Solomons Says

‘RHAW’ MATERIAL

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:27:24 -0400

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

NEW YORK THEATRE BALLET

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:13:00 -0400

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

CARTE BLANCHE

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:16:01 -0400

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

DANISH DANCE THEATER

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:54:02 -0400

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: NEAL BEASLEY AND BRADLEY TEAL ELLIS

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 20:45:18 -0500

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

THE PETER PRINCIPLE

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 10:47:29 -0500

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

LES BALLETS JAZZ DE MONTRÉAL

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:42:02 -0500

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

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 18:44:00 -0500

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

MUSEUM AS THEATER AND VICE VERSA? – SOME SWEET DAY

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:46:23 -0500

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

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 11:36:00 -0500

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

SUNHWA CHUNG – KO-RYO DANCE THEATER

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 09:31:52 -0400

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

KEITH HENNESSY/CIRCO ZERO

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 17:20:00 -0400

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

DD DORVILLIER / HUMAN FUTURE DANCE CORPS

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:59:00 -0400

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

SCOTT LYONS AND COMPANY

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 10:10:29 -0400

“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

THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 06:44:00 -0400

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.

STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:54:34 -0500

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.

CRYSTAL PITE/KIDD PIVOT

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 12:43:48 -0500

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

DANCE THEATRE OF HARLEM 2

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:27:00 -0500

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)

STREB ACTION VIRTUALLY KISSES THE ARMORY CEILING

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:11:00 -0500

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

KYLE ABRAHAM – “LIVE!: THE REALEST MC”

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:06:00 -0500

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