DanceNOW at DTW

2008 DanceNOW(NYC) Festival
Base Camp
Dance Theater Workshop
New York, New York
October 30, 2008

by Tom Phillips
copyright 2008 by Tom Phillips

For one who has seen a lot of self-conscious drama at Dance Theater Workshop over the years, it was a pleasure to drop in on a program that focused instead on music and pure movement. Thursday’s DanceNOW(NYC) Base Camp, co-produced with DTW, was a survey of 12 companies in a dozen brief works and excerpts, most of them new. The high points were three solos, three duets and a sexy trio.

Two were choreographed by Robert Battle, who was being honored in the festival’s 10th anniversary project, presenting a dance he created ten years ago alongside a newly commissioned work. These were very different in form, but alike in their exact and exacting response to the music. “Takademe” from 1995 is a sequence of compulsive-looking movements, large and small, to the rapid-fire mouth music of Sheila Chandra’s “Speaking in Tongues II.” Solo dancer Kanji Segawa looks as if he’s plugged directly into the mysterious source of the glossolalia, which takes turns electrifying various parts of his body, including his face and mouth in a soundless monologue. The contrast couldn’t be greater with Battle’s new work, “Still,” to a flowing serenade by Mendelssohn. Segawa returns with a striking partner, Erika Pujic, for a moonlight exercise in lengthening limbs, and stretching out long liquid musical phrases.

Gerald Casel’s “Exit Skeleton,” had the same kind of lyricism in tandem, danced with passion by Guillermo Ortega Tanus and Eun Jung Choi-Gonzalez. These two seem to be invisibly connected as they double their movements in separate space, then dynamically linked as they come together for some powerful lifts.

An excerpt from Zvi Gotheiner’s “Interiors” (2000) is a much closer tangle for a man, a woman and a chair. Todd Allen and Ying-Ying Shiau work their way inside, outside, around and through each other's arms and legs, while trading places on and off their four-legged partner, and never letting go. This is Zvi at his most intimate and intense, and an awesome display of strength by the tiny, tensile Shiau.

Pure strength in female form was also the theme of a solo by Bergen Wheeler, to a marching chant by the U.S. Army Infantry and a soulful howl by James Brown (“I feel good!”) Wheeler is (almost) famous for a trick she did in 2005 on the David Letterman show, walking up to the host on her hands, wrapping her legs around him and pulling herself upright. Here she shows her strength in independent action, seemingly pulling herself off the floor by means of her core strength alone.

A more self-effacing solo was “Dream Lockdown,” a witty piece of hip-hop by Kyle Abraham to a rap by Kanye West, danced under a single hand-held light that shone like a street lamp. Abraham has worked subtlety into street dancing, creating an awkward, tentative character out of the macho-mechanical technique of popping and locking.

The most mysterious piece on the program was Ashleigh Leite’s premiere “Valedictory,” in which a trio of young women in slinky black mini-dresses and pink boas take minimal steps in close formation, to a background of industrial noise and hard rock. These three keep their eyes front, and their expressions deadpan, as if to tease the audience into some unintended reaction to their kittenish Kabuki. They got it from at least one viewer. Who are these ladies, and how can I see more of them? That is the question.

Not everything on the program was appealing, particularly the finale by the Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre. “Apian Way” is supposedly inspired by the social interaction of bees, but the three men here act more like pigeons, clomping around, bumping each other and noisily trampling the delicate structure of a Bach sonata. This may have been intended as a light-hearted spoof in the Paul Taylor vein, but it came out ham-fisted and heavy. Still, this evening was a sampler worth sampling, and a heartening look at the present state of the New York dance scene. The DanceNow(NYC) Festival continues through Saturday at Dance Theater Workshop, with 65 companies in all.

Copyright 2008 by Tom Phillips

Photo by Steven Schreiber