chung adheres to elements of “good composition.”  In a couple of passages, the lack of an extra male means that, with obvious difficulty, a woman must act as a lifting partner for another.  Anxiety and a sense of impending doom pervade the piece without the emotional contrast to provide context.

The dancers execute the movement efficiently, but because of Chung’s vaguely articulated emotional intentions for her characters, it’s difficult for the performers to rise to individual distinction or achieve clarity, although at least one does: Frenchman Benjamin Gaspard displays electric physicality and piercing focus; his kinetic vibrancy so excels that he captures our visual attention, whenever he is onstage.

After intermission, a trio, “Inevitable Convergences: The Last Story,” finds Gaspard narrating (in French) and dancing in a kind of “No Exit” situation with Alissa Wall and Ishiguro on, in, and around three of those ubiquitous folding chairs, they used in “Arirang.”  Soaring, orchestral music by Stephen Warbeck swallows the dance.  

“No One Knows But You” is Chung’s contemporary solo paints a portrait of a woman, confronting – or seeking – her own truth in a mirror that stands in an upstage corner of the stage.  She wears a magenta shift and uses high heels as her prop – both or one or none.  It is a counterpart to “Love and Memories,” where the traditional garb of delicate pastel chiffon and an umbrella hat depicts a fragile, stylized woman without her own agency.  Chung’s committed performance in both solos makes them convincing.  

The obligatory “upbeat” finale, The City from the Sky: Coming Together,” uses one of Danny Elfman’s pounding, familiar movie theme songs alongside equally catchy music by Hwang Sang Jun and Kodo drumming.  Urbanites in black suits and white shirts dart laterally across the stage, throwing in occasional somersaults and attention-pulling tricks.  At ninety minutes, the show gives us more than our fill of mid-20^th century modernism – competent but by now irrelevant.  

Photos by Lexi Namer

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

Performer/philosopher Keith Hennessy likes to flaunt rules.  During his aptly titled “Turbulence (a dance about the economy),” the San Francisco-based artist declares in one of his impassioned declarations that his performers are “private contractors,” which freaks out the administration at New York Live Arts where they’re playing (October 4-6), because they’re supposed to be covered by workmen’s compensation and have proper deductions taken, etc.  

Hennessy breaks down for us the budget of this work, for which he’s received more funding than for any other in his career.  Most of the comparatively lavish funding, of course, went to airfares and hotel rooms, although the performers are getting paid a moderate fee.  And he takes pains to point out that, no, the foreign performers are not working illegally in the U.S.; instead, they’re part of this “research project” that is “Turbulence.”  Oh, and by the way, does NYLA have special insurance for the trapeze that hangs onstage from the grid and supports as many as three or four performers at a time during the show? 

The décor comprises flattened cardboard boxes taped to the white floor and the rear wall into a “carpet” and “mural” of sorts.  Hennessy and his fearless performers produce skillfully modulated chaos, determined by an improvisational structure that includes a certain number of events that must happen, though when and where are not determined. 

The cast is in action as the audience enters the theater.  Lanky Irishman Ruairi (Rory) leads various audience members to onstage seats, where they can watch the action up close and personal.  He offers to share with us the whiskey he and others are tippling.  We simply submerge in the multi-ring circus of exotic episodes, sampling bits like a buffet and marveling at the range of the performers’ imaginations.  The start and finish of the performance are purposely vague, and the audience is encouraged to hang out with the performers – naked and clad – afterwards.

Jessem Hindi produces an ungodly racket with his computer and electronic toys, plopped on the floor amid a tangle of cables.  (I’m glad I accepted the earplugs offered.)  Seated at a table at the side, lighting designer Shelby Sonnenberg plays with the lights: a warm wash of light turns dark and shadowy; house lights go on and off willy-nilly; rolling instruments pick out individual actions to highlight.

Through the apparent chaos, charismatic Hennessy keeps referring us back to the notion of economic inequity.  He channels his rage at the unfairness of the economic system into this intense theater experience, which – save its prescribed landmarks – is never the same twice.  Between his own vigorous improvisation stints, he sits and chats with the audience before rejoining the fray.  All his collaborators exude personality and presence, but you never miss Hennessy.  Even his most inconsequential move captures attention.  

Groups tussle in twos, threes, and more, climbing on and lifting, and carrying each other in good-natured bouts that are simultaneously combative, sensuous, and loving.  Guest artist Ishmael Houston-Jones makes love to Hana Erdman’s feet, kissing, stroking, and rubbing them on his face.  A swath of gold, sequined fabric sweeps through the action, perhaps symbolizing the filthy lucre of capitalism.

One of the required landmarks is a pyramid of kneeling women from the audience, whose heads are wrapped in triangles of the shimmering gold fabric.  Another, presumably, is Houston-Jones’s stripping naked and having the cast swaddle him in pink chiffon and cover him with the golden “shroud” and Hana Erdman’s black platform high heels.  

Later, the cast hefts Houston-Jones to their shoulders and struggles up the stairs, bearing him aloft in a ritual funeral – the golden calf, stripped naked and borne to its just reward.  

Very pregnant, Canadian guest artist Dana Michel capers around, her belly seeming to grow with each new entrance.  Portly Empress Jupiter, as flamboyant as his name, wears a series of lacey black sheaths over loud patterned clam digger pants and comments to the audience about the onstage happenings.  Upstage, Jesse Hewit turns cartwheels and somersaults.  Gabriel Todd disco dances down front in his skivvies in a remarkable show of stamina, as other cast and audience members join and leave him, endlessly doing his side-to-side “pony” step. 

You watch whatever episodes of the non-stop action you like, and there’s plenty to take in.  People shed clothing or don garments that others have discarded.  Periodically, Hennessy clears the clothes off the floor, as if grooming his nest.  And he shows some aerial skills on the trapeze, tangling upside down and every other which way with Julie Phelps and Emily Leap.  Downtown diva Faye Driscoll, who happens to be in the audience, joins in some trapeze pulling and pony-ing in the Occupy spirit.

Hennessy’s iconoclastic work is metaphoric on myriad levels.  Commentary from him and his cast refer us back to his theme of economic inequity, so the matrix of random action really lives up to the dance’s parenthetical subtitle.  It “unearths the power in refusing the ve

Music has traditionally provided the sea upon which to set dance steps afloat – according to, I think, George Balanchine or someone equally noteworthy.  In her new “Danza Permanente,” performed at the Kitchen, September 26-30, DD Dorvillier appropriates none other than Ludwig von Beethoven’s String Quartet #15 in A Minor, Op. 132, “Heiliger Dankgesang” (Song of Holy Praise), as the ocean, on which to set sail.  But when the music is that auspicious, and you can’t even hear it during the dance, you can’t help feeling that you’re being swindled somehow.  

l-r: Naiara Mendioroz, Walter Dundervill, Nuno Bizarro, Fabian Barba

The dance painstakingly translates the rhythm and structure of the score, note for note, into movement.  For the duration of the first movement, Assai sostentuto, the conceit is fascinating.  The game of tracing the musical lines becomes a kind of game; we note the instrumental interplay, assiduously embodied by Naiara Mendioroz and Fabian Barba as the voices of the violins, Nuno Bizarro as that of the viola, and Walter Dundervill, the violincello.  

Occasionally, one of the dancers counts off a vocal “one, two.”  The dancing largely comprises prancing footwork below with torso tilts above with shaped arms that stretch overhead or tilt the trunk from side to side like pump handles.  It’s intriguing for its short 15-minute duration.

But when we reach the second movement, Allegro ma non tanto, we’ve got the conceit, and it seems time for more than literal translation.  The rhythm continues to rule, but since the accompaniment we actually hear is an arrhythmic, atmospheric soundscape by electronic harpist Zeena Parkins, there is room for – and we begin to expect – some further elaboration on the textural quality of the dancing, on the expressive intention of the music, its presumptive emotional connotations.  

l-r: Dundervill, Barba, Bizarro, Mendioroz

As the earnest dancers begin to perspire, we note how sweat patterns darken the dress shirts and runners’ shorts costumer Michelle Arnet has fitted them with.  The woman, Mendioroz, wears a muted tangerine color, her partner violin, tall, youthful looking, Ecuadorian Barba has a magenta shade.  The viola, elegant, ramrod-erect Bizarro from Portugal, is in bright goldenrod, and powerfully intense Dundervill, the cello, is in a copen blue.

The dancers rarely touch each other – save for one swooping lift of Mendioroz by her three partners.  And they look at each other only when their eyes accidentally meet – except for one brisk passage where Bizarro repeatedly swings his arms overhead with a flourish, each time focusing on a different person.  Most notably, Dundervill invests every phrase with an intensity of focus and commitment that breathes vibrancy into it; whether or not the choreographer has told him her version of what his intention should be, his vivid presence tells its own compelling story. 

To her credit, Dorvillier endeavors to pursue provocative intellectual propositions in creating her dances, and to judge by the warm reception of her audience, her rendering of this concept captured their interest.  But Dorvillier’s diligent exercise in musical mimickry looks like the first draft of a multi-layered treatment of the concept that craves further exploration.  It’s the scaffolding, on which to build a fully formed being that hasn’t yet found its poeticism. 

photos by Paula Court

(c) Gus Solomons jr, 2012

“The Private Life of Chickens” grew out of its creator Scott Lyons’s decision to give up his vegan diet.  Rumor has it the project was also, in whole or part, his Master’s thesis in dance.  If this is in fact the case, don’t even get me started on diminishing qualifications for a terminal degree in dance!  Lyons’s curiosity about barnyard fowl led to appreciable research and thence this movement theater piece, which alighted upon the stage at Dance New Amsterdam, July 6-7.

Scott Lyons as Gretta

Basing his piece loosely on the traditional tale of Chicken Little, Lyons and three appealing women performers strut, cluck, and cackle on stage, while an earnest, British news reader (Bradford Scobie) narrates from a video screen.  When Scobie is not eyeing the onstage silliness with a bemused smirk, he taunts the chickens from the screen with a flashlight and pelts the barnyard with rubbery penises from a fast food container.  I guess they don’t make rubber chicken nuggets.  

Lyons, whose background is in theater as well as dance, performs with the intensity of a coltish young actor, combined with the ungainliness of an eager non-dancer, and his lack of inhibition knows no limit.  What he has apparently failed to research sufficiently is how to sustain narrative focus and humor, i.e., when enough of a joke – visual or otherwise – is enough.  

l-r: Anne Bloom, Amii LeGendre, and Lindsay Gilmour

Dressed by Nicole Asselin like whimsically hilarious chickens – hoodies with red crests, white-rimmed, Hollywood starlet sunglasses, plastic raincoats, and bloomers made of upside down T-shirts – Lyons’s cohorts are his greatest assets.  Understated Amii LeGendre is a geyser of wry sarcasm; wide-eyed Anne Bloom is comically clueless; and Lindsay Gilmour with her dancerly legs poses and clucks, in Hurculean efforts at attempting to lay an egg.

Lindsay Gilmour

A mock military/industrial debate generates a few deserved guffaws, when the four hens peck at each other’s policies between doing iterations of a generic dance phrase.  And you can’t help chuckling at the ridiculousness of four grownups dressed up like advertising mascots for a fast-food joint.  

l-r: Gilmour, LeGendre, Bloom, and Lyons

Lyons does build some genuine dramatic tension with the machinations of the barnyard denizens to ward off the impending doom of a falling sky.  But his Julia Child imitation outwears its welcome during the first of its several subsequent reprises.  When the obsession with the sky falling switches to that of laying an egg for the gravy that Gretta (Lyons) intends to slather on some store-bought roasters, the piece loses rigor.  It devolves into “schtick,” like a fraternity party skit, with situation and characters no longer evoking the humor.

l-r: Bloom, LeGendre, and Gilmour

Jay Ryan’s lively lighting is a big plus, and Benjamin Cerf coordinates his sound and video design seamlessly with the live action; a larger TV screen would have made it even more effective.  And let’s not neglect rigging designer Scott Parks’s downpour of wafting feathers to eulogize the demise of Mary Beth (Bloom), whom Henretta (LeGendre) – for whatever reason – suffocates with a downy pillow.  Lyons’s character Gretta finally manages to produce a puny little egg from the neck of his inverted-T-shirt groin, which in his enthusiasm, he accidentally smashes. 

photos courtesy of Scott Lyons and Company

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

Celebrating its 50^th Anniversary and making its first trip to the U.S.A. in more than a decade, the Australian Ballet brought four U.S. premieres to the David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center (June 12-17).  As if to prove they go another way, the Aussies’ repertory included versions of classics, choreographed by contemporary dance makers – “Giselle” by Maina Gielgud, “Don Quixote” by Rudolf Nureyev, and Graeme Murphy’s “Swan Lake.” 

The full company roster includes over sixty dancers, most of whom Artistic Director David McAllister brought for this comprehensive season.  Along with members of the fourteen-dancer Bangarra Dance Theatre, directed by of the Stephen Page, they provide an impressive array of talent.  The mixed bill program on June 12 ranged from classic to contemporary to indigenous, for a stunning display of the dancers’ versatility.

The opening act, named “Luminous,” capsulated with film clips the history of the down-under company to give the audience come context.  The movie – compiled by The Apiary with music by Robert John and voice-over artist Robert Grubb – played like a TV show with “commercial breaks” consisting of five dance excerpts, calculated to display the wide stylistic range of the company.  

The Act II pas de deux from Gielgud’s version of “Giselle,” which features Rachel Rawlins and Ty King-Wall, is a standout.  Lanky, fresh-faced King-Wall proves an able partner for Rawlins, whose technical and expressive power makes her Giselle arguably the most magically ethereal we’ve seen.

Diminutive pair, Reiko Hombo and Chenwu Guo, exhibits uncanny control in Nureyev’s re-imagining of Petipa’s “Don Quixote.”  Musical director Nicolette Fraillon leads the New York City Ballet Orchestra in a slower than usual tempo of the familiar Leon Minkus music, exaggerating the dancers’ absolute command of the ballet’s difficult balances, lifts, and leaps.  Hondo’s obligatory fouette turns become doubles, and Guo’s Martial arts-inflected jumps stretch the classical form and ignite the crowd.

A pas de deux from “Molto Vivace” by Stephen Baynes, set to music by Handel, represents a contemporary love duet.  Adam Bull wafts Amber Scott weightlessly, and these two principal artists continue to affirm the company’s technical command and artistic prowess.    

The act closes with the pas de deux and ninth movement from Stanton Welch’s “Divergence,” his setting of Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne Suite No. 2.”  Costumes by Vanessa Leyonhjelm’s put the men in back and belly-baring unitards with lacing across the abs and the women in horned bras and removable tutus that look like broad Elizabethan ruffs.  

photo by Lisa Tomasetti. Artists of the Australian Ballet in Welch’s Divergence

The choreography is self-consciously “modernist,” with symmetrical ranks of dancers twitching their knees and making angular arm gestures that somewhat distract from the soloists’ efforts in the center of this frenetic frame.  Eventually, the women discard their tutus, and all sixteen dancers line up, front to back, in front of a fiery red-lit cyclorama and do cascading port de bras.  It’s a deft assemblage of effects, geared to pure visual impact. 

British choreographer Wayne McGregor’s own company, based at the Sadlers Wells Ballet is aptly named Random Dance.  How interesting it is to watch Australia’s lithe dancers deftly negotiate the arbitrary convolutions and contortions of his “Dyad 1929,” which he presumptuously dedicates to Merce Cunningham!  Its naïve, frontal use of space is the antithesis of Cunningham’s sophisticated spatial three-dimensionality.  

photo by Lisa Tomasetti. Kevin Jackson and Lisa Jones in McGregor’s Dyad 1929.

Set to Steve Reich’s relentlessly persistent Double Sextet, McGregor’s ballet is meant somehow to reference the discovery of Antarctica (as we glean from the program note.)  White backdrop and floor, sparsely dotted with rows of black dots, and a rising and descending horizon-line of yellow fluorescent lights (stage concept by McGregor and light designer Lucy Carter) and the brief white, black, and beige costumes by Moritz Junge set the gelid environment.  Maybe the dancers’ perpetual motion, done at maximum physical tension throughout, is a warming tactic.

 A unique attraction of the repertory is the collaboration with Bangarra Dance Theatre, in which Aboriginal and classical dancers blend seamlessly.  Stephen Page’s “Warumuk – in the dark night,” with a lush instrumental score by David Page is based on Yoingu lore. The ballet explores astronomical imagery – the Milky Way, shooting stars, the celestial Seven Sisters, tides of the moon, and the mystery of a lunar eclipse.  

photo by Jeff Busby.  Artists of AustralianBallet and Bangarra Dance Theatre in Warumukv-in the dark night.

Sets by Jacob Nash and shadowy lighting by Padraig O Suillieabhain complete the imagery, setting the dancing in evocative, primitive locales, where athletic, floor-bound, animal-like movement becomes a metaphor for astronomical themes.  In seven sections, Page’s expert massing of bodies and clear, simple motion create pungent images of nature.  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2012

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, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Beijing Dance Theater – not to be confused with the Beijing Dance Company – appeared at the BAM Harvey as part of the Next Wave Festival, 2011.  Artistic director and choreographer Wang Yuanyuan, perhaps attempting to recapture the childhood fun of bouncing on a mattress, had set designer Tan Shaoyuan cover the dance area with foam padding for her “Haze,” (October 19-22.)  The sixteen dancers – almost never more than eleven onstage at a time – spend seventy minutes exploring different ways of falling and rebounding.  

The dance in three “chapters” – Light, City, and Shore – has a score by Henryk Górecki and the electronic group Biosphere, which is often choppily patched together to serve the choreographer’s stated intention of depicting “the uncertain progress of the individual in times of seismic change beyond his or her control.”  That’s the kind of profound aspiration a dance rarely if ever lives up to.  

The movement alternates between stretchy extensions that collapse into rolls on the resilient floor, hurtling jumps that would be impossible without the soft landing the cushioning provides, and slogging sprints around the space that tax the dancers’ stamina – like running through deep mud.  After about fifteen minutes, the falling motifs begin to repeat, as if she’d run out of possibilities and resorted to rearranging the same motifs with changing speeds, locations, and personnel.  

Although Yuanyuan creates interesting spatial patterning and has lithe and strong dancers, the constant, restless motion and repetitiveness grow monotonous.  Nowhere is there an extended episode that’s long enough to establish a personal relationship.  The dancers romp like children on a playground, or they feign jumping into a swimming pool and splashing around awhile before returning to the rim.  Perhaps because of Chinese cultural ethos, the individual is always subservient to the group.  And they perform with a seriousness that makes it look all the more impersonal.

The lighting by Han Jiang deserves most of the credit for varying the stage picture, as the dancers exhaust themselves running on the mushy terrain and caroming from vertical to horizontal and back again.  He throws them into strong side light that adds sculptural depth; he uses silhouette effectively against a rear wall that resembles a granite cliff; he drenches them in colors that saturate their gray costumes.  The stage is constantly filled with stage fog, of course, which enhances the visibility of the light effects.

The most compelling passage of the dance is the final three minutes, when the cast simply stands absolutely still, while the music swells and snow trickles then showers down on them.  Perhaps it’s simply the contrast to the previous hyperactivity that makes it effective, but there is something gratifying about watching the snow wafting down, coating the stage and landing delicately on the dancers’ bodies frozen in place.  

Photos by Jack Vartoogian

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

 #2 L-R: Adele Nickel (back), Brandin Steffensen and Jessica Weiss (floor), Claire Westby

Liz Gerring creates really lusty, aggressively physical movement. In the world premiere of her new “She Dreams in Code” at BAC (Baryshnikov Arts Center), her strenuous choreograph looks like fun for dancers to do, and her athletic cast of six takes it on with relish – and lots of stamina. Gerring’s vocabulary is at once reckless and controlled, refined and raw. Limbs sometimes purposely don’t fully extend and bodies lurch in ways that strike you as ungainly, which is part of what etches the movement so indelible into your memory.

The black box stage of BAC’s Howard Gilman Performance Space is set up with wings on each side. Behind the dancing, Willy Le Maitre’s sensitively complementary video “set” sprinkles delicate patterns across a silky backcloth that ripples in the breeze of the open studio windows in back of it. Carolyn Wong’s starkly effective lighting blinds us with an initial flash into our eyes that subsides to reveal Ben Asriel, Tony Niederbach, Brandin Steffensen, and Jessica Weiss standing onstage in Jillian Lewis’s form-fitting costumes in shades of gray.

Gerring deftly distributes the elements of the first phrase among the four – deep lunges, round-off handstands, and a precarious pose balanced on one foot and hand with body pitched over and free leg stuck in the air. When the four fall to the ground in semi-darkness, Adele Nickel and Claire Westby enter in a bright upstage corridor with a different arrangement of the same motifs.

#4 Brandin Steffensen, Jessica Weiss

One thing that makes Gerring’s choreography so memorable is that she explores the possibilities of her thoughtfully designed phrases – archetypal outlines, attacked with force and headlong, risky momentum – before introducing new material. She brings one kinetic conversation to a conclusion, as it were, before broaching another topic. That gives her dances the expressive power and cohesiveness that’s missing from so much current modern dance, which tends – like our contemporaneous short-attention-span patter – to jump all over the map, trying to hold your attention with random snippets instead of real substance.

#3L-R: Brandin Steffensen and Jessica Weiss, Tony Neidenbach and Claire Westby

Gerring’s hour-long essay is packed with delicious movement morsels and meaty chunks – an adagio arabesque phrase that Westby repeats at different times and locations after introducing it with Nickel upstage; a lift where a supine Steffensen, balancing Weiss with his hands on her hips, lowers her to lie on top of him; and stage crossings, where dancers drop into a deep parallel squat, lurch forward onto a hand, and scramble up to standing.

The dancers move with solid muscular articulation and authority rather than freakish flexibility or mannered eccentricity. Gerring’s movement choices positively revivify the modern dance lexicon with a freshness borne of expressive commitment, not acrobatic sensationalism. Although she maintains a fairly low profile, Gerring is one of those dance makers that connoisseurs appreciate and the general public should get to know better, and that could happen after her performances in this year’s sold out Fall For Dance Festival, October 27 through November 6.

Photos by Julieta Cervantes

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

The Berliner Ensemble appeared at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in its 2009 rendition of “Dei Dreigroschenoper” with direction, stage setting, and light concept by Robert Wilson.  It’s another of Wilson’s masterpieces of style and visual mastery.  Architect and painter turned director of spectacle, Wilson turns the stage into a canvas for his singular, painterly visions of operas and other works, some of his own creation like his seminal 1976 collaboration with Philip Glass and Andy DeGroat, “Einstein on the Beach,” which is due for yet another revival in 2012.  

“The Threepenny Opera,” the German classic written by Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill remains as politically relevant now as when it premiered in 1928 with its depiction of criminality, in a society of unbalanced wealth distribution, corruption, and police complicity with the criminality.  And as the denouement of the play cynically suggests, no matter how bad things look for the hero, some deus ex machina will swoop down and save the day at the last minute.  In this case, it’s in the form of a royal decree, giving Macheath a reprieve from the gallows in celebration of the queen’s coronation.

The Berliner Ensemble in Robert Wilson’s production of “The Threepenny Opera”

Macheath, played with arrant androgyny by Stefan Kurt, is a gangster with insatiable sexual appetites and two wives, Polly Peachum (Stefanie Steppenbeck) – daughter of his boss Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Jurgen Holtz), the head of a gang of beggars – and Lucy (Anna Graenzer) – daughter of his protector Tiger Brown (Axwl Werner), London’s police chief.  Wilson sets the scene with a parade across the stage apron of the all characters, brilliantly costumed by Jacques Reynaud to look like 18^th century Englishman William Hogarth’s caricatures.  The performers faces are painted white with exaggerated features.  

Wilson’s extraordinary stage pictures are like three-dimensional paintings.  One might say paintings come to life, but there’s the problem: there’s virtually no theatrical action in the piece; it’s a series of intriguing tableaus that would be appropriate for a coffee-table book, which you could pick up and put down at will.  At BAM, you’re stuck in a cramped seat for three hours, forced to watch the pages turn at Wilson’s deliberate pace until the end of the tome.  

Angela Winkler, Stephan Kurt

The brothel, for example, is visually ravishing, with nine pool hall lamps overhead that glow pink, as red curbs on the ground rise, tightening the frame, and then separate into horizontal stripes across the space with Macheath’s ladies of the evening popping up at various levels between them like paper doll cutouts.

Stefan Kurt, Angela Winkler

Fluorescent tubes that run vertically, horizontally, and diagonally to form the interior backdrops in several scenes, create a stroboscopic effect, when people in silhouette crossing in front of them.  

Stefanie Stappenbeck, Stefan Kurt

The members of the Berliner Ensemble do their best to transcend the rigor of the staging, especially gender-bending Kurt, golden-throated Winkler, vivacious, full-voiced Steppenbeck, and Jurgen Kurtz and Traute Hoess as Macheath’s in-laws the Peachums.  The picaresque bandits and prostitutes come in a rich assortment of shapes, sizes, and breadths of characterization.  

Wilson’s first act – which runs Brecht’s first two acts together – lasts for two hours, and after ninety minutes, rear end cramping, nature calling, your concentration turns to the intermission, which can’t come soon enough.  The brief second act – 40 minutes – when the plot thickens and dramatic tension should build, is just more of the same handsome stasis.  The density of the tableaus increases with more people onstage, but the dramatic tension remains locked in the intellect.  It doesn’t help that reading German-to-English supertitles splits our focus and exhausts our vision.  

As a visual artist, Wilson’s talent is undeniable, but as a theater director, he’s still a visual artist.  Theater demands kinetic as well as visual and dramaturgical artistry.  Stylization is a fine place to start in rendering Brecht/Weill’s sardonic work, but Wilson files down its satiric teeth to a nub, replacing emotion with eye candy. 

All photos by Stephanie Berger

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

In the little town of Toccoa, Georgia, there lives a family, just like any other – only not exactly.  At the patriarch Robert’s regular Sunday back-yard barbecue in Scene Two, we learn that this is a “Chosen Family.”  Gradually, we find out that family members Robert, Maxwell, and Casss began life in the wrong bodies.  The story, based on Kate Davis’s documentary film “Southern Comfort” – unlikely as it may seem – has been turned into a heartwarming new musical of the same name by Dan Collins (book and lyrics), Julianne Wick Davis (music), and Thomas Caruso (director).  It’s playing through October at the CAP21 Theater in Chelsea.

The plot deals sensitively and truthfully with the terrible consequences of their secrets’ being discovered by the outside world in which they have to function every day, with their difficulty accepting new members into their small, secret circle – Robert’s mannish, transvestite beau Lola and Maxwell’s new male-to-female heartthrob, Cori (Natalie Joy Johnson), and with their excitement, going to the annual trannie convention in Atlanta, called Southern Comfort or “SoCo.”  Finally, Robert’s death gives them all greater insight and reinforces their sense of self-acceptance and worth.    

Scenic designer James Fenton transforms the whole black-box theater space into the rear section, deck, and back yard of this rural, southern homestead, complete with a traditional porch glider, and makes one of the two pillars in the space into the family’s beloved, hallowed tree.  Several audience members are even seated along one side of the porch, bringing us intimately into the action.  And lighting by Ed McCarthy does a lot with fairly minimal lighting instruments to change moods with subtle and dramatic tonal shifts.    

Photography by Matthew Murphy

through October 29

CAP21 Studios, 18 West 18th St. (bet 5th and 6th Aves.)

Wed.-Sat., 7 p.m.

$18

866-811-4111 

or www.cap21.org

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

You can’t help admiring Katherine Helen Fisher’s ambitiousness.  She’s very much the artistic spawn of the 21^st century; she’s into media mixing, collaboration, athletic dancing, and crowd-pleasing.  Her show on Dance: Access at Danspace Project (September 29-October 1) – presented by thisiswater Productions, whose neon sign in the entrance filled the lobby with a garish glow – clearly showed stylistic influences of her past and current employer/mentors, Momix and Lucinda Childs, with some Paul Taylor-inspired bound muscularity tossed in.  

Her program consisted of a world premiere and a dance from 2010 – the more successful of the two, “Finite and Infinite Games.”   In it, a 12’ by 48’ painting backs the action; it’s a vivid, geometric abstraction by visual artist C. Finley that showerrs big and small triangles and squares in autumnal reds, yellows, beiges, and browns across its span.  Four men in tuxes and five women in couture gowns by Gai Mattiolo sweep and swirl through nine scenes of pure movement.  

On a video screen, hung from St. Mark’s Church balcony, plays a film of the same dance, performed at Judson Church.  It matches the live version, although the cast is slightly different.  Sometimes, it’s fun to compare the video with the live, but at other times the electronic version becomes a needless distraction.  

The video announces each the name of  each section – “No One Can Play a Game Alone,” “A Finite Game Occurs Within a World,” “Nature is the Realm of the Unspeakable,” et al.  The relationship of the overblown titles to the dancing is rarely apparent, since the sections vary mostly only in the music that drives them – Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Moondog, Michael Nyman – and even that all has similar tone, ecstatic and shimmering.  

Titling her own solo “I Am the Genius of Myself,” is a triumph of chutzpah, but Fisher – petite, toned, and platinum blonde – pulls it off with sparkling presence.  She has eye-catching dynamic attack, lightning-quick direction changes, and fully extended lines.  “A Story Cannot Be Obeyed” is a solo done by Todd Burnsed live and simultaneously by Ari Loeb on film.  Tall, wiry Burnsed moves with the controlled fluidity of molten silver.    Like the rest of Fisher’s dancers, he’s a polished professional.

The premiere, “Leading Edge Disturbances” features two clear plastic stair units by Finley – four steps leading up three feet to a square platform – and three narrow rectangular units with sloped tops.  Although transparent, the props still crowd the dancing space.  Athan Vennel’s black and white costumes, made from fabric, onto which one of Finley’s drawings has been printed, presage a narrative that never materializes.  

photo by David Kimelman. Leading Edge Disturbances.

Shakirah Stewart and Jaime Verazin wear tight black pants and white halter tops;  Burnsed and Jeremy Neal are in pants of the fabric, held up with suspenders.  Josh Greene and Sarah Nachbauer have a tailcoat and short-skirted dress, respectively, also made of Finley’s fabric.  

At the start, the “characters” look like a romantic, perhaps royal, couple (Greene and Nachbauer) – standing atop the platforms – with their attendants, pushing them around.  But shortly, the distinction between characters vanishes, and the incipient narrative dissolves into a miasma of movement, some of it on the edge of danger – scaling and running down the stairs, walking in geometric patterns, jumping onto and off the platforms and shoving them into new configurations.  But we have no clue why all the perilous action.  Nathaniel Bartlett’s original score, played live on an enormous marimba with electronic sound modulation, has the same kind of roiling repetitive texture that impels the rest of Fisher’s motion. 

If this piece – inspired, says a program note, by “complex motion patterns created by the disturbances of still fluid when the leading edge of an object moves through it” – represents Fisher’s next choreographic step, it hasn’t yet found a foothold; the work needs focusing and shaping.  One hopes the talented Fisher does not waste the wonderful dancers, strong production values, and exciting visual collaborators she has assembled on work that’s all scrumptious icing without any cake. 

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

Artwork by Adam Shecter. Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey in Tool Is Loot

Wally Cardona is an intellectually rigorous artist with enormous curiosity about the expressive possibilities of dance, and he sets himself fascinating challenges, of which “Tool is Loot” is the latest.  Curated by Yasuko Yokoshi and presented at the Kitchen (9/22-24 and 9/29-10/1), “Tool Is Loot” is curiously compelling because of its curious blend of transparency and opacity.  The performers Cardona and Jennifer Lacey, of course, are worth watching, whatever they do onstage.  And this investigation is part of the real stuff of art, however abstruse.

Last year, Cardona and Lacey worked separately – she in France and he in the U.S. – staging week-long encounters with non-dance experts to subject their esthetic positions to scrutiny and inquiry by people in other disciplines like astrophysics, wine-tasting, film editing, and social activism, among others.  Although none of that movement material appears in this piece, Cardona says, “the work has been formed through aesthetic propositions that persisted because of their foreignness” – a not atypically elliptical notion from Cardona, which I translate to mean that the residue of those previous investigations subconsciously infuses present decisions.   

Lacey, in a fitted tunic and gray calf-length tights, enters the black space, lit dimly by Thomas Dunn – whose lighting throughout is purposely, eloquently pedestrian – and confronts the white folding chair that sits casually mid-stage.  She considers it, squats before it, lies with her calves resting on its seat, climbs onto it.  All the while, Cardona’s disembodied baritone describes the action, “the object in the space, with two stands on the floor and two hanging down… the top part of the object faces up … the object can fold in the middle.”  We contemplate the human as an objective thing.

After she skips off behind the black drapes, Cardona enters on the other side in shirt and jeans, windmills his arms, tiptoes in curving paths, runs here and there, looking for something at the edges of the space, skips around like a love-struck swain.  His actions seem dramatic, even pantomimic; he strokes his chest under his shirt, licks his armpit, and wails into his cupped hands.  Sounds by collaborating composer Jonathan Bepler’s consist of trombone farts, trumpet bleats, an assortment of isolated noises, including his own singing voice, and banging piano chords.

After Cardona leaves, Lacey’s voice tells a tale of the romantic infatuation of an Indian prince for a hairy, mustachioed man, and we realize that it’s the story Cardona has just acted out; it also explains the incongruous literalness.  It’s worth noting that deadpan Cardona is a gifted physical comedian.  

Lacey has an earnest conversation with her folding chair, which, she learns, is envious of Charles Eames’s legendary furniture.  She reassures the flimsy folding chair that style is superficial, while design is a response to a need.  Then she proceeds to have sex with the chair in a way that’s amusingly – and a little disturbingly – graphic.   

When the two dance together, it’s hard not to recall Cardona’s 2008 brilliant collaboration with Rahel Vonmoos and innovative lighting designer Roderick Murray, “A Light Conversation,” a much more kinetically intense encounter than this.  There, at Joyce SoHo, the proximity of the audience, ringing three sides made the work almost unbearably – wonderfully – intimate.  The texture and tenor of “Tool” is delicate and less physically compelling but still philosophically rich in the queries it posits: blurring the line between human and object, the displacement of the enactment and narration of the fairy tale, its almost-a-palindrome title…   

Cardona draws back the black curtain to reveal a huge, blindingly white projection screen, lashed to a pipe frame.  Dunn uses low front light to throw shadows of the dancers on it, as they rock back and forth on the floor.  About an hour into the piece, the dancers exit behind the screen, which then goes through its own seven-minute “dance” of vivid color washes, a full moon that brightens into a white-hot sun, a view of the galaxy that dissolves into cloudy miasma, and finally total darkness.

Through October1

The Kitchen

512 West 19^th Street

Thursday-Saturday, 8pm

Tickets $15

212-255-5793 or

www.thekitchen.org

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

The title of this new musical at the Acorn Theater was a survival tactic for homosexuals in the fifties, when it was actually illegal for women to wear pants or tend bar, for guys to dance with other guys, and for anyone to be gay – a couple of facts we learn from Mary, the owner of Mary’s Hideaway, a little club off Sunset in 1953 Hollywood, a welcoming hangout for “ladies and gentlemen and those who are still making up their minds,” Mary quips.  

“Play it Cool,” opening September 14, is conceived and co-written by Larry Dean Harris and Martin Casella with music by Phillip Swann and lyrics by Mark Winkler.  It’s a screed against the fifties’ homophobia – that forced people to live dishonest lives – in the guise of a Humphrey Bogart, “tough guy” movie spoof.

Michael F. McGuirk in Play it Cool

Mary (Sally Mayes) is a pants-wearing, out-and-angry lesbian, who was intimidated from fulfilling her promising singing career by homophobic threats; instead, she runs the jazz bar but refuses to perform there.  Her blond, ultra-femme partner (Robyn Hurder) – who’s still not out – sings with the band in her place.  Henry (Michael F. McGuirk, doing his best Bogart imitation) is an undercover cop who protects the Hideaway from police harassment – for a price – ostensibly because he’s a jazz fan.  

Eddie (Chris Hoch), an in-the-closet Hollywood producer, shows up with his latest trick, whom he picked up in the bus station john.  That’s Will (Michael Buchanan), who just fell off the Greyhound turnip truck, after getting kicked out by his southern family, when he came out to them.  Everybody – except maybe naively candid Will – has secrets, which all come to light.

l-r: Robyn Hurder, Michael Buchanan, Sally Mayes, McGuirk, and Chris Hoch in Play it Cool

Plot complications keep the pace lively with not altogether unpredictable surprises, like the B-movie melodramas the show is riffing.  Setting it in the fifties keeps the gay liberation/oppression stuff from seeming whiney.  Police raids, casting couches, and sham marriages were all facts of life at the time, and Harris and Casella’s book tries deftly to balance blitheness with the danger.

Swann’s music is harmonically complex, and it has the rhythm and fluency of be-bop jazz improvisation.  Five other songwriters are credited for some of the songs.  The voices of the cast are musically true, and – refreshingly – there’s not a big belter in the bunch.  Their vocal ease belies the difficulty of the music.  Mayes’s vinegar-and-honey voice has a broad palette of tonal colors, and she scats up a storm in “Jazz is a Special Taste,” teaching Buchanan how it should be done.  And Buchanan as her protégé is an apt student.  

Hurder’s reedy voice isn’t loud, but it’s clear, winding nimbly around Swann’s tricky melody in “Whatever it Takes,” her declaration of situational morality.  Hoch brings a resonant baritone to “Happy Ending” a healthy helping of double entendre, and McGuirk more than holds his own as an actor who can actually sing with his poignant “How Do I Go Home Tonight?”

The terrific three-piece combo gives the show a great musical through line – director David Libby on piano, Dan Fabricatore on double bass, and Dan Gross on drums – with authentically cool jazz flavor.  Set designer Thomas A. Walsh places the establishment in a basement, with the stairway from street level wrapping around the bar, which is adjacent to an alcove where the band nestles, under the upstairs hallway that leads to Mary and Lena’s bedroom.  It’s a cozy “hideaway,” whose neon sign is inside, so the location’s a secret from those who don’t need to know.  

the cast of Play it Cool. photos by Joan Marcus

Through October 9

PLAY IT COOL

Acorn Theater, 410 West 42^nd St.

Tue 7pm, Wed 2, 8pm, Thu, Fri 8pm, 

Sat 2, 8pm, Sun 3, 7pm

$65, 212-239-6200

www.playitcoolmusical.com

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

“Wallstories” is the brainchild of Nejla Yatkin, originally from Berlin with Turkish roots.  One of this year’s dance offerings at the NYC Fringe Festival, the hour-long work centers around personal stories of life before, during, and after the Berlin Wall slashed the vibrant East German city in two during the Cold War.  The text comprises Yatkin’s interviews with several subjects who experienced the era.

Projected images by video designer Michael K. Rogers and Yatkin and Yatkin’s photos form an animated backdrop.  Lighting with dramatic flair by Carolyn Wong, and music by Pink Floyd, Sherman and Larsen, and J.S. Bach, back a cast of eight dynamic dancers in the eleven-part suite.   Yatkin has both a keen theatrical eye and the craft to turn her inspirations into physically rich, touchingly expressive movement.  

At the beginning, the dancers in trench coats are walking towards the rear wall, on which plays a grainy film clip of President John F. Kennedy in Berlin.  Singly, the dancers collapse to the ground and rise again.  Then, to Larsen and Sherman’s “Berlin Wall” we’re transported to a cabaret where a sardonic chorus line routine is happening, while behind it two men (Shay Bares and Derek Crescenti) are French kissing.

photo by Kokyat.  The cast in Wallstories

In “Helpless on the Wall,” people on three sides slowly back up, shrinking the cell in which elegantly linear Ahmaud Culver tries to stretch his long frame with increasing frustration.  The text over Bach’s “Cello Suit No. 6” declares, “Freedom is the most important thing.”

In another section, the cast, lined up from front to rear, marches shoulder to shoulder across the space, and individuals burst out into solos, only to be absorbed back into the rank.  Later, the line returns from the opposite side, this time stamping their feet in military precision; they’re in darkness, carrying flashlights.

There are passages that stir real emotion, like Marissa Maislin impassioned solo – she flings herself into the air, and her percussive breathing erupts into grunts, as she desperately seeks liberation.  And four women – sisters, mothers, and wives – attend their fallen men, covering their faces with handkerchiefs and annealing their bodies for burial.

In “Grandmother’s Gaze,” the cast, lying prostrate, passes diminutive Karin Lesko precariously along their uplifted arms, then support her feet with their hands, as she clambers along the rear wall, against projected graffiti from the real Wall and words from a young girl who only knew about the Wall from her grandmother.  

photo by Kokyat.  Karina Lesko and cast in Wallstories Using the individual talents of her dancers, including also Sevin Ceviker, Rachel Holmes, and Fadi Khoury, Yatkin has fashioned an affecting portrait of an era that is at once specific to the Berlin of the past and universal in its emotional resonance about the spiritual liberation of faith, love, and the inspiration of art. 

Only the disconcertingly uplifting finale titled “For the People of Berlin,” a unison passage, set again to Bach’s cello suite, seems a rather glib portrayal of triumph.  And the subsequent attempt to engage the audience in an onstage “victory dance” might have worked better in a less pressured atmosphere than the Fringe, where the next show is champing at the bit to set up even before the previous one ends.  As an ending, it might have been infuriating, had what preceded it not been so powerfully moving. 

© 2011, Gus Solomons jr, 

photo by Matthew Murphy. Cisne Negro Dance Company in Calunga

Let’s give the Brazilian Cisne Negro Dance Company the benefit of the doubt that the Brazilian folk legend that inspired Rui Moreira just happens to involve a tall woman with an umbrella and people rippling a swath of blue fabric to simulate a flowing stream in front of her, but one section of his 2011 “Calunga” – seen in its New York premiere at the Joyce (August 15-20) – looked way too much like the “Wade in the Water” section from Alvin Ailey’s classic “Revelations,” to escape notice.  

In “Calunga,” – the final dance on the program of this 34-year-old company, directed by its founder Hilda Bitttencourt – the dancers enter in a group from an upstage corner.  They wear Gustavo Silvestre’s Balinese-looking headdresses and embossed bikinis, and they’re saturated in intense pink light, devised by Moreira and Raquel Balekian.  They ripple their torsos in Afro-Brazilian style, and they dance is obviously narrative, although we’re given no clues about specifics.  After lots of ritualistic circling and stomping, everyone poses in a travelogue photo, wearing capes and holding another umbrella even larger than the first one.

Hard as it tries, the choreography is perfunctory at best and the dilatory performance by eleven of the company’s dozen dancers on opening night made one question their stamina.  In the program, twelve are listed in the cast but only eleven appeared, so perhaps they were filling in for someone injured during the show.  Even so, Francisco Mignone’s 1940s movie musical-sounding music only exaggerates the superficiality of the dance.

Earlier in the program, the dancers showed real talent; they’re young and appealing and enthusiastic.  And the men especially represent a rainbow of racial hues.  But too often, they look as though they lack coaching; lines are sometimes not fully extended and transitions aren’t fulfilled.  Energy is high during the opening ballet, “Flock” (2007) by Gigi Caciuleanu, who also devised the costumes.  The ballet is set to Stravinsky’s two works with ‘fire’ in the title – “Firebird” and “Fireworks.”  Thus, the costumes go from black to red – tutus on both men and women –symbolizing transformation from black swans into firebirds.  

photo by Matthew Murphy. (l-r) Diogo Santos and Morvan Teixeira in Flock

Caciuleanu starts with a tidy, formal opening – three men on one side opposite a man and woman.  As other dancers enter, the formality collapses into a jumble of couples vying for attention.  Acrobatics are the choreographer’s stock in trade; men upend women in split lifts and tote them around; and she throws in Capoeira kicks and tumbling, too. 

Entrances mostly feature pairs of dancers, crooking their arms like wings, one curving up and the other down, making figure eights or infinity signs.  Then, the dancers saunter offstage after their tricks, as if they were invisible to us.  It’s choreography that might have been made for film, where transitions are optional, you can cut out what you don’t want seen, and you can retake the steps that don’t go so well.  Onstage, however, everything shows, and we see all the above shortcomings.

“ABACADÁ” by co-director Dany Bittencourt takes its structure and title from the rondo form of Andre Mehmari’s jazz-inflected clarinet and piano score that accompanies it.  Each “A” section is choreographed, and the “B,” “C,” and “D” interludes are improvisational.  The music has a happy lilt and the dancers indulge in a private game that looks like more fun for them than it is for us.

photo by Matthew Murphy.  (l-r) Marcelo Gomes and Charles Yang in Paganini

Not surprisingly, the hit of the opening evening was a one-night-only performance by Marcelo Gomes of his “Paganini” with Charles Yang playing the composer’s  “Caprice in A minor” onstage with him.  (So popular was the piece in fact, they’ve added an additional performance on Saturday.)

Gomes, the outstanding principal with American Ballet Theater, banters playfully with Yang and the music, making it a friendly discussion.  Gomes can do anything he chooses with his gifted body, and his playful choices range far beyond the classical vocabulary.  The native Brazilian, who grew up in Miami deploys his torso and hips with intuitive passion, giving his technically immaculate jumps and turns a lusciously sensual personality.  Yang’s skill on the violin matches Gomes in virtuosity and aplomb, and they have an enviably good time.  Watching this pair of stars turn their crafts into artistry is well worth a trip to the Joyce this Saturday night – if you can get a seat. 

© 2011, Gus Solomons jr, 

At the 2011 New York International Fringe Festival, Carlos A. Cruz Velázquez presented his company, Colectivodoszeta (a tongue twister of a name) at the intimate 4^th Street Theater in the premiere of his new “… unwanted,” a dance for six women.  The 45-minute piece features original music and sound design by Giovanni Escalera and lighting by Simon Cleveland.

The women stand still for a long moment at the beginning, building expectation.  They’re unambiguously feminine, bare-footed and wearing dresses.  Their powerful calmness pervades the small black-box theater.  At last, Zoe Blake crosses the stage and in profile circles her shoulder slowly, sensually, stretches her hand forward, and sinks into her opposite hip; she cradles her face in the crook of her elbow and loops a foot behind herself.  

One by one, the others take up the phrase, each varying it slightly with her own inflection.  They walk briskly in rectangular pathways on an invisible grid, creating a rich visual texture. The women seem unaware of each other, motivated by something they won’t share with us.  Are we, the audience, unwanted?  The trading of motifs continues through a series of side falls, upping the physical energy but not the emotional ante.

Each of the women makes a break to escape the group, but it overtakes and subdues her.  Here, the seed of an intense relationship amongst them is sown.  But the relationships don’t grow; every burst of momentum retreats to the refuge of tidy form.  It’s as if the choreographer were unwilling or unable to go where his theme of abandonment and discard wants to take him. 

photo by Stephen Schreiber.  Colectivodoszeta.

About 30 minutes in, three of the women exit, leaving Blake, Lori Bayargeon, and Jennifer Jones onstage.  These are three enormously capable dancers whose kinetic appetites make their dancing a treat to watch.  But Cruz Velázquez gives them no individual characters or puts them into dynamic conflict; they move mostly in unison, reiterating the expository movement we’ve already been sated with.  We’re deprived of a relational complexity to fulfill the emotional punch the dance promises. 

After the trio, Kathryn Rhodes returns in a tank top and briefs for a solo, which introduces a different phrase but still doesn’t advance the emotional stakes.  When the others return, similarly clad, they revert to the prior device of iterating the motif in different formations.  We’re back where we started.

When Rhodes separates herself from the group, it seems an arbitrary liberation, and leaves us still wanting for emotional transformation.  “…unwanted” remains an attractive exercise in movement manipulation but seems afraid to push emotional boundaries to the limit.

© 2011, Gus Solomons jr, 

Doris Humphrey rightly said that all dances are too long, but Christian Von Howard has not entirely taken her admonition to heart.  Nonetheless, although some editing is in order, his concert at DTW (July 21-24) proved that Von Howard really knows his way around a stage.  With a cast of eighteen dancers – including some students from Virginia Commonwealth University, where Von Howard teaches – the New York premiere of his “Triptych” demonstrates impressive mastery of how to move bodies proficiently in space.

“Love,” the first part, set to smokin’ renditions of pop songs by Dinah Washington and Etta James is the kind of fluff that no doubt sets a college crowd squealing in delight, but the notions of love, “Classic,” “Unspoken,” and “Psychotic,” enunciated in the program note, remain intellectual concepts and don’t achieve the physical and kinetic urgency or commitment that elevate dancing to more than animated stage pictures.  

After a film, made by Von Howard, of an infatuated couple groping each other tentatively in a playground, a young man and woman onstage strip off their outer clothing as they slowly approach each other and embrace.  Half a dozen couples – both boy-girl and girl-girl – “slow-dance” cheek to cheek to Dinah Washington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes.”  As lights fade, one partner unzips the back of the other’s dress.  Then, Von Howard in bridal gown and veil gets petulant, angry even, but nowhere near psychotic.

Photo by Jaqi Medlock.  Dancer Courtney Sauls

In the section “Darkness,” however, Von Howard redeems himself choreographically with kinetic intensity and sophisticated spatial patterning.  An opening, unison floor phrase evolves into canonic polyphony.  Later, couples scattered in the space hoist each other aggressively.  Opposing teams push against each other, trying to gain ground only to be repulsed.  Three upstage pairs, counterpoint a downstage row of four, creating a dense yet uncluttered complexity of bodies.  The cast forms a striking diagonal, relaying one small man along it in their arms like a disaster survivor.  Although there’s no specific narrative, the vignettes of “Darkness” make constant reference to the emotional implications of its title.

Perhaps because it follows the explosive energy of “Darkness,” the more lyrical “Light” for seven women seems less emotionally specific and is less gripping.  But spatial motifs and gestures from the former section recur, tying the two nicely together.  The women wear light gray dresses with a horizontal white stripe under the bust – designed and constructed by Tamara Cobus and Von Howard – reminiscent of Crusaders’ tunics, giving us to expect more warrior-like intensity from them.  

Full-bodied orchestral music by David Lang and Nico Muhly occasionally careers towards the sentimental but mostly provides a lush, energetic aural presence that supports the dancing.  Although Michael Jarett’s dramatic intentions are well placed, at times his lighting is too murky to discern the dancing clearly.  

The opening piece by guest choreographer Susan Douglas Roberts “breath to bone” is a premiere, which perhaps needs more time to marinate before manifesting its intentions.  At the start, a standing woman in white becomes a screen for film of a dancer, projected onto her dress.  Around her, a woman does a solo, then a couple dances.  The movement is rich with gentle, fleeting touches and internally focused gestures.  The seven dancers interact but their encounters are expressively vague. 

Technically, lighting this dance presents a virtually insurmountable challenge; we’re expected to read lines of a poem by Daniel Mark Epstein, which glow faintly, illegibly from the rear wall, while we watch live dancers as well as a videoed one.  The pervasive dimness and the dynamic evenness of the movement combined with the obscurity of meaning make the dance soporific.  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

Pascal Rioult, whose company took the stage of the Joyce Theater June 14-19, deserves an “A” in Comp101.  That’s the good news and the bad.  His work is easy on the eyes and the imagination.  Like the choreographic equivalent of a pleasant conversation – neither frivolous nor consequential – Rioult’s dances are polite and gracious.  Karen Young’s beautifully textured costumes and David Finley’s intelligent lighting make them visually handsome.  

Some of Rioult’s movement is genuinely inventive and pungent with emotional implication, but because he doesn’t attach it to a narrative that gives it context, it’s hard to recall once it passes.  Audience members near me – the kinds of people you see at lectures, museums, and symphony concerts – enjoyed Rioult’s lack of complication.  But for the experienced dancegoer, the evening has a lack of new information that soon causes attention to wander.

His all-Bach evening, seen on June 16, concludes with “Celestial Tides” (a world premiere), set to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6.  Rioult ‘s earnestness indicates not an ironic bone in his body, so his movement choices here are dictated by Bach’s dynamics and texture – bounding jumps and swooping lifts.  But when you take on the Brandenburgs, you’re standing in the tall shadow of Paul Taylor, whose treatment of that music is definitive.  Rioult does nothing that sets his version above or apart.  

photo by Sofia Negron. Celestial Tides.

Brian Clifford Beasley devises animated projection backgrounds for this and all the dances on the program.  It’s a smart way to gain a lot of atmosphere without the expense of transporting sets.  For “Tides,” projected abstract artwork by Harry Feiner creates op art effects when the dancers move in front of it.

photo by Sofia Negron. Jane Sato and Jere Hunt in Celestial Tides.

“City” (2010), a quartet danced by Brian Flynn, Michael Spencer Phillips, Jane Sato, and Anastasia Soroczynski, shows us four isolated people, fighting their demons in an urban jungle.  The projection design is slow, continuously changing views of building facades.  Each dancer does a fraught, staccato solo in a rectangle of light, while the others walk on imaginary grids around them. The emotional intensity echoes Anna Sokolow’s classic “Rooms.”  The four subsequently pair up for duets before blending once again into the projected crowd. 

The program (one of two during the week-long season) opens with “Views of the Fleeting World” (2008), a nine-section suite, set to a lush orchestral arrangement of Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue.”  In the first section, “Orchard,” nine dancers in velvety leotards stand rooted (like trees), doing canonic phrases.  For “Gathering Storm,” they wear red skirts pleated like Japanese fans that flare stiffly as they move briskly.  

In “Wild Horses,” the men roll down their leotards to become bare-chested mustangs being broken by their female handlers, still in the skirts.  In “Sudden Rain,” Sato darts about in front of a rain cloud.  “Moonlight” is a duet bathed in a spotlight, in which Penelope Gonzalez and Flynn rearrange their bodies on the ground then struggle to vertical, only to have her sink again, as lights fade.

Rioult’s Graham heritage creeps into these literal vignettes – static postures with cupped hands and flexed feet – although his movement style and dynamics are more kinetically fluid than Graham’s.  He is also fond of frontal spatial arrangements, leaving dancers too often facing the audience instead of acknowledging each other – like writing everything in capital letters.  Choreographing skillfully in the modern tradition, Rioult’s work is well behaved and doesn’t challenge or provoke; it just wants to be liked. 

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

One of Boston’s esteemed dance makers brought her eight-woman company and two musicians to the Cunningham Studio Theater, June 17-18.  Rebecca Rice’s dances show influences of the ballet, Denishawn, and modern dance styles she has studied.  Live accompaniment for cello and for piano provided a welcome additions to the program.  

The dances, which span the years 2004 to 2011, show a great similarity in movement material and emotional range.  Rice gives each piece a short program note to clarify her intention – “The conflicts involved in transformation,” “Layers of hope and melancholy intermingle with [an] eclectic score,” “Celebrates the joy and camaraderie of blissful, creative fun,” etc. – but except for music and costumes the dances look much alike.  Chainé turns, front attitude extensions or arabesques that rise to relevé, and turns with a bent leg extended to the side and L-shaped arms appear in each piece, whether done barefoot or in ballet slippers.     

“Stratas” (2004) to a tonal, contemporary piece by MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and Pulitzer Prize winner John Harbison, played sensitively and forcefully by Sebastian Baverstam on violoncello, is a four-part suite of three solos and a duet, done by two women.  Ann-Marie Cofield and Abbey Kowalec deliver somewhat tentative performances of solos “Sarabande,” “Giga,” and “Preludio,” and duet “Fuge-Burletta” that comprise the dance.     

Mariah Steele, on the other hand, performs the New York premiere of “Verge” with strong, grounded authority, accompanied by pianist Constantine Finehouse playing Christos Koulendros’s dissonant “Dead Cave Marbles” – not easy to dance to.  Steele gives convincing dramatic intention to assertive movement bursts that alternate with contemplative pauses.

photo by Ben Hudson. Mariah Steele in Verge.

“Busy Blues” (1007) sets to offbeat jazz selections by Jonah Jones and Paolo Conte, three solos, a duet, and a quintet of Rice’s standard lexicon with hip wagging and facial mugging added.  The women wear men’s jackets over their black leotards.  It comes off more cutesy than bluesy.

“On Joy and Sorrow” (premiere) takes up where “Bach Dances” (2004) leaves off, although they’re performed in reverse order.  The latter closes the show, since it has the advantage of Baverstam’s live accompaniment – selections from Bach’s cello suites.  This dance marks the evening’s first appearance of Agan Neal (standing in for injured Sara Knight, who couldn’t perform) and of Ariane Georg, who is arguably the troupe’s most accomplished performer.  She commands the stage in her solos – two “Preludes” and “Sarabande” – with polished classical style and urgency of projection.

photo by Ben Budson. Rebecca Rice Dance in On Joy and Sorrow.

While Rice’s dances demonstrate solid choreographic craft, they lack kinetic and dynamic variety.  Also, perhaps due to the stress of having to replace Knight unexpectedly during pressured performance days – and the theater’s stifling lack of ventilation – the stamina of some of the dancers appeared to flag during vigorous passages.  But New York’s a tough town on dancers.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

Presented by Gotham Arts Exchange in association with The Joyce Theater, June 1-12, 2011 

(Full disclosure: Ken Maldonado, the producer of the Festival has been the managing director of my troupe PARADIGM since its founding, and several of the companies presented are led by former students of mine at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, where I have taught for two decades.  In addition, PARADIGM received a 2010 Princess Grace Foundation commissioning grant for Kate Weare to create a dance for my company.  So, I make no claim to journalistic “objectivity” in reviewing the Festival.  I simply want to share my observations about their work with the choreographers and the public in hopes that the feedback might be informative and/or helpful.)

BRIAN BROOKS MOVING COMPANY

Brooks’s seven-dancer company moves like a tornado.  Brooks danced for three years with Elizabeth Streb, which might explain his voracious appetite for stamina-testing activity.  His choreography is full of clever ideas, which has in the past led to some works, whose color-coordinated props and costumes bordered on “decorative.”  But the three dances he presented at the Joyce (June 1, 3, 5) are choreographically solid, and handsomely abetted throughout by Philip Treviño’s dynamic lighting.

Brooks and Treviño created the “tunnel” of silvery elastic cords for “Motor.”  An arc of white cords runs from the rear of the stage all the way into the auditorium.  Three men and three women tussle inside the confined space, remaining segregated for a long while before mixing it up with each other.  In his typical fashion, Brooks repeats contact-inspired motifs in different orientations and combinations of people.  Driven by Jonathan Pratt’s propulsive score, the dancers start out in black slacks and shirts by Liz Prince; as the dance progresses, they shed garments, until they’re down to briefs, bras, and bare chests.

The heart of the 2010 dance is the six-minute, show-stopping duet for Brooks and Aaron Walter.  Slow-motion running in absolute unison has them hopping constantly, simulating frames of a film.  It’s sheer tour de force.  Likewise, Brooks’s 2007 solo “I’m Going to Explode” has him dressed in a business suit, sitting quietly in a chair.  When he removes his shoes and jacket, he turns into a possessed mad man, whipping himself into frenzy, with nonstop vibratory motion to the pulsing music of LCD Soundsystem.

The premiere “Descent” is still a work in progress, a series of still unconnected ideas that lead nowhere as yet.  Caught in beams of intense light, the men trudge slowly across, carrying another inert dancer like a backpack; it suggests astronauts on the moon.  Following this, the cast fans scraps of chiffon aloft like clouds with cardboard squares.  Slow lifting and lowering of partners concludes the dance uncertainly.  “Descent” marks an interesting change of pace in Brooks’s hyperactive repertory.  He’s definitely onto something.

photo by Christopher Duggan. Descent by Brian Brooks; l-r, Danielle McIntosh, Hollis Barnett, Jo-anne Lee, Meghan Frederick, Aaron Walter, Jeff Kent Jacobs.

MONICA BILL BARNES & COMPANY

Monica Bill Barnes and her four female cohorts make few steps go a long way.  The first of three dances in her Joyce show starts out with two women (Barnes and Anna Bass) mincing timidly atop a dining table and the third ends up with baton twirling, confetti cannons, breakaway pants, and a mirror ball.  Barnes’s dances explore gesture and physical attitudes with humor, and she’s not shy about recruiting vaudeville gags to help her along. 

A string of pop songs accompany each of the three dances on the program.  “Suddenly Summer Somewhere” uses live recordings by members of the notorious Hollywood Rat Pack, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.  The built-in applause on the recordings sometimes cues the real audience to join in.  Kelly Hanson, who does all of Barnes’s costumes, dresses “Mostly Fanfare” in white camisoles, black miniskirts, and plumed headdresses, a la Las Vegas showgirls.  Bass’s solo keeps getting interrupted by cardboard cartons getting tossed at her from the wings.  Not to be outdone, she turns the boxes into her partners, stacking them up and gracefully toting the pile off. 

“Everything is Getting Better All the Time” (the premiere) gets its groove from Otis Redding classics like “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” and his irresistible R&B epic “Try a Little Tenderness” with its built-in encores.  How do you top the hailstorm of cartons, flurry of glittering snow, balancing chairs in their teeth, and a mirror ball that occur in “Fanfare”?  By pulling out even more stops – a human pyramid with Barnes, sitting atop Christina Robinson’s shoulders holding three chairs, while Celia Rowlson-Hall and Bass twirl batons, and by engaging the Joyce’s stalwart stage crew as extras, detonating a blizzard of confetti.  

There aren’t actual fireworks, but Jane Cox’s spectacular lighting – with additional lighting by Clifton Taylor – projecting a collage of stars behind the dancers, provides an effective stand-in.  Barnes entertains with a galaxy of theatrical tricks.  The work piles on the visual jokes, and you’re so tickled you almost forget you haven’t also been really touched.  

photo by Christopher Duggan. Monica Bill Barnes’s Things Are Getting Better All the Time; l-r, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Barnes, Christina Robson, Anna Bass

KATE WEARE COMPANY  

In Kate Weare’s remarkably original dances every gesture is anchored with intention, and she and her three dancers, Adrian Clark, Leslie Kraus, and Douglas Gillespie, imbue them all with stunning commitment and emotional specificity.  Her program comprised “Lean-To” (2009) for her three dancers and the world premiere “Garden,” in which she dances with them. 

Clark and Gillespie are symbiotic in “Lean-To.”  They tilt off balance and catch themselves with quick shifts in space; they support each other in off-balances.  Kraus with her flaming red hair is the catalyst, inserting herself between the men to separate and to connect them.  Are they vying to outdo each other for her attention?  Is she trying to split them up or to reconcile them?  Yes to all, depending on your experience of each moment.  Kraus wraps herself around the men, and they pass her between them.  There’s a satisfying balance of suspension and fall, tension and release, and leveraged poses that melt suddenly into unexpected motion.

photo by Christopher Duggan. Kate Weare’s Lean-To; l-r Leslie Kraus, Adrian Clark, Douglas Gillespie

Weare’s design team of Kurt Perschke’s (sets), Sarah Cubbage (costumes), and Brian Jones (lighting) suggests a sci-fi domain for “Lean-To” with a soaring triangular sail that arcs from the ground to the rafters, sleek black clothing, and piercing white side lighting that reflects off the sail.  And for “Garden,” colorful lighting that throws dancers into sharp relief, ash-gray and white clothes – Gillespie in shorts, slacks on bare-chested Clark, Kraus with loose pants, and a dress for Weare – and a tree stump and a living tree hung upside down.

Under the treetop, Weare moves Gillespie’s limbs, while Clark on the stump, in the opposite corner, moves in unison with him, although they can’t see each other – an example of the rapport this tight-knit company shares.  The women join in a heated gestural discussion, etched in profile, and run in opposing, curved paths.  The men stamp their feet and slouch around, subserviently – or perhaps subversively.  For a moment, Clark holds forth on the stump, as if preaching to his flock, and finally they all huddle together on it, momentarily safe – perhaps. 

photo by Christopher Duggan. Kate Weare’s Garden; Leslie Kraus, Kate Weare

CORBINDANCES

Patrick Corbin, a former star of Paul Taylor’s company is now making dances of his own.  In his “Shady,” which received its premiere at the Festival, Corbin shows not only his Taylor roots but also his choreographic process.  The opening section in silence of his nine-part, evening-length dance is a demonstration of how he has his dancers reshape a phrase he invents.  Platinum blonde Morgan Fogarty does the sequence standing, while her five mates, Traci Klein, Orlando Martinez, Sharon Milanese, Christopher Ralph (who also appeared in Dolbashian’s dance), and Meggi Sweeney, do it lying on the floor. 

Then, Corbin breaks out his secret weapon, guest artist Michael Trusnovec, the current star of Taylor’s troupe, whose creamy, sensuous dancing draws focus whenever he’s onstage with confident ease and astonishing clarity of line and shape.  His solo, danced to one of composer Quinn Raymond’s rock inflected numbers, is a wonder of dynamic economy.

In a stark spotlight (Joe W. Novak’s lighting tends toward murky), starting with Fogarty, a hand motif traces geometric lines and loops.  Although after two iterations we get the idea, we must watch a version by everyone in the cast.  The overall content of “Shady” seems abstract, so when Martinez and Ralph barge in on Klein’s sinewy solo and start a gay, heavy petting session, the dance incongruously turns explicitly narrative.  In context, the men’s deep kiss is just way too much information. 

photo by Christopher Duggan. Patrick Corbin’s Shady; Christopher Ralph, Orlando Martinez

Like Barnes, Corbin manages to stretch a small amount of dance material to great lengths – over 75-minutes – but less effectively; every section is longer by half than it needs to be – often the case, when young dance makers try to fill an evening.  That said Corbin shows considerable skill in staging.  The arrangement of unison, canon, and counterpoint for the full company section to Joseph Haydn’s “Piano Concerto in D major” is crisp.  Six dancers fluently fill the stage, repeating the signature motif – a striking pose with a backward-reaching foot tilting the body forward and arms stretched wide, reaching behind the shoulders – leads the eye here and there, as it caroms among the dancers.

SUMMER SAMPLER MATINEES

Festival producer Maldonado went out on a limb by programming Saturday and Sunday matinees during sunny, late spring weekends.  But the two programs of three choreographers each yielded some delights.

On June 4, 5, in pin-drop silence, Kyle Abraham weaves himself a bundle of air with quick, silken arm gestures at the start of his “The Quiet Dance.”  Then, to legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans’s serene, solo rendition of “Some Other Time” begins, his other four dancers pick up fragments of his motifs and elaborate on them in unison and canon.  Even as the movement gains amplitude, the piece remains calm and deeply poetic.  

photo by Christopher Duggan. Kyle Abraham in The Quiet Dance

“Not …Not (Part 1):” perfectly pairs Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt in her tongue-in-cheek, steam of consciousness collage of poses, twitches and tics, and odd connections that take pedestrian movement to a new level of wacky expressiveness.  Apparently random events seem inevitable, and they stimulate you to generate your own fractured narrative.  Their slowed down physical dialog looks like cocktail party banter on Valium.  Holding hands, they lean away from each other.  On hands and knees, Zaritt nudges the backs of Driscoll’s knees, inching her forward.  Side by side, they shake their pelvises like strippers; Zaritt pulls up his shirt.  Then one of the random-seeming sequences repeats verbatim, suddenly giving it choreographic weight.    

photo by Christopher Duggan. Faye Driscoll, Jesse Zaritt in Not …Not (Part I):

Gregory Dolbashian’s “Like the Eagle” is inscrutable.   Sound bites from NPR’s “RadioLab” show and a mixed bag of musical snatches coexist uncomfortably with the generic skittering of five dancers.  The dance blurs in memory.  Perhaps another viewing – or a program note – might help explicate its intention.

On June 11, 12, five wild women in V-back, long-sleeve mini-dresses (by Marlina Kessler) thrash on the ground and scamper around on all fours in Ashleigh Leite’s “The Zoo” (2009).  Their uncanny unisons and stiff-jointed limb whipping can’t help but remind you of the dynamic texture of Leite’s long-time artistic employer Stephen Petronio.  Sparse music by The Magnetic Fields and Leite’s own sound design help sustain the feral tension of this appealingly dangerous, distaff menagerie.   

photo by Christopher Duggan. Ashleigh Leite’s The Zoo; l-r, Jessica Jones, Alexandra Giroux, Madeline Wilcox, Jessica Rajko, Beverly Kerr.

In Julian Barnett’s “Echologue” (2009), he explores the idea of echoing, first of his own backwards and forwards running, stage right, then stage left.  He bangs his body with a microphone, producing sharp pops, and makes vocal sound effects that accompany his movement.  When he plays back the live recording and dances other movement to it, he reinforces the premise.  He wriggles out of his hoody and kicks off his pants and lays them in an “echo” of himself on the ground.  Up to this point, the solo is nicely coherent, and should have ended.  But – perhaps on the advice of his European dramaturge – the dance continues; he removes his shirt and frantically pumps his arms like a crazed boxer, dissipating the tension he’d built with overkill.  Nonetheless, Barnett’s performance is riveting.

photo by Christopher Duggan. Julian Barnett in Echologue.

Two short dances by Sydney Skybetter, which he calls “mathy,” demonstrate his increasing control over his invention and its formal arrangement in time and space.  “Temporary Matters” (world premiere) is a quartet for two couples that has both men and women in luscious midnight blue skirts lined in red by Karen Young.  The music by Johann Johannsson swathes the dancing in Nordic melancholy, but the intricate spatial weaving of buoyant motifs gathers emotional power.  “Halcyon” (2009) is a nine-dancer grid with a tenth, wild card, continually replacing one of them.  The dance, set to romantic music by Enrique Rangel, performed by Kronos Quartet is an astute essay in geometric organization that simultaneously engages intellect and emotion. 

photo by Christopher Duggan. Sydney Skybetter’s Temporary Matters; l-r, Jordan Isadore, Kristen Arnold, Gary Schaufeld, Jennifer Jones.

photo by Christopher Duggan. Sydney Skybetter’s Halcyon; l-r, Jordan Isadore, Liz Beres, Wheeler Hughes, Kristen Arnold, Jennifer Jones (obscured), Kile Hotchkiss, Delphina Parenti, Gary Schaufeld’s hand.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

For its final event before combining with New York Live Arts, Dance Theater Workshop presented a Meredith Monk evening, “Education of the Girlchild Revisited.”  The program consists of the 35-minute solo from her 1972 work as the first act, and music, images, and movement from the “Girlchild” period 1969-1973, as the second, under the title “Shards.” 

The five-day run (June 7-11) is taking place off-site at 3LD Art and Technology Center, located on Greenwich Street in the shadow of the Trade Center.  A packed opening night audience included many artists and fans, who have followed Monk since the beginning of her career (myself included) and marveled at the seamless way she straddles the worlds of dance, music, and theater.

Monk’s extended vocal techniques, which have by now entered the contemporary music lexicon, were born of her intensive study of dance with Merce Cunningham and others in the sixties.  The sounds she is capable of producing with her multi-octave voice stem from a kinetic understanding of the whole body as an instrument – the ululating, percussive breathing, note bending, and myriad textures that constitute her unique aural vocabulary.

As we enter the spacious 3LD theater with its gray walls and wide rows of seating on shallow risers, an ancient-looking, plaster-white figure slouches on a small stool atop a four-step riser at the rear.  A wide swath of ecru fabric covers the stairs, winds in as S-shaped path, and ends downstage right under a matching stool.  When we are seated, three cracking noises announce the start of the piece.  

No one can hold a stage like the diminutive Monk with her mischievously angelic face and spill of fine, straight, chestnut-colored hair (which she lets loose in “Girlchild” and wears in two long braids for “Shards.”)  She straightens up, turns her head, and lifts her right hand at a rate so slow you can barely perceive the motion.  Her glacial tempo slows down our perception of time.  To the strains of simple, modulating keyboard motifs, she nods in rhythm, mimes playing the piano and pulling petals off a daisy.  She sings syllables that morph into words – “day-in,” “dyin’.”

photo by Lorenzo Capellini. Meredith Monk in Education of the Girlchild solo

With a keening wail, she rises, crouches, lies on her side, then stands and pulls off the gray wig.  Over the course of the next half hour, uncannily matching her live voice to apparently her own recorded keyboard accompaniment, Monk traverses the fabric pathway, like Benjamin Button reversing her age.  She removes her eyeglasses and apron and becomes a housewife, then loosens her hair from its chignon and lets it flow down her back and over her shoulders – suddenly, an ingenue.  Her voice alternates between gruff contralto rumbles and falsetto chirping in abstract language.  

The solo depicts three stages of life – dotage, middle age, and youth – into their essences.  She is not a specific character but a distillation of a life.  As she approaches the stool, her steps grow lighter; she throws her arms wide, and even launches into a dance step – a low backward kick and a dip.  Her voice becomes nasal like a baby’s cry, perhaps, or a teenager’s whine.  Then in the midst of a repeated vocal motif, she suddenly freezes and the lights fade.  We’re returned to our normal sense of time duration.

photo by Patrick Berger.  Meredith Monk in Education of the Girlchild solo

The second part begins with Monk’s singing an achingly beautiful, a cappella aria, comprising the subtlest vocal glides and note bending that teases dissonance into resolution.  Three keyboards ring the space, and three long-time cohorts join Monk for a suite of selections from her recorded albums, including “Do You Be” and “Dolmen Music.”  Katie Geissinger, Allison Sniffin, and Ellen Fisher sing and move (especially Fisher, the spriest of the three) along with Monk, who stands at each keyboard in turn.  Often one or another of the women adds a third hand in a higher or lower register to Monk’s mid-range accompaniment, which changes tonal color – piano, autoharp, organ – with a flick of switches.  

Another magic moment is “The Tale” from the “Dolmen” album, in which Monk cackles with laughter and enumerates her remaining assets, “I still have my hands,” “my mind,” “my money,” “telephone – Hello?  Hello?” she sings, “my allegies,”  “my philosophies!”  Monk’s voice is as crystalline and plastic as ever; her daily vocalization and physical practice (Pilates) are paying enormous dividends.  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

Martin Løfsnes, artistic director of this young company, is an alumnus of the Martha Graham Dance Company, where from 1993-2006 his distinctive, dramatic presence was memorable.  He formed 360° Dance Company in 2007 to give himself and other former Martha Graham dancers a forum to help perpetuate her modern dance tradition.  The four performances at Dance Theater Workshop (June 2-4) featured works by Løfsnes, Ricardo Flores, Alessandra Prosperi, and revivals of two Jane Dudley solos from 1934 and 1946. 

The current choreography trends toward opacity by trying to express emotionally complex ideas with movement alone.  Løfsnes’s “What Was Still Is,” for six, set to Middle Eastern, Hispanic, and Kronos Quartet music, finds its protagonist alone in a strip of light (lighting throughout by Judith M. Daitsman) before being beset by five compatriot/adversaries, who attack, torment, and embrace him, before leaving him where he began, though presumably – since the lighting is slightly different – more enlightened.  According to the press release, “…the piece asks the question: do we change, or do we simply uncover what was always there?”  But posed shapes and predictable transitions feel static, and the dancers look under-rehearsed.  

“Spike Heel,” a slight solo by Løfsnes for Hana Ginsberg in a glittery sheath dress, sitting on a stool and set to an eponymous pop song, is meant as a bit of sexy fun but comes off just looking self-conscious.

“Que Color Tiene El Amor” (“What is the Color of Love”) by Flores casts Løfsnes and Prosperi as anxious characters.  He sits atop two stacked end tables in front of a tall panel, punched near its top with nine small square holes that cast interesting shadows on the floor.  She enters upstage, carrying a big, black umbrella.  He writhes in a rectangle of light, down left; she twirls the umbrella and does wide splits, down right.  He dons goggles; she bathes in a shower of rice.  Both undress, and she puts on a white shirt that’s hanging in midair; he stays in his dance belt.  They dance together, using the tables, un-stacked.  Flores shows definite theatrical flair, and the dancers handle the material with authority and strong presences.  But if not for the press release, I wouldn’t have known they “long for their soul mates, who may be each other in the end.”

photo by Yi-Chun Wu.  Martin Lofsnes and Alessandra Prosperi in “Que Color Tiene El Amor?”

Prosperi’s “Satsang” opens with a sensational image – a woman’s body gliding across the rolling bodies of the other nine, caught in a diagonal shaft of bright, white light.  In this 2010 ballet, the metaphor of human interdependence is clear, as people by turns fall into the arms of the ever-changing group.  Prosperi’s movement palette is more fluid, less bound than strict Graham technique enforces on some of her acolytes.  The falling motif makes a striking return at the finale, as Prosperi, lifted aloft by the others, dives onto the uplifted arms of the group like a body surfer at a rave, as the lights dim.  Or is she committing suicide?   

Løfsnes’s company is devoted to an old-fashioned esthetic, the two revivals it presented offered exhilarating glimpses of our modern dance heritage.  Performed by Prosperi and Løfsnes, respectively, with equal parts passion and reverence, “Cante Flamenco” (1946) and “Time is Money” (1934) illustrate the potential power of dance as political statement.  The two kinetic character studies crackle expressive power.

photo by Alexandros Giannakis. Alessandra Prosperi in “Cante Flamenco” 

“Cante Flamenco” paraphrases flamenco style to honor the courageous pride of Spanish Parliamentarian and feminine activist Dolores Ibarruri, know as La Passionara, who said, “it is better to die than live on your knees.”  In “Time is Money,” Løfsnes (alternating performances with Jerome Stigler) represents a working-class cipher, regimented and depersonalized, doing hunched, percussive steps in grid-like patterns.  Both solos have been reinvigorated with great attention to details of shape, focus, and dynamics, making them gratifyingly contemporary.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

Scrappy little New York Theatre Ballet celebrated its 32^nd season at the Florence Gould Hall of Alliance Française (May 14-15).  Don’t let the company’s small size – 14 dancers – fool you; it’s no gauge of its quality, which is the highest caliber.  And the small size of the Gould Hall stage is challenging for ballet works that generally require more space, but the impeccable dancing and well-wrought production values of this troupe make the space limitation seem like a mere blip. 

NYTB is the repository for the ballets of Antony Tudor, and they couldn’t be in more lovingly respectful hands.  Founding artistic director Diana Byer oversees every detail of technical clarity with meticulous attention.  The program, Signatures 11, presented works dating from as early as 1936, but in the hands of Byer’s sure-footed, assiduously coached dancers, they all looked excitingly fresh.  

What makes Theatre Ballet vital, even in the shadow of giants like American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet is its mission to revive rare, neglected choreographic gems that have fallen out of repertory.  Although at first glance, this repertoire would seem to be about as diverse as could be – two by Tudor, and one each by Merce Cunningham and Sir Frederick Ashton, and a premiere by Richard Alston.  

But at a break before the final dance, guest choreographer Alston in an onstage Conversation on Dance tied things together for us.  He himself studied with and was greatly influenced by Cunningham and, being an Englishman, grew up around Ashton and Tudor ballets in his days at Ballet Rambert.

Tudor’s “Soiree Musicale” (1938), a suite of folk-inspired dances, set to Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of the eponymous Gioachino Rossini music, is done with pristine technical and studied but not disingenuous graciousness.  Cunningham’s 1953 “Septet” received a technically crisp rendering, although the women, Amanda Garrett, Young Wha Lim, and Rie Ogura, have trouble letting go of their ballet posture to find the requisite suppleness in their spines.  

Photo by Richard Termine: New York Theatre Ballet in Merce Cunningham’s Septet.

In the role Cunningham created for himself, Joshua Andino-Nieto jumps with the height and buoyancy, for which Cunningham was renowned.  Random handshakes, entrances that lead to immediate exits, and unison prancing like a team of coach horses retain their wry humor.  And the long, serene passage where the women grasp the man for tenuous support in a series of leggy tableaus reminds us how exquisitely pure and formalistically radical Cunningham’s work was even from the start.  

Ashton’s “Capriol Suite” (1930), his earliest existing ballet created for students at Marie Rambert’s school, is a youthful and spirited series of dances, set to music by Peter Warlock, that are based on ancient forms like Pavane, Basse-Dance, and Mattachins.  William Chappell’s costumes have two of the women in wide panniers and the men in pantaloons, pink below the waist with tan tops adorned in brown piping.  

Tudor’s 1936 masterpiece “Jardin Aux Lilas” (Lilac Garden) withstands the test of time, remaining as dramatically pungent as ever.  Focus plays a major role in articulating the mutual deceit of Caroline (Elena Zahlmann), who is really in love with a soldier, Her Lover (Kyle Coffman), while The Man She Must Marry (Terence Duncan) also has a secret in the person of An Episode in His Past (Rie Ogura).  Characters enter and exit, missing the intrigue we see so clearly in this brilliant cat-and-mouse game.  As guardian of Tudor’s works, NYTB treats them with the respect and artistic integrity they deserve.  

Richard Alston’s premiere “A Rugged Flourish,” set to Aaron Copland’s edgy “Piano Variations,” features Seven Melendez – arguably the company’s premier danseur – as a satyr/superhero and six nymphs.  Although Alston is primarily a modern dance choreographer, the women here are in toe shoes.  They do mostly unison steps in intricately manipulated spatial patterns – an Alston forte.   

Photo by Richard Termine.  Steven Melendez with Rie Ogura in Richard Alston’s A Rugged Flourish.

Still, the ballet’s structure is curious.  After the exposition dances of the soloist and the group, Melendez dances a duet with Ogura that leads us to expect he’ll have some kind of intimate engagement with the others in turn, but that doesn’t happen.  What is it that distinguishes his chosen partner from the rest?  Not her role within the group, not even the color of her costume distinguishes her.  As the ballet ends with the pair in an embrace, we are left to wonder what impelled his choice of a mate.  But the dance is a wonderful showcase for Melendez’s creamy, expansive dancing, of which we can never get too much, and Ogura’s delicate assurance.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

San Francisco-based Alyce Finwall brought the eight strong women of her company, Alyce Finwall Dance Theater, to Joyce SoHo (May 5-7) to present the premiere of “Evenfall,” billed as the company’s first evening-length production.  I don’t know how long Finwall has been making dances, but apparently not long enough to know that evening-long dances are a lot harder to sustain than most choreographers seem to think.  

Mercifully, the piece lasts just under an hour, during which time a series of mostly solos and duets, partitioned by short group transitions, streams out before us.  Carson Whitley’s electronic score combines synthesized sounds and Auto-Tuned voices but lacks the sonic range of textures to support and hour’s worth of dancing.  Creating a dance that sustains an audience’s attention for an hour means more than just stretching out a 15-minute one.  It requires modulating a range of kinetic, visual, and emotional textures to illuminate multiple facets of your expressive intention.

Lighting design by Finwall and Joe Landini – his biography says he’s a chorographer/ curator not a lighting designer – illuminate the piece with half a dozen red light bulbs, hung from the ceiling, a dim wash of overhead lights, and a hand-held work lamp.  The pervasive dimness has a soporific effect, making it hard to focus on the action or even see some of it.  For lack of light, details of relationship and gesture can’t grasp our attention.  

photo: Bruce Phelps. Maggie Stack.

The dancing itself consists of occasional moments of dynamic vehemence within a matrix of shapes that are reminiscent of ballet and Cunningham styles but without the clarity of the latter or the intensity of the former.  The dancing isn’t “ferocious,” as one of her press quotes implies, and although the dynamic arc of the work does rise in energy, it doesn’t evolve emotionally.  

A repeating motif has the women taking off and putting on their short black skirts and long sleeved jerseys.  They dress and undress themselves and each other to “portray the loss of female innocence,” according to the press sheet.  But the work starts off with one woman in bikini underwear being probed with a portable work light by the other seven hovering around her in the darkness.  Short of nudity, which doesn’t occur, the striking first image pretty much states the “loss of innocence” and leaves Finwall nowhere to go. 

Except for one extended, unison duet near the end every encounter seems cursory and unresolved.  In one duet, for instance, crouching partners on their hands and knees bump each other like angry bulls, growling and panting; it looks like the seed of a powerful episode or the climax of one, but instead of a fight to the death, the partners simply back off and exit the stage to be replaced by yet another undifferentiated solo.

The women, who are clearly well trained in ballet, are fearless in hurling themselves down and up from the floor.  But Finwall has not clarified or modulated the emotional journey these women are wending, so when their restless, roiling motion suddenly resolves into a perfect leg extension or an exemplary arabesque, we are impressed by their technical prowess but not otherwise engaged by their circumstances. 

photo: Bruce Phelps. Joy Prendergast (l), Emily Jones.

Andrea Williams’s video textures – fiery and watery – projected across the dancers onto the side walls of the stage during the initial parts of the piece, create interesting textures, but towards the end, when we’d expect the visual interest to escalate, they are nowhere to be seen.  In the concluding duet, both women are stripped to their bras and panties.  Is that the final loss of innocence?  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

John J. Zullo is an ambitious, young choreographer, who presented his first full-evening season at a small black-box space at Theater for the New City in the East Village (April 28-May 1.)  The program comprised two dances, the first of which was too long by half, and the second of which ended not with a bang but a whimper.  Zullo’s dances moved at an unrelenting pace, impelled by musical selections – electronic washes and high-pitched string ensembles – that added dramatic tension to a vehement, aggressive movement palette.  

photo: Paula Weiss. l-r, Ashley Lindsey, Or Sagi, Mike Hodge, John J Zullo

Amidst the kinetic restlessness of “How Brief Eternity” there are some novel physical connections – like dancers hooking each other’s legs with their own to move them – and some clichés – like rolling into shoulder stand then arching into a bridge as the feet slam to the ground.  The small stage brims with so much constant motion that it’s sometimes hard to take it all in.  Zullo calls his dance in eight sections “a meditation on the survival of hatreds that can prosper in a flawed society.”  A magazine article about “the genocide of gay men in Iraq” inspired the dance.

The seven scrappy performers scrawl gay pejoratives, “faggot” or “maricone,” on the skin of their limbs in red paint – the ones not already tattooed.  Against the back wall hangs a chain-link panel with a silver rectangle in the center.  It represents by turns an imprisoning gate and a vanity mirror.  The costumes by Hector Perez are intriguingly scruffy, and Lily Meyer highlights and accents dramatic moments with her crafty lighting.

What Zullo’s choreography gets right is the energy of outrage, but what it misses is emotional modulation.  He organizes material by iterating motifs but without amplification or elaboration, so the recapitulations grow repetitive.  And the four guys’ onstage costume change from trousers into kilts is an awkward transition.  

When tall, lanky Brigitte Mitchell and slim, wiry Or Sagi – wearing matching, corseted gowns – dance a duet on a portable floor panel, their “stage,” the change of visual density onstage is welcome, and the gender switch-up (Sagi is a man) makes its point.  Throughout, the cast doesn’t let limited stage space cramp its go-for-broke dancing.  With serious trimming, “How Brief Eternity” would fulfill the middle word – not the last – of its title and be more affecting. 

After intermission, “Insignificant Others” starts with dancing to Patsy Cline’s rendition of her classic, “I Go Out Walking After Midnight,” teasing us with the possibility of a lighter mood, but the subsequent tortured string music of Petris Vasks and the tense dissonance of The Tractors Revenge Company cast us back into the pit of pervasive angst that the first dance had already sated us with.  Partners ignore each other, even while hoisting each other around aggressively; their mutual disregard seems petulant and arbitrary, since we’re not given to know the reason for it. 

For better or worse, with his evening-length concert debut, Zullo has hurled himself into the maelstrom of the downtown dance scene.  His is a promising voice, which with some dramaturgical guidance and fine-tuning could become one we’ll soon be paying more attention to.

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

Stephen Petronio’s distinctive style relishes the sensual motion of limbs slicing space like knives and bodies wrenching their parts into spiraling opposition.  Initiation from the ends of the extremities – arms, legs, head – virtually extends the physical length of his dancers’ bodies, as they hurtle through space.    

photo: Julie Lemberger. front - Tara Lorenzen; back - Natalie Mackessy and Joshua Tuason

Petronio’s company returned to the Joyce, April 5-10, with the New York premiere of his program-length “Underland,” which he created in 2003 for the Sydney Dance Company.  The dance is set to music by Nick Cave, whose songs run toward the darker side.  And the piece begins with Australian guest dancer Reed Luplau, climbing down a rope ladder, upside down, as if descending into hell.

On the rear wall a triptych of screens by Petronio’s lighting and visual designer Ken Tabachnick, displays continuous videos by another long-time Petronio collaborator, Mike Daly, behind the dancing.  Images of fire, flood, shattering glass, and nuclear explosions – jumping between screens or spreading across all three – reference to the infernal undercurrents in the dance.  

Four solos epitomize the seductive appeal of Petronio’s kinetic style.  “Mercy Strings” for Gino Grenek,  “Prelude to Weep” for Amanda Wells, “Prelude to Death” for Shila Tirabassi – all company veterans – and “After Lee” for Luplau capitalize on these remarkable dancers’ flexibility, speed, and coordination.  Each solo dazzles with its unpredictability, and fierce abandon.  

A tumbling pass by Luplau introduces “The Carny,” a broadly presentational section with women in bras and red tutus; it’s more overtly theatrical than Petronio’s typically more abstract choreography.  And in “The Weeping Song,” mushroom clouds in the video back dancers wearing army fatigues (costumes by Tara Subkoff) set an overtly political tone.  At one point the mushroom cloud replicates into a grid of 147 of them, turning them horrific image into mere wallpaper. 

photo: Julie Lemberger.  Barrington Hinds and Natalie Mackessy

The last section, “Death is Not the End,” with everyone wearing white, dancing in orderly formations with repeating motifs to Cave’s eponymous anthem, comes off less as pure Petronio than the obligatory ballet “finale” – a bow, perhaps to his Sydney Dance commissioners.  It’s not unlike the kind of big finish you’d see set on the Alvin Ailey troupe.  Petronio has said “Underland” is “his favorite dance ever.”  But for my money, it’s not in the same league with dances like his perversely titillating 1990 “MiddleSexGorge.”  

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011

When we think of Dublin, about the last thing that springs to mind is, African torture victims.  And when you think of a dance by and about those victims, you’re not likely to say, “Wow, I really want to see that!”  But John Scott’s Irish Modern Dance Theatre’s “Fall and Recover” at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre (March 25-April 9) shatters dire expectations and allays fears.  Subject matter, which in the wrong hands could turn maudlin, here becomes wonderfully uplifting.

 The dozen performers, dressed in loose white clothes, are young and old, black and white; what binds them is their survival of torture in their native countries.  “Fall and Recover” – a term invented by modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, referring to the dynamic moment between verticality and horizontal stasis – grew out of therapeutic workshops Scott led for clients at the Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture (CCST) in Dublin.  

The cast created the movement under the guidance of Scott and his two assistants Philip Connaughton and Aisling Doyle, professional dancers from his company, who also perform in the piece.  Virtually everything explored in the workshop has found its way into the piece from basic warm-up and conditioning exercises to indigenous songs, chants, and dance moves from many of the nine countries, from which the participants originally came.  

photo: Mike Walker

At the start, unspooled rolls of paper cover the floor, and a man and woman (Haile Takabo and Faranak Medhi Golhini) stand upstage center against a wooden wall.  Two women, one white, one black, enter and sit on folding chairs, downstage left. The African woman, Kiribu (who can’t reveal her last name to protect remaining family in Africa), speaks and sings in her native tongue, as the other woman, called Nina, an eastern European refugee, mimics her gestures silently.  Other performers filter into the space carrying markers and draw pictures on the paper floor.  

In the first of many dynamic highpoints, achieved with the simplest of means, the performers create a blizzard of paper, violently tearing it up and tossing it into the air, until the stage is littered with past memories; dignified Nigerian Solomon Ijigade sings calmly, ignoring the flurry around him, as if in meditation.  Then, as others clear away the paper, six people move slowly across the stage, with their arms gesturing in unison.

Lisa Shu from Cameroon, who’s not a trained dancer, tilts and leans as if she’s falling, out of control, in a poignant solo, braced by the wall.  Takabo, a carpenter from Eritrea, bounces, stiff-legged, with dignity in an elegant solo and later leads off a phrase – squat, roll to lying prone, push back to kneeling, and rising to stand – it repeats, as the others join in, scattered through the space.  The cumulative persistence gains emotional resonance.

Eamon Fox’s lighting constantly reshapes the space.  When the performers line up and revolve slowly like a pinwheel, they drift in and out of the sculptural side light, which enhances the visual complexity of the simple action.  A strip of light catches a line-up of people sliding down the rear wall till all, except Oiplea are sitting beside her, tipping from side to side in a cascade of mutual interdependence.

Emotions in the hour-long piece range from quiet determination to outright exuberance.  High-schooler Mufutau Kehinde Yusuf (nicknamed “Junior”), a refugee from Nigeria, springs to astonishing height in the air – NBA take note – in a jumping marathon with several different partners, including his young, female counterpart, Patience Namehe.  The pair embodies the energy and optimism of youth.

Back to back, partners alternately take each other’s weight, evincing the trust they’d regained through the workshop process that produced the piece.  The full cast forms a wide circle that slowly contracts into a tight clump with everyone yearning their fingers to the sky – a tight-knit community, empowered by each other’s spirit.  In the subsequent finale, the searing image left behind, as the dancers escape the stage, represents at once the tragedy of the past and hope for the future.  “Fall and Recover” is an utterly redemptive work of art. 

Through April 9

Ellen Stewart Theatre at LaMaMa, E.T.C.

66 East 4^th Street

Thursday-Saturday at 7:30pm; Sunday at 2:30pm

Tickets $25, $15 (student/senior)

212-475-7710 or www.lamama.org

© Gus Solomons jr, 2011  

“And All The Question Marks Started to Sing” at Dance Theater Workshop (February 24-27) isn’t what you’d call dance in any conventional way.  It combines sound, video, and sculpture into an intense 45-minutes that keep you wondering, how do they do that?  And what is this?  And who thought this up?  As these question marks dance through your head, singing before you is a creation like nothing you’ve seen, and you stare wide-eyed at the ingenuity of the spectacle. 

The Norwegian group produces a most provocative poetry that resists definition.  But the complete integration of 19^th century toy making, 20^th century traditional puppetry, and 21^st century electronics hints at an exciting new direction for live performance.  The appearance of Verdensteatret is the inaugural event of FuturePerfect 2011, a new initiative founded by artistic director/producer Wayne Ashley, dedicated to hybrids of performance art and technology. 

photo by Yi-Chun Wu. l-r: Øyvind B. Lyse and Gjertrud Jynge

DTW’s stage is made to resemble a museum gallery with gray walls at the sides and rear, and a column, off-center, upstage.  A series of contraptions fashioned from bicycle wheels, clips, cables, and wires are scattered around the space; industrial-strength conical speakers at the sides occasionally swivel on their bases.  Small spotlights, strategically placed on the floor, throw shadows of equipment and performers on the walls. 

At the start of the piece, the most visually elaborate of the doodads proudly confronts us, downstage center.  Its many bike wheels are rimmed with flowers and feathers, and some have mesh or plastic woven through their spokes.  The wheels spin at various speeds with choreographic articulation.  A puffin appears on the back wall, projected faintly.   

Hai Nguyen Dinh enters into the dimness of the space and whistles; then, by holding some kind of device to his mouth, he turns his whistling into loud static roars.  Ali Djabbary, who has been spinning wheels upstage, moves down and recites text in – I assume – Norwegian.  Gjertrud Jynge in a black dress sings into a microphone, which transforms her voice into wailing electronic sounds.  Øyvind B. Lyse gets up from a seat in the front row and manipulates a complex optical device that throws a circle of light on the back wall; spinning lenses animate small electronic components in the halos of light.

A tiny glass capsule with projections that look like a nose and a fedora hat becomes a guy who flirts with a little bundle of wires that’s the object of his affection.  Another light bulb with bent wire appendages bobs and spins in its spotlight like a disco dancer.  

At one point, the four performers exit the stage, and the machines perform on their own, controlled by unseen forces; the gears turn and plungers plunge, driven by wireless remote control from the rear of the theater.  At the curtain call we discover that eight others in addition to the four onstage performers are involved in making the magic.   

At the climax, projected birds’ wings loom on all the walls, and the sound swells to a deafening pitch.  The rich sonic and visual imagery is at once dramatic and abstract, exquisitely detailed and theatrical. 

It is significant that this hybrid work of art found itself at DTW, a primarily dance venue.  If, as the sixties dance revolution posited, dance in the broadest terms requires only organized motion, and not necessarily people doing it.  With Verdensteatret, which translates “theater of the world,” we are seeing what may be the future – a potentially exciting mix of live and electronic performance.  

©, 2011 Gus Solomons jr 

photo by Christopher Duggan. l-r: Taryn Vander Hoop, Yohta Tsagri, Sumi Clements

It’s refreshing when a new company with convincing artistry and fierce dancing appears on the crowded concert dance scene.  Summation Dance made an impressive debut at Baryshnikov Arts Center, February 4-5.  Founded by artistic director/choreographer Sumi Clements and executive director/producer Taryn Vander Hoop, both of whom are also dancers, Summation presented a concise 70-minute evening, created over the past year – during and since graduating from the MFA program of NYU/Tisch School of the Arts.  (Full disclosure: as an arts professor there, I was one of their dance technique teachers.)  Still, so auspicious a commencement merits recognition.  

“Keep Your Feathers Dry” comprises three dances – “Fortitudine,” “Whac-a-Mole,” and “No Man’s Landing” – which, according to a eloquent but perhaps overly personal choreographer’s note, chronicle Clements’s emotional journey during the demise of her love relationship, when her Marine Corps boyfriend was deployed to Afghanistan.  Rarely does such deeply personal turmoil translate into such objectively powerful dance.

photo by Christopher Duggan

Fearless performing by a cast of strong women brings the work vibrantly to life.  The choreography has all the elements of “well-made dances” – expansive use of space, soaring dynamic contrasts with skillful use of silence and stillness, and cohesive development of thematic materials.  But these elements of good craft never stultify the kinetic and emotional impact of the work; rather, they amplify them.  

“Fortitudine” begins with McMillan, Clements, and Vander Hoop mumbling and poking the air.  Yohta Tsagri, at once maternal and menacing, looms behind them.  The image establishes the physical power of the distaff troupe, and that force continues to mount through the evening.  A pulsing electric collage by Moby, edit, Four Tet, and original music by Kyle Olson supports the action.

In “Whac-a-Mole,” Vander Hoop and Clements in bright sundresses, move largely in unison, vying for power with Angela Curotto, Julie McMillan, and Kristin Schwab, three sultry fem-bots in black lace leotards and slicked back hairdos.  Falling to the ground on hips and knees, sliding, and rolling look physically punishing, but the women take it on with relish.  The balance of power shifts from one side to the other, until they all finally fall into unison – harmony or perhaps only a momentary truce.  

When in “No Man’s Landing” Julie McMillan balances in a squat on one foot for minutes, you’re engaged by the physical difficulty of the balance, you empathize with its obvious discomfort, and its duration allows you to ponder the very notions of endurance and patience.  Then, the company – including also Cat DeAngelis, Allie Lochary, Sarah Holmes, and Erin Okayama, in dark tights and mesh tunics – comprises an intrepid female clan, repeatedly hurling themselves in pairs from the wings onto the ground. 

The hard scrabbling dancing may not always reveal the emotional nuances of its intentions, but that opacity is more than offset by the passion with which it’s conceived, the commitment with which it’s done and the craft with which it’s assembled.  Dynamic lighting by Simon Cleveland and Brigitte Vosse’s textural costumes add authority to the artistry.  Summation Dance renews your faith in the power of motion and announces the advent of a troupe to put on your radar.

©, 2011 Gus Solomons jr 

GALLIM DANCE

photo: Yi-Chun Wu. l-r, Jonathan Royse Windham, Troy Ogilvie, Caroline Fermin, Dan Walczak, Francesca Romo, Arika Yamada

Andrea Miller’s dances most often target sheer sensory impact for the audience, and they’re sometimes effective.  Pounding musical beats and physical contortionism prevail.  Her new “For Glenn Gould,” seen on a shared program at Dance Theater Workshop, January 18-22, seems a salubrious attempt to stretch her artistic range.  Ostensibly, the piece pays tribute to the remarkable piano virtuoso, Gould, by using selections from his two legendary recordings of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” the bombastic one recorded in 1964 and the more contemplative one in 1981.  

Although Miller intends to parallel Gould’s artistic evolution from youthful virtuosity to mature introspection with that of her own creative process, her musical choice is open to question, since her movement is far from musical, and because she intersperses the Bach with Strauss, Alvo Noto, Ryuchi Sakamoto, and Nick Drake, turning it merely into aural wallpaper.  

The dancers, clad at first in just dance belts and bras and later in miscellaneous casual duds, push and pull their joints to the limit in feats of remarkable flexibility.  In the opening section, they sprint around the bare, gray stage floor, swinging their legs in high arcs, lunging so deeply that crotches graze the ground, throwing their torsos into perilous backbends, and skidding into falls.

After this spate of kinetic purity, they litter the space with props – folding chairs, traffic cones, a rolling suitcase, microphones, strings of tiny lights, and assorted found junk, with which they fashion assemblages that compete to upstage her hard-working soloists.  Jonathan Royse Windham dances earnestly behind a crescent of chairs, on which the others drape and entwine themselves.  Dan Walczak keeps repeating “I’m performing now,” as he climbs across chairs and the bodies on them, while Arika Yamada in a floppy sweater careens around, occasionally baring her breasts.  

Troy Ogilvie does a rock steady series of impossible attitude turns and high extensions, then becomes obsessed with the chairs and picks them all up in a tangle that envelops her.  Caroline Fermin virtually dislocates her hips, whacking out big kicks, and Francesca Romo, in a little heap center stage, dances her heart out amidst chaos.  Then singly, the dancers drift away, leaving us to ponder what might Gould’s response have been to this raucous homage, inspired by his refined artistry.

SIDRA BELL DANCE NEW YORK

photo: Yi-Chun Wu. l-r, Kendra Samson, Jonathan campbell, Austin Diaz

The second half of the evening featured Sidra Bell’s “Pool,” a forty minute dance for seven in shiny, black tights with feet and mesh tops, and false eyelashes bizarrely placed on their faces – costumes and makeup by dancer Alexandra Johnson.  Bell’s movement choices are strongly personal, consistently kinetic, and carry dramatic implications, although a narrative is not explicit; she has a distinctive voice.

Imagery implied by the title is manifest in moments when circles of light appear on the rear wall for dancers to dive in and out of, like bathers; moving pools of light randomly rove around the stage; and a lowered strip of lights at the rear suggests a pool’s edge above – we’re in the deep end. 

The women (Johnson, Caroline Kirkpatrick, Maude de la Purification, and Kendra Samson) and a man (Zach McNally) act as a kinetic chorus, modifying and commenting on the journey of the two principals (Jonathan Campbell and Austin Diaz.)  The men’s movement is dynamically punctuated, while the women’s is more lyrical, but it’s all highly technical and solidly executed.  

When the dance focuses on the two male figures – sturdy, grounded Campbell and lithe, dramatically expressive Diaz – it completely captures our attention.  Campbell controls, torments, and teaches Diaz, who abides, rebels, and finally challenges.  Their nicely modulated relationship throughout is continually intriguing, and their climactic duet that ends the dance is marred only by the lack of enough stage light to see it clearly.  

An eclectic assortment of musical selections by a dozen different groups, ranging from ambient to disco, serve less to focus the dance than to diffuse it.  And a distended passage, driven by pounding house music, which consists of fleeting couplings that seem to come and go at random, could needs further investigation and judicious trimming.

Lighting for both choreographers by clever, ambitious designer Vincent Vigilante is long on dramatic effects – distended shadows, moving pools, intense backlight, and even a rolling spotlight – but sometimes short on illumination of the actual dancing.  Hence, it obscures some luscious passages.  Though we admire inventiveness, light should articulate dancing, not obscure it. 

© 2011, Gus Solomons jr

The opening performance of American Ballet Theater’s sparkling new version of the holiday classic at BAM was auspicious.  The evening began with artistic director Kevin McKenzie’s welcome and presentation of a token of thanks to David H. Koch, the lead underwriter of the $5M production.  In his acceptance, Koch accidentally referred to McKenzie as Peter (as in Martins, ballet master in chief of ABT’s uptown rival, New York City Ballet, which Koch has already gifted by finding the renovating of their home (the former New York State Theater) and having it renamed for him.  These performances also happily mark the first year of ABT’s five-year connection with the Brooklyn institution – a theater more viewer-friendly for dance than the Met Opera House.

Alexei Ratmansky is the classical choreographer of the moment.  His Russian ballet roots show in the rigorous architecture of his work for the corps de ballet, and his contemporary sensibility is evident in the perceptive way he physicalizes of his characters’ emotional motivations.  What, you may wonder, can yet another new version of “The Nutcracker” offer?  In this case, quite a lot.  In his new version of the dance adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale, Ratmansky has substantially maintained the familiar scenario but added his own clever touches.  

The ballet opens in the kitchen of the Stahlbaum’s house, where cooks and maids are preparing the party buffet and an adorable mouse noshes under the table.  At the ensuing party, the children get to dance some of the music that’s usually done by the adults in stiff social dances that always lack a button.  Here, when the children dance, their achievement can be duly rewarded with real applause, because the youngsters – students in ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School – are well drilled, capable, and cute.  

Ratmansky has the young Clara and Nutcracker Boy (Catherine Hurlin and Tyler Maloney) dance throughout, adding excitement to their journey.  Both are charismatic dancers who look like ballet stars of tomorrow.  In the Battle scene, after Clara shrinks to toy size, the Boy leads his toy soldiers in battle against the poly-headed Mouse King, Thomas Forster, and his rodent troop.  Clara, having shrunk to doll size perches atop an enormous chair; she takes out the king with a well-aimed toss of her slipper.

Most of production designer Richard Hudson’s costumes are sensational, saturated with color and motion.  Exceptions are Meaghan Hinkis’s bulky dress as the Canteen Keeper – one of four giant mechanical toys Drosselmeyer (Victor Barbee) brings to the party – and those on the three women in the Spanish Dance, all of which obscure the their lines in an excess of fabric.  The chubby mice’s suits and masks are comically cartoonish, and the Snowflakes’ classical tutus are luxurious.

Hudson’s set for the Victorian living room has somber green walls and the graceless Christmas tree look awkward.  But when this set disappears to reveal a translucent, silver forest for The Snow scene, the physical environment improves markedly, and the golden cage that surrounds the Land of the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act Two is delicately elegant and magical.  

Jennifer Tipton’s masterful lighting enhances the dramatic tension throughout with special effects like a gigantic shadow of Drosselmeyer on the living room door after the Party and stars glittering above the Grand Pas de Deux; and it provides shadowy mystery in the Battle, stormy menace in the snow storm, bright sunshine in Sugar Plum Fairy land, and an icy shimmer to the final Grand Pas de Deux for the Prince and Princess.

The production is technically ambitious, although it lacks the slickness of Broadway; the dancers shove props off stage, and some of the movement of drops, flying in and out, is clunky.  Whether this will meet the expectations of general audiences is yet to be seen, but for my money, it enhances the charm of the piece. 

Ratmansky is remarkably adept at moving people in patterns, quoting from multiple sources of inspiration.  The toy soldiers pinwheel in lines of eights and fours like Rockettes.  Mother Ginger’s eight little Polichinelles line up like the iconic entrance of the nine, baldpated drinking companions in Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son.”  

The Snowflakes, swirling and blustering through the space, create a virtual blizzard, through which Clara and her Nutcracker slip-slide and frolic like real kids on a snow day.  As the pace of the storm accelerates, the children lose and find each other again, before Drosselmeyer rescues them in his sleigh, and the snowflakes settle to the ground in a glistening blanket. 

The Flowers – a cheerful bouquet in gorgeous, fluffy pink and red skirts – splice their four lines of four in endless kaleidoscopic patterning.  The quartet of male Bees who buzz around mostly seem more interested in each other than the flowers, but their ultimate job is to lift and toss the women in a spectacular cascade with split-second timing.  

The grown-up counterparts of Clara and Nutcracker, Murphy and Hallberg, cap the performance with perhaps the most assured and exhilarating dancing of their careers.  Both stars continue to deepen their dramatic abilities, which here match their divine purity, inflected with love-struck gazes at each other.  Ratmansky has devised for the pair some of the most challenging steps imaginable, including three big, Russian-style lifts that take your breath away.  

There is so much to look at, you could watch this “Nutcracker” times over and still see new facets of Ratmansky’s sly humor, magical appearances and transformations, and the startling dramatic reality he finds in his fresh new incarnation of Hoffmann’s fairy-tale. 

© 2010, Gus Solomons jr