“Les Chambres des Jacques,” “Rush,” “Odissi:PRAVAHA,” “Harmonica Breakdown,” “Uprising”
[bjm_danse] Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal/Oregon Ballet Theatre/Madhavi Mudgai/Sheron Wray/Hofesh Shechter Company
City Center
New York, NY
September 20, 2008
by Susan Reiter
copyright 2008 Susan Reiter
The Fall for Dance Festival really hit its stride with this third program, as wide-ranging a sampler as one could devise -- and with not a single New York-based company among the five. In fact, only one -- Oregon Ballet Theatre -- was American, with the others hailing from Canada, India and England. The three works seen in excerpted form were intriguing enough that one wished to put them in a fuller context, and the two that were performed complete -- one solo and one duet -- were powerful and distinctive.
The evening got off to an exhilarating start with an excerpt from Aszure Barton's "Les Chambres des Jacques," a work she created for [bjm_danse] -- the company formerly known as Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal (and which on this occasion confusingly chose to use both names). The always interesting Barton recently completed a two-year stint as the troupe's resident choreographer, and she clearly got to know the dancers well and discovered how to make them look their best. The stage throbbed with ten distinctive, quirky movers, shimmying and torquing and slip-sliding through phrases that looked loose and wild while clearly requiring pinpoint control. Even rooted in place during the opening section, they filled the stage with explosive energy. The odd yet delicious mix of music -- a French-Canadian folk song song in a dry, raspy voice, a transitional bit of Vivaldi; the odd soulful mix of blues and klezmer played by the Cracow Klezmer Band -- matched Barton's surprising blend of the whimsical and plaintive, the sensual and inquisitive.
The central duet from Christopher Wheeldon's "Rush," a 2003 ballet set to a Martinu score performed by OBT's Alison Roper and Artur Sultanov, reveals his fluency and eye for the striking image, yet its overall impact was more generic than memorable. Wheeldon has crafted a few too many ready-for-the-camera entwined positions, and the section where the dancers sink to the floor and recline felt obligatory rather than organic. The dancers were impeccably clear and strong, and captured the underlying unease of the Martinu music.
This was followed by a duet of a very different nature: Madhavi Mudgal's refined, stirkingly animated "Odissi: PRAVAHA," a world premiere in which the choreographer and her niece, Arushi Mudgal, exemplified the deliquescent arms and upper body, as well as the engaging alertness and sparkling eyes of the Odissi style. Madhavi Mudgal opened with a solo, accompanied by five exemplary musicians seated on the floor at stage right, in which her warmth and meticulously placed gestures filled the stage to a degree that belied her petite stature. Her lustrous draped costume of turquoise and purple emphasized the curves of her bowing and dipping phrases.
When Arushi Mudgai joined her, wearing the identical costume with the colors reversed, their duet became a dialogue of symmetry and oppositions. The program note cited "the meeting of complementary principles," and the two women -- one more grounded, and serene, the second more vibrant and darting -- embodied this with eloquent refinement. The musicians -- most doubling as instrumentalists and singers -- added richly to the performance.
Sheron Wray, who danced with Ballet Rambert and London Contemporary Dance Theatre and now creates her own work, was entrusted with Jane Dudley's classic 1938 solo "Harmonica Breakdown," and this performance demonstrated why she merited that trust. A tall, powerful, vivdly focused dancer, Wray delivered this study in determination with concentrated power. She established the eloquent simplicity of the work's recurring motif -- a stiff, weighted forward trudge, as the dancer leans forward as though pushing through obstacles -- but interspersed that with explosive, muscular jumps, her legs shooting out in unexpected directions.
The seven men of Hofesh Shechter Company, performing an excerpt from "Uprising," immediately created an aura of brutish menace and ominous tension. The glaring bank of white spotlights and Shechter's ponderous, mechanistic score certainly added to the sense of unease and threat. Looking ultra-casual and anything but dancerly in their plebeian grey clothes, the men nonetheless introduced themselves by striding purposefully forward from the upstage gloom, pausing downstage with a leg raised in passé and staring out with blank defiance. They proceeded to lope and twist, executing feats of fluidity while sustaining their proletarian matter-of-factness. Shechter, an Israeli who danced with Batsheva before moving to England, where his company is based, pours on the atmosphere and surface effects, but there is no denying the vigor and purposefulness at work here -- as well as his artfully fluid use of stage space.
Photos:
top: [bjm_danse] in "Les Chambres des Jacques" (photo by Jean Tremblay)
bottom: Arushi Mudgal and Madhavi Mudgal in "Odissi: PRAVAHA" (photo by Kamal Sahai)
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