danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Reviews

Bay Area Report

Flyaway Productions and Jo Kreiter; Dominique Zeltzman and Kathleen Hermesdorf; Krissy Keefer; New Shoes, Old Souls; Peter Sellars; ODC/SF

by Rita Felcianol
copyright © 1999 by Rita Felcianol
Spring 1999

The most difficult part of these quarterly musings on Bay Area dance is deciding on what to cover for readers unfamiliar with the artists who live and work in these parts. Unlike T-shirts where extra large is the most commonly sold size, small is the most popular item in Bay Area dance. Small groups keep the pot bubbling and if often the quality control is not what it should be, the pleasure of seeing artists striving to get control of a medium compensates for much. Among the dozens of ensembles that vie for space and audiences on the local stages, there are three that most recently struck me with their ability to articulate movement ideas and craft them into expressive forms that are at the very least promising.

Flyaway Productions is the brainchild of former gymnast turned dancer and longtime member of Zaccho Dance Theater, Jo Kreiter. Kreiter is trying to bridge the gap between gymnastics and dance, developing a dance style which demands great upper body strength and a willingness to embrace physical risks. But unlike sports or a circus act, the effort and energy to create the movement are totally subservient to the expressive end. This is dance and not gymnastics.

Much of the performance of The Body Project/the soul needs the body (February 24, Theater Artaud) took place on a trapeze and a series of suspended vertical poles. It was an airy environment in which the six dancers freely moved back and forth between earth and sky. The transitions from ground-based to airborne movement were transacted so smoothly that running across the floor looked as naturally as hoisting yourself up ten feet up into space with the use of your arms only. The silvery poles became partners in these imagistic dances of gravity suspended and gravity embraced. Body Project, with its strong sense of physicality, particularly of female strength, supposedly was created as a response to the dehumanizing effect of technology and mass communications. Blessedly, we were not given a Luddite harangue but a calm, at times almost static series of images which did not always cohere but whose individual eloquence often spoke powerfully: Kreiter on top of a pole leaning into space like the outlook on a ship’s mast; other dancers “flying” in formation like migratory birds to descend into individual handstands, curls and sit-ups; two women on a t-bar curling, twirling and swinging in perfect unison but perilously close to hitting a prone body below them. Dancers calmly but forcefully running into two others, causing them to keel over like dominoes; two dancers five feet in the air softly intertwining their limbs to make them indistinguishable from each other. . .

Despite its shortcomings—the piece petered out in the end and needs tightening—Body Project bore not a trace of gimmickry. Its considerable poetry was much aided by a sophisticated lighting design (Joe Williams) and an excellent, varied score played live by the seven member Charming Hostess orchestra.

The dance inspiration of an even smaller ensemble, the duo Dominique Zeltzman and Kathleen Hermesdorf, is also based on sports moves and a robust athleticism but one in which momentum and speed play a more prominent role. Both women have performed with other ensembles but their pairing is one of the more inspired recent hookups. Tall, lanky dancers, Hermesdorf is the more wispy of the two. Zeltzman moves in a sturdier manner, at times almost stoically and often appears to observe herself with a bemusemen , contrasting with Hermesdorf’s high voltage energy that seems to send her jumping out of her skin.

In Alter Ego: duality dances (March 21, Dancers Group), each of the women presented a solo and together they performed two duets. The solos accentuated their differences but it was in the duets that wires crossed and sparks began to fly. The opening Forget-Me-Knots featured the two dancers ambling away from the audience as they hugged themselves with fingers tapping their backs. This swiggly image set up a series of casually friendly encounters of rolling and heaving phrases with just a hint of romance-both sweet and ironic—thrown in for good measure. This was le jeu, courting as affection as well as a game, and its bodily contacts of pushes and pulls, as well as precision games of patty cake, never lost their sweetly ironic touch. Their newest piece, Nostalgia Sea was if anything even more successful. Watery fauna and flora images and those from water sports were easily recognizable and integrated into less specifically referential material. But what made Nostalgia one of the more delightful original pieces I have seen in a long time was the deftness with which this material was spun together by two women with minds of their own. Krissy Keefer has a track record of some fifteen years of creating and directing dance theater pieces of a socially committed point of view. Queen of Sheba (January 23, Dance Theater Mission), in which she drew on all of her theatrical instincts and experience, is her first excursion into solo work. It’s a work whose effectiveness lives off Krisser’s theatrical personality. She can be brash, she can be funny and she can also throw together a few entrechats.

In Sheba, four characters ultimately fuse into one. First the audience meets Lilith, the wife who refused to submit to Adam. Here Lilith—whose lovemaking is so noisy it disturbs the neighbors—is dressed in leopard coat and stiletto heels. Then an impatient 16-year-old Krissy, dressed in an American flag, furiously practices her ballet beats (though she doesn’t have the ‘right’ body for ballet). Next is Lily, Queen of Sheba’s restless commentator and most clearly Keefer’s alternate ego, slams doors and refuses to tone down her voice. Lily travels with a kit of emergency supplies “for the small catastrophes in life”—even though all she wants is “to heal an epidemic.” Finally, there is the Queen of Sheba: mythical, mysterious, amorphous, and, somehow, most importantly, real.

Keefer eloquently pinpoints the pain, absurdity, and humor inherent in a wide variety of situations. Her recreation of callous conversations overheard in pre-Roe vs. Wade hospitals is chilling. Her attempts at portraying sitting meditation are just as hilarious as her frantic searches for meaning in life. Above all, Keefer intuits how language and dance can supplement each other. It’s in moments of heightened emotional awareness—great passion, suffering, and joy-that her characters break into dance. And it’s through dance (not surprisingly, those of the whirling dervishes) that Keefer tied her myriad threads together.

Small companies may be the yeast that keeps dance flourishing but no society is healthy without a middle class. Even though New Shoes, Old Souls, (Jan. 13, Cowell Theater) is but five years old, the fact that its nineteen dancers are all over the age of forty, gave these performances a kind of solidity that is much associated with established ensembles. This year the program emphasized dance as a social activity; and for the first time all of the work was commissioned. The most eagerly-awaited piece was the collaboration between Mark Morris and the dancers. The Morris Dances title is something of a pun since it refers to the English folk dance tradition in which Morris dances were performed outside pubs during the Christmas holiday season, as well as to the renowned choreographer who in fact directed but did not choreograph the dance’s six sections. Morris Dances is a charming, lighthearted trifle, enlivened by a spirit of revelry and masquerading. One dancer donned horns, another two live snakes; a man devolved from a loping human into a wiggly dragon, and one woman’s silvery mane became something of a hedgehog’s costume.

Morris left his strongest imprint, however, in the sense of community created by the dance’s simple unison line steps and circle formations. Priscilla Regalado’s Latin jazz Encuentros was a more substantial affair in which music inspires bodily communication on a sensuously vibrant level. People meet, check each other out, pair off, change partners, emerge as individuals and ultimately again disappear into the dark. Regalado’s choreography most clearly showed how variously trained these dancers are. And Latin jazz dancers they ain’t. None came even close to Regalado’s and guest artist’s Juan Pazmino’s fluid and rhythmically expressive responses to Wayne Wallace’s excellent original score.

Michael Smuin’s tell-all My First Time featured the first sexual experiences of three middle-aged women friends (with Robert Sund dancing The Guy for each of them), Emily Keeler, Jo Ellen Arntz, and Leeds. It was a piece of mostly crude humor and some wit in which the verbal narratives unfortunately were given more care than their movement counterparts. Carlos Carvajal used Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales for his dream-dancing couples who come to the realization of the effect of time on their relationship. A lovely little piece, it was both noble and sentimental. And finally Celia Marta’s contained, yet ever so expressive Transcendence spoke up for maturity and, as the song says, “I am a woman.”

Another not so small event was the only American performance of Peter Sellars’ take on Peony Pavilion (March 7, Zellerbach Hall), the 16th century kun opera (as distinguished from the less refined Bejing type) by Tang Xianzu. The Festival d’Automne in Paris had planned to present Sellars Peony Pavilion was very much one of his bell-and-whistles shows intended to popularize a classic: the interlacing of a traditional story with contemporary references; spectacular sets, here a series of movable glass panels with dozens of small TV screens reflecting the action on stage; and first-rate performers, in this case three different ones for each of the two main characters. In the score Chinese-born composer Tan Dun paid tribute to the original opera in the first half of the show and then wildly veered off into post-Puccini dramatics that I half-suspected were intended as satires. At the core of this romance of Shakespearean dimension is the tale of a young girl who wastes away pining for love of a poor poet she has dreamt about. He in turn falls in love with her image and after many travails succeeds in bringing her back to life.

To tell his story Sellars chose two actors who presented a contemporary perspective, two opera singers who added heightened emotional intensity and, most ingenuously, he paired Chinese opera singer Hua Wenyi with a contemporary dancer, the astounding Michael Schumacher. Body language, mime and gestural expression are an essential way to create character in kun opera. To emphasize this very refined aspect of the form, Sellars coupled it with pure dance element. It was an inspired choice. Rarely has the power of dance and movement be more eloquently illustrated than in the ongoing interchange between this young modern-trained dancer and the older woman whose fluttering hands, mincing steps and serpentine poses sent him into breathless ecstasy. The two of them never touched, but he shaped himself into her shadow and created a protective space in which their passion, was never in doubt. It the made the literal coupling of the two actors and the opera singers overblown emotionalism look positively crude. It also infused soul into a work which otherwise was very heavy on spectacle.

The major satisfaction of ODC/SF’s spring season program (March 26, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) was the emergence of KT Nelson as an increasingly assured choreographer. Both works, Below the Rim and Walk Before Talk were created last year; the first for ODC, the latter for Diablo Ballet. Nelson for the time being apparently has abandoned her fascination with narrative and is concentrating on works in which movement is doing all the telling. She can set off plenty of sparks when her dancers float overhead, bounce off each other like water on a griddle or in one smooth line are lowered from an over the shoulder hoist to simply walk away. Walk Before Talk, the more intriguing of the two pieces, looked better than it did on Diablo Ballet whose male dancers were not nearly as supple as ODC’s Brian Fisher, Felipe Sacon, Levi Toney and guest artist Robert Henry Johnson.

There is no story except the one you always get when the male and the female of the species encounter each other. The work starts out on a somber note with the men tracing solitary patterns of raised arms, off-center balances and falls when the women enter from the side, one of them gently prodding a prone male dancer with her toe. In contrast to the men’s eventual fist-shaking energy Nelson infused the women (Shannon Mitchel, Heather Tietsort, Karina Richter and Monique Strauss) with a curious placidity of wide horizontal arm stretches, prayer-like hands and torsos frozen in an arrested sprint. Walk boosts splendid moments: a powerhouse duo of lifts and drops for Sacon and Richter, The high-kicking solo for veteran Mitchell and, my favorite, a velvety ensemble number in which the women vainly attempt to raise the sleep-drunken men from their stupor.

The other major work was Brenda Way’s Investigating Grace, set to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,“ premiered in Germany earlier this spring. In the program notes Way described the piece as having come out of a need to work with a piece of music that “could feed the spirit without bathos” during a time of deep personal anguish. Way wove a soloist, Freeman, first seen alone in a series of plies and little hops, like a thread through the thirty variations which she gave to small ensembles of two’s and threes. Eventually something emerged like a narrative along the line of a community’s embrace—Freeman corpselike lifted and lowered in a series of stages, a fierce and angrily slashing solo for Mitchell—but its connection to Bach’s magnificent score, remained out of reach. I felt I needed to see it again. When I did, I cried.