danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

New York Report

The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Sydney Dance Company, Twyla Tharp Dance, ABT Studio Company, Diane Fay Dance Theatre, Dances Patrelle

by Mary Cargill
copyright © 2001 by Mary Cargill
Spring 2001

New York this winter had, as usual, a variety of visiting dance companies and some homegrown ones as well. The Dayton Contemporary Dance Company performed at the Joyce Theatre in October, its first visit to New York since the death of its founder Jeraldyne Blunden. The program I saw opened with Sets and Chasers, choreographed in 1999 by Kevin Ward to music by Duke Ellington. Though the program note called the piece a ballet, the dancers were far from balletic. They were weighted, strong, and fierce. The piece, too, had a jazzy, impromptu feel, and the per-formers, especially their dynamo Sheri “Sparkle” Williams, were exhilarating.

The other two pieces, Warren Spears’ black (from 1989) and Donald McKayle’s and Ronald K. Brown’s Children of the Passage (1999) did not quite match the artistic satisfactions of the opening piece, though each had powerful moments. black was set in a high school gym during a prom in 1968 Detroit at the time of the riots, and, though over-long, made its tragic point about external chaos generating individual’s violence. During the fun, the boys attacked the girls to the sound of sirens in the distance; the house lights came up during the piece, as if to implicate the audience. Again the performances, especially that of Williams, were com-mitted and dramatic.

Children of the Passage, accompanied by live (if over-amplified) music of the Dirty Dozen Dirt Band, was, to quote the program note, about “a party of decadent lost souls who are haunted and later rescued by spirits that reconnect them to their ancestral char-acter.” It is certainly possible that repeated viewings would reveal some of this complexity, but it looked more like a series of disjointed, though often interesting, dances performed by people wearing cast-off clothes.

Another exercise in spiritualism was given when the Sydney Dance Company returned to the Joyce in November with director Graeme Murphy’s full-length, intermissionless production Air and Other Invisible Forces. The music, a blend of Tibetan and Japanese music, with the addition of folk music from Thailand, Pakistan, and Java augmented by sounds recorded by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, was striking, but certainly beyond my ability to evaluate. The choreographer’s note was also an amalgam: “Journey with unknown endings…Gods who dwell in the everyday…doors that open into nothingness…” and so on.

Certainly one needs a fairly specialized knowledge of Buddhism to understand fully all the allusions of the piece, but a single viewing showed a striking theatri-cality, with swathes of silk manipulated by a wind machine, evocative lighting, and an ability to create memorable stage pictures.

The dancers’ movements seemed very balletic without using actual ballet steps; feet were pointed, legs were stretched, and the dancers moved with a powerful grace, especially in a trio for Bradley Chatfield, Chri-topher Harris, and Simon Turner. The work may have been opaque, but it was certainly haunting.

Twyla Tharp’s new company, Twyla Tharp Dance, is another modern dance/ballet inflected company; it performed two of her new works at the Joyce in February. The dancers, all current or former members of ballet companies, are top-notch and seemed to enjoy letting go. The works were clearly ballet influenced; no point work but lots and lots of turns and beautifully stretched positions, though with the typical Tharp choreographic tics, including sharp twitches and off-balance poses.

The first piece, called simply The Mozart Clarinet Quintet K581, was bright and sunny, but was costumed in very unflatteringly stiff, multi-colored tunics by an uncharacteristically off Santo Loquasto. The choreo-graphy was playful, but occasionally the fun ran thin, as the dancers pretended to get dizzy after turns or two men went through a knockoff of a Dances at a Gathering competition. The piece looked jokey rather than witty.

There were no jokes during the second piece, Surfer at the River Styx, which was danced to vigorous and very loud percussive sounds (including noise from hubcaps and pot lids) by Donald Knack. The piece featured a wonderfully lyrical performance by Keith Roberts and a more aggressive one by John Selya, both in white, who were pursued/taunted by Benjamin Bowman, Elizabeth Parkinson, Alexander Brady, and Ashley Tuttle in black on a dark and harshly lit stage. Finally, there was some resolution and the dancers (now all in white), carried Parkinson off stage in a scene reminiscent of Balanchine’s The Unanswered Question.

The choreography was typical of Tharp’s eclecticism, a little bit of hip-hop, a little bit of ballet, but for me the seams show and it didn’t merge into a coherent whole. This of course, may be the point; no matter how young and trendy and pop we are, everyone ends up at the Styx. But after being pounded by unrelenting noise and incessant movement for so long, I was hoping Charon would appear and take my by the River Lethe.

Francie Huber has been dancing with Tharp, though she did not appear in New York. She has left the Paul Taylor Company, which made its annual visit to the City Center in March and her unique blend of femininity and gentle strength has not really been replaced. Her role in Taylor’s recent work Piazzolla Caldera was danced by Annmaria Mazzini, who gave an exuberant, earthy performance, but she gave the impression she just wanted a man. Huber was searching for a soul, and without her aching loneliness, the piece, while wonderf-ully exciting, became more of another tango dance than a vision of spiritual emptiness.

Taylor brought two works new to New York, Fiends Angelical and Dandelion Wine. Fiends Angelical is one of his mysterious-goddess-presiding-over-natives pieces (this time the natives wore fuzzy red wigs). As always, Taylor’s craft is wonderful to see, and he created some interesting movements for the goddess, danced in New York by Silvia Nevjinsky. Dandelion Wine, too, is vintage Taylor, this time the young, bounding, happy Taylor, creating a human knot garden in a land of eternal sunshine. It was led by a bounding Richard Chen See, all in yellow, and featured four blond women, who truly do seem to have more fun. If it takes us to a place we have been before, at least it is a place we love to visit.

There were also performances by several chamber ballet companies, including the ABT Studio Company, the Diane Fay Dance Theatre, and Dances Patrelle. The ABT Studio Company is a small touring company made up essentially of American Ballet Theatre apprentices, and directed by former ABT principal John Meehan. The company is eager, well-trained, and thoroughly prepared. The choreography, though, was not always up to the dancers.

The program opened with a piece by Ann Marie De Angelo called Blackberry Winter, to the wonderfully infectious folk-inspired Concerto for Strings and Dulcimer by Conni Ellisor. The costumes, uncredited, were extremely unattractive; cut-off multicolored leo-tards quite at odds with the folksy flavor of the music. The choreography, too, other than a few hoedown accents, was pretty generic, with lots of rolling and rushing to no apparent purpose. The slam-bang gymnastic gyrations just seemed like filler. The program note explained that “the piece is about letting go of something or emphasizing our sadness in order to feed joy”; it seemed to refer to another ballet, one that was begging to be choreographed to that evocative, rhythmic music.

Misty Copeland and Craig Salstein held up the classical wing in the grand pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty. Copeland seemed a bit perky for the majestic role, and her hands were a bit stiff, but the couple’s air of serious dedication was very touching. Unlike so many young dancers, they were not afraid to look at and react to each other. Any great work of art is going to lose some of its impact performed out of context, but the young dancers showed real promise.

This was followed by Robert Hill’s Helix for a Japanese fireball, Masayoshi Onuki, danced to very loud percussive music in a dark and oppressive atmos-phere. It was the typical jump, jerk, and turn solo, with some odd pecking moves, like a chicken on steroids, varied by some flashy lighting effects. Instead of the loincloth so often seen in similar dances, he wore, for some reason, a purple cowboy suit. The dancing was flashy, confident, and accomplished, but seemed aimed at winning medals (Mr. Onuki lists many competitions in his resume) rather than hearts, much less minds.

The final piece was Won, a new work by the San Francisco ballet dancer Julia Adam, performed to live new-agey string music by Matthew Pierce. Julia Adam did not provide program notes implying anything profound, so the audience had to take it as given. What it took was a very well-made, witty and unpretentious ballet showing a group of dancers moving in various fashions from one side of the stage to another, a somewhat impressionistic race, which despite the title did not have winners and losers—other that the audience, which was clearly the winner. The vocabulary was limited but interesting and full of little, clever variations. Adam is apparently confident enough not to feel the need to blind the audience with lots of flash.

It was a group piece (she seems to share the current aversion to classical ballet’s hierarchy of a lead couple surrounded by distinct ranks of dancers), a very accomplished work of ballet-derived modernism, with some striking stage images. She has a clear and distinct voice which seemed to say “Look at the ways these wonderful dancers can move and please enjoy it.”

Another chamber group, the Diane Fay Dance Theatre, gave a program of new ballets at the Clark Studio in Lincoln Center in February. Called “An Evening of Contemporary Ballet”, most of the works were choreographed by Diane Fay, a former Joffrey dancer. The term “contemporary ballet” does not have the most pleasant of connotations, bringing to mind a grim mixture of black costumes, black moods, and aggressive glares. Fay’s works would be more accurately be described, I think, as neo-romantic, since she appears interested in form, steps, music, and feeling.

The first dance work (music was given precedence in the program, which opened with a brief violin solo by Gabriel Gordon) Praise to Bach, was performed to a live violin, a blessing in this day of recorded music. There were three parts; the first (Partita No. 2) had three couples in simple black and red leotards. The choreography had a nice flow, with some elegant, unfussy partnering. I especially enjoyed the third sec-tion (Partita No. 3) with three women in white tunics, scampering lightly to the music, rather like the muses would have danced before they met Apollo. It ended with a gentle bow in homage to the violinist and to Bach.

Faux Pas, choreographed by Brian Sanders of MOMIX, was a very funny take-off of a classical ballet solo for a ballerina and her fake leg, which she lifted lovingly into extensions undreamed of even by Sylvie Guillem. Nicole Gaston performed it with a deadpan seriousness and a serene and graceful upper body.

The performance ended with Loving Positive, a somewhat awkward attempt to tell the story of a playwright who, on the night of his first success, learns that he has a brain tumor. The mixture of realism and dance didn’t always work—the illness was indicated by a dancer wearing a stethoscope and the play’s success was signaled by copies of newspapers being read and backs being slapped interspersed with double tours. But the performers had a genuine conviction, especially the young Alexander Lavsky as the playwright, and it was refreshing to see a choreographer try to explore human relations instead of just technique.

More human relations were on display when Dances Patrelle performed Francis Patrelle’s 1995 Macbeth at the Kaye Playhouse in February. Graced by Duncan Cooper and Donald Williams from the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the work, though at times confus-ing, was ultimately very moving. Among its strengths were the simple and effective sets by Gillian Bradshaw-Smith (basically cloth columns lit to look variously like trees or pillars) and the costumes by Rita Watson. These were graceful modifications of period clothing, which helped create real characters and avoided the hoary universalist cliché of dressing historical dramas in multi-period costumes (with the inevitable Nazi soldiers) to pound into the audience that “We are all alike!”

Patrelle excerpted bits from various orchestral works of Tchaikovsky. The choreography was express-ionistic and used the music for atmosphere, not for structure, but the music supported the emotional climaxes very effectively. The plot, especially at the beginning, was a little hard to follow and was told in a somewhat disconcerting mixture of old-fashioned mime (the sign for “crown” was right out of Swan Lake) and the newer “dancestimme” style of Soviet story telling with lots of anguished expressions and expres-sive kicks.

But once the characters settled in, it was a grip-ping production, with some very memorable moments. The sleepwalking scene, a choreographic cliché in the making if there ever was one, was subdued and power-ful. There was real ten-sion and drama shown by Lady Macbeth (Joni Petre-Scholz), not just a lot of melo-dramatic hand-wringing. Lady Macbeth’s death, too was very moving; Macbeth just set the crown that she had wanted so on her lifeless body and knelt by her as if to say “All this bloodshed for such a little prize”.

Duncan Cooper (Macbeth) and Donald Williams (Macduff) were extremely powerful. Macbeth began the ballet as a young, hopeful nobleman, and the gradual change form bright youth to violent and obsessive ambition was brilliantly portrayed by Cooper, who seemed to grow older, heavier, and more danger-ous before our eyes. His death was a necessity, but the audi-ence could not forget the gracious young lord of the opening scene, and there was a true sense of tragic waste in the final slashing fight between Macbeth and Macduff.