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Bay Area Report

Flyaway Productions, Mel Wong Dance Company, Joe Goode Performance Group, Sonya Delwaide, AXIS Dance Troupe, Paufve Dance, The Foundry

by Rita Felcianol
copyright © 2001 by Rita Felcianol
Summer 2001

Having grown up in a climate in which the seasons make themselves unmistakably known, I always thought that “hope springs eternal” referred more to the weather than some people’s propensity to tie the knot again and again. But in the Bay Area the adage could also be applied to space-deprived dancers who somehow find the energy—and the stages—to keep performing. While spring usually produces a crop of voices in their first bloom, this year it seemed a season particularly rich with dance that has moved beyond initial expectations.

Choreographer Jo Kreiter, of Flyaway Productions, is developing a movement language that demands upper body strength and, in spots, a ballet dancer’s sense of placement. The subject of her new evening-length Maybe Grief is a Good Bird Flying Low (April 6, SomArts Theater) was mourning, with Kreiter suggesting that women grieve communally and differently from men. The piece slacked in a few spots but for the most part it soared, carried along by an emotionally involving trajectory in which lyricism and danger, restriction and liberation went hand in hand. It was also helped by performers who were as comfortable thirty feet up in the air as on the floor.

Kreiter calls her works “apparatus-based dances” because she uses specially constructed equipment, in this case small platforms attached at various levels to the theater’s walls, two trapezes suspended mid-point in the performance space and an enormous two-tiered carousel-like contraption that for much of the evening looked like an arrested satellite. Maybe Grief started conventionally on the floor but then grew up onto the “shelves,” one of which was mounted just under the roof. The women looked like statuary come to life, writhing, kicking, turning in on themselves or reaching towards each other across space. The dramatic highlight came in a physically risky but also anguished and lyrical duet between Kreiter and Rachel Lincoln—the two most gymnastically trained dancers—just below the theater’s roof line. Always on the verge of throwing themselves or falling off that tiny heaven of safety, at the last minute a hooked foot would reached into an arm pit, a hanging body’s two arms grabbed a waist or a reservoir of strength kicked for the saving hoist. This episode, more than any other, made physical the work’s pull between despair and hope. Settling into a more subdued and lyrical mode on the trapezes, the piece ended in a circle dance on the “carousel” that was both quietly accepting—at one point the dancers looked like corpses in orbit— and upbeat.

The Mel Wong Dance Company’s most recent program (March 31, ODC Theater) raised questions about where this choreographer is going. The former Merce Cunningham dancer, who has been teaching at UC Santa Cruz for many years, presented an evening of world premieres which veered between the exhilarating and the banal. With solo works as good as they were, and ensemble pieces—performed by his company of former students—so thin to be threadbare, one wondered whether Wong might not be better off doing what he clearly does well, find good dancers and create solos.

Wong offered two of these solos, Segue and the somewhat reworked 3rd Avenue and 33rd Street, his yo-yo-assisted autobiographical take on growing up in the Bay Area. Segue’s loose-limbed and impish wit, the Cunningham-inspired vocabulary of large light-footed trajectories, quick as lightning changes and loping loop runs partnered the earlier “memory” piece well.

With The Arrival Wong pulled out all the registers for Silvia Martins, a still remarkably powerful and expressive dancer. At times Martins seemed pursued, at times she was the pursuer, but above all she appeared caught in a situation beyond her control. Initially yanked onto the stage by an invisible force, her body shuddered at the violence applied. She staggered into contractions and from then on seemed pulled in all directions simultaneously. At one moment fierce turns whipped her around, in the next she sank into cloud-like descents.

Taking his cue from Molissa Fenley, with whom Martins has danced, Wong choreographed Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for her, or at least half of it. Wong focused on the victim and didn’t bring the ensemble into the piece until the second half. A fierce creature, Martins’ virgin fought her fate with flailing arms and eddying turns, collapsing and contracting but also with an awareness of what was to come. Unfortunately, the piece completely went off track with Wong’s vapid group choreography, unbearably undercutting Martins’ remarkable interpretation.

Two sextets, That’s My Secret—based on narrated secrets contributed by each dancer—and the slightly more complex Veil, completed the program.

Joe Goode Performance Group’s new What the Body Knows (May 30, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) was one of Goode’s most satisfying recent premieres. It broke a trend towards marginalization of dance in Goode’s approach to dance theater. This was choreography—as always co-created with the dancers—that was emotionally telling and detailed. Dance wasn’t subservient but convincingly amplified and commented on the spoken narratives. The duets and solos were grounded in specific narratives. The weighty ensemble work—including a knife fight—was detailed and lush; structured falls and slow motion sequences balanced sculptural lifts and suspensions. The result more than once sent spirits soaring.

Goode’s wistfulness has acquired a darker edge. The desire to entertain still looms large, yet these characters are a little more sharply drawn. Despite his compassion for our foibles, a note of impatience has also crept into Goode’s look at the way we live our lives.

Listening to the “rumblings of the body” yielded a series of mini-narratives, fresh in their specificity but ultimately not all that unfamiliar to Goode watchers. Liz Burritt’s character, who was “born to be sympathetic” built upon her “physically challenged” mermaid from Take/Place. In between whirl winding through a torrent of conflicting emotions, from fury and impatience to tenderness and bathos, she sat at a table where the camera picked up every twitchy grimace and ironic facial comments. Videographer Doug Rosenberg’s traveling cloud images provided a placid refrain.

Language and movement played off each other in different ways in this work; their interaction nicely varied. Sharp attacks, thrusting limbs and aggressive but even-handed partnering showed Marit Brook-Kothlow and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello equal partners in a marriage born in hell. Verbally she had done all the accusing as well as the courting, while he had simply stood frozen in silence. The flipping-each-other duets for an eczema-picking (the metaphor was the skin) and talkative Marc Morozumi and a less verbal, but physically very articulate Vong Phrommala, presented one view of a relationship through language while its more intriguing aspects were worked out through the interspersed martial arts-inspired choreography.

Sonya Delwaide is a movement devouring Canadian transplant whose appropriately named Les Invités (The Guests) (May 31, ODC/Theater) proved that mixing party guests can make for stimulating conver-ation. Since she doesn’t have a company yet, she borrowed wholesale: ODC/San Francisco for its bravura dancers, the Berkeley Ballet for its fresh-faced, well trained students and AXIS Dance Troupe for its mix of abled/disabled dancers.

L’Apéro, to a score by the ever-elegant Georg Friedrich Handel, received an exceptional Bay Area premiere by ODC’s Yukie Fujimoto, Brian Fisher, Brandon Freeman and former member Heather Tietsort, with Diablo Ballet’s Erika Johnson and free-lancer Kara Davis completing the cast. Equally adept at designing meticulous gestures and large scale high velocity trajectories, Delwaide dove into the social niceties and social pretensions, moments of quasi-intimacy and near collisions that one is likely to encounter at any large party. L’Apéro was a marvel of invention and sardonic wit.

The architecture of the newer, at times quite stark Tra (Wood), choreographed last year for Hubbard Street’s second company, was more severe. More than anything Tra appeared to explore the clashing of immutable forces, maybe tectonic plates, maybe human egos. Men pushed against each other till gravity defeated them, an airborne woman’s pedaling looked like a machine’s, one man carried off his partner like a log. These specific images were bedded into volatile choreography that carried the piece with the inevitability of a force of nature.

L’Attente, despite its not so successful excursion into ritual involving a bride’s initiation, impressed with the clarity of its design and rather intriguing, at times quite fast group choreography that favored floor work and much upper body expressiveness. Well performed by Delwaide’s students, the piece ultimately piece proved to be overly long; it also was hampered by a maudlin score. However, it highlighted Delwaide’s versatility and capacity to create for specific dancers.

Suite Sans Suite (Part 1) was another example of how Delwaide can cut pieces to what dancers can do. Each of the four sections—a fulminating solo for herself, one for a twirling ballet dancer, another for a man on a chair who repeated a series of phrases within changing contexts, and a duet for physically unequal dancers. Each of these mini dances raised questions about virtuosity, technique and expressiveness.

AXIS Dance Troupe (June 7, Cowell Theater) is a feisty group of disabled and able-bodied dancers who a couple of years ago started commissioning choreographers outside their immediate entourage. The results have been transformative since everyone—dancers, audience, choreographers—learned to think outside the box. The company now, in addition to two Delwaide pieces owns works by Joe Goode, Joanna Haigood and Bill T. Jones. Delwaide’s intermittently captivating Suite Sans Suite (Part 2), included some of the material she had performed on her own concert. This series of miniatures worked by themselves but tying them together proved to be problematic. The company also the presented a commission by the master of high speed virtuosity, Stephen Petronio. His Secret Ponies for Axis’ five women was imagistic and telling though in a rather modest way.

Ponies’ seven short sections tried to minimize physical differences by having, for instance, all of the dancers perform from a sitting position and focus on contrapuntal arm gestures that everyone could do. The piece spoke with a pleasing sense of reconfiguring small units in which two bodies often appeared as one. Up Syncline by company members Alisa Rasera and Megan Schirle was a delightful romp full of abrupt stops and starts and dizzying changes of directions. The reworked aerial piece of Air, now danced by Stephanie McGlynn with Uli Schmitz, however, looked haphazard with the dancers getting tangled in the rope instead of flying with it.

The concert’s highlight remained the rigorous and soaring Fantasy in C Major to the eponymous Schubert chamber work that Jones had set on the ensemble last year. Challenging because of the speed with which the dancers engaged each other, changed partners or moved through space, the work made high demands on every dancer whether in or out of wheelchairs. With multiple simultaneous actions, all the scooting, whirling, racing and sliding at times seemed headed for collisions but instead the dance felt playful and exuberant. Ironically, it was the able bodied dancers who had some difficulty carrying through in this remarkably musical piece of choreography.

At the same church in which Isadora Duncan first performed in public, Randee Paufve’s new company, PaufveDance (June 7, First Unitarian Church of Oakland), made its premiere appearance. For this concert—three solos and two ensemble pieces—Paufve channeled earlier narrative impulses along more abstract avenues. What stood out again was Paufve’s excellent craft; she is inventive but particularly adept in knitting disparate phrases togehter so that they amount to surprises. However, the overall feeling tone of the ensemble work at this point is quite reserved; some of it could use some heat.

BloodTongueSeverTatterRend is based on poems about violence by Beth Murray. Given the subject matter, Paufve’s choreography, with the superb Jane Schnorrenberg as the lead dancer, registered as subdued. Transparently formal and a with measured sense of give and take in the way individuals would be featured, Blood appeared almost to clinically examine the relationship between outsiders and an intermittently supportive group. While intriguing in its details, the piece ultimately overshot its trajectory, no doubt in part because of Shostakovitch’s overwrought score.

Misgivings, a trio, is so carefully balanced that you wonder how exactly these people relate to each other—which is Paufve’s point. An overall static quality contrasted with abrupt, short phrases. Telling silences which punctuated the movement worked well. At one point the dance’s jerkiness evolved into an attempt at a waltz à trois; the dancers looked caged.

The newest solo, Thursday West Oakland showed Paufve at her most ebullient. A slinky, slippery step and stomp quality characterized this interaction with the equally exuberant vocalizing by Allegra Yelling. In Notes on Citizenship Paufve looked back at her adolescent crush on Richard Nixon. This was a study in awkwardness—hunched shoulders, back to the audience, abrupt hand and arm gestures—of both Nixon’s physical ungainliness and that of a self-conscious pubescent’s.

The appropriately named Giovanni’s Wings, a memorial to a friend who died of AIDS, had a lovely airborne quality to it. Even when she slid sideways into a sitting position or hopped in arabesque, Paufve seemed to be looking down from a place above until the end when she dejectedly sank into the ground. She had lost her wings.

The Foundry may be only three years old but the particularized approach to multi-media that co-directors Alex Ketley and Christian Burns’—who also dance with Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet—take has made the company a distinct and intriguing Bay Area voice. For Capacity From Shallowness (June 10, Headland Center for the Arts), as they have in previous works, they directed, choreographed, danced, designed both visuals and the sound and created the extensive videography. That’s a lot to be good at but with the Foundry brings it off.

Performed in a shallow pool and on a piece of lawn inside an old army gym, Capacity’s half dozen or so scenes juxtaposed seemingly unrelated ele-ments which acquired meaning by sheer proximity to each other and a modest insistence on being themselves. A fully clothed Ketley sloshed in the water against actress Leslie Schickel’s reading of deconstructionist theory. Flute player Richard Worth paired images of a man battling the surf. A naked Burns plunked down solitary piano notes while a clothed Ketley on screen crawled ever so slowly across a bench.

In the most surreal scene, Burns partnered a tree stump. He started using an ax on it, then dressed it carefully in his own shirt and partnered it in a tender duet. Throughout Capacity remained tactile, visceral and immediate. The piece ended with Ketley pouring water on his arm as Burns slowly rolled up the sod.