“Natural Selection,” “Love Songs,” “Triptych,” and “Bolero NYC”
Keigwin + Company
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
June 25, 2009
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Larry Keigwin has wit, theatrical smarts, and an enthusiasm for giving his audience something delicious to watch. The program he served up during his company’s recent run at the Joyce Theater was perfectly suited to an early summer evening: it was as quaffable as a glass of crisp white wine and hook-laden as a set of good pop songs.
The program opened at full throttle with “Natural Selection.” Six dancers in white linen and chiffon slugged it out over mates, tore after one another in a frenzy, and literally climbed the walls. It was an exhilarating ride but not an exhausting one, thanks to Keigwin’s supple musicality: he knew when and how to downshift his dancers into a measured counterpoint against Michael Gordon’s beautiful but relentlessly tense and propulsive “Weather One.” Not that Keigwin shied away from pyrotechnics—at a moment of climax, the quicksilver Ying-Ying Shiau, supported by two men, ran up the backs of a clawing huddle of dancers and raced horizontally along the back wall of the stage—but he detonated them shrewdly. There were arresting leisurely images, too: at one point, the dancers moved across the stage in a continually replicating arc of backbends, crawling through it in turn as if it were an endless tunnel.
“Love Songs,” a series of six duets for three couples set to 60’s pop music was a lesson in economy. Each couple had their own singer, shtick, and species of dysfunction—and each required less than six minutes to traverse the little arc of their relationship. Amazonian Liz Riga and the cocky, pugnacious object of her all-consuming passion—hilariously realized by Julian Barnett—grappled their way between the twin poles of dominance and dependence to Aretha Franklin. In the most touching pair of duets, Keigwin and Nicole Wolcott lurched and staggered across the stage to Nina Simone as a couple who couldn’t dance with each other, but couldn’t dance without each other, either. Keigwin fell against Wolcott’s hands after an awkward series of lifts and turns, and it was impossible to tell if she was holding him up or pushing him away. They finally collapsed into the swaying clinch of a last slow dance before the band goes home. The duets to Franklin and Simone were bookended by sock-hoppers Shiau and Alexander Gish dancing to Roy Orbison. They danced their entire opening duet to “Blue Bayou” without touching and their brittle cheer seemed willfully oblivious to the song’s expression of loss and longing. Although they eventually exchanged a shy first kiss when they returned to close out the work to “Crying,” their physical contact was mediated by the formality of balletic lifts and promenades as unruffled and chaste as anything in Bournonville.
“Triptych,” which premiered during the run, was the most abstract and emotionally remote work on the program; it didn’t have its locus of energy in little dramas of human interaction—it was all about outward-facing group formations. Its seven dancers—four women and three men—were dressed in cool, sleek variations on black bathing suits; the women had their hair up. Jonathan Melville Pratt’s commissioned score—percussive post-minimalist electronica—was sleek and remote, too. Midway through the first section, I wondered if “Triptych” was going to turn out to be Keigwin’s version of virtuosity to no particular end; it was a stylish eyeful, but not especially compelling. As the work progressed, however, he grew more pointed in his use of groups to create emotionally charged stage pictures, which sharpened its impact. The final third proved to be as unsettling as it was amusing: the dancers—still sleek and expressionless—marched back and forth across the stage in ever-changing patterns with quick, stiff-limbed strides and tick-tock waves, like a little army of toy bears.
“Bolero: NYC” was a send up—and celebration—of New York City street life for eight dancers and forty-six non-dancers of every size and shape, plus a dog and a baby, set to Ravel’s infamous “Bolero.” Keigwin’s deftness at flowing the crowd on and off the stage and his skill in directing our attention to witty little vignettes unfolding in its midst or at its margins was admirable. Most of the jokes were easy—a crowd parting like the Red Sea before a charging stroller mom, a commuter wresting with a newspaper hell-bent on deconstructing itself—but fun all the same.
Keigwin demonstrated an eye for telling gesture and a sure sense of how to populate the stage with groups large and small, but he also gave them something to dance. His phrases were elegantly textured and movement flowed naturally from the swift, fluid transfer of weight or the play of torsion around the body’s axis. His style—which at first glance doesn’t seem as distinctive as his sense of theater—easily incorporates an eclectic mix of movement. At the beginning and end of “Natural Selection” Gish swung across the stage in a series of moves that seemed equal parts street dance, gymnastic routine, and chimpanzee celebration. In the second section of Triptych, three dancers progressed serenely across the stage in what appeared to be the hybrid offspring of street dance and tai chi.
Keigwin doesn’t play with convention, he works it. Nothing on the program was genre-busting; the list of mainstream choreographers who haven’t done something like “Love Songs” or “Natural Selection” is shorter than the list of those who have. And while his dances were thoughtful, they hardly strayed from conventional wisdom: beneath every tea party lurks a troop of baboons in party clothes, love is a many-splendored but dysfunctional thing, and no one is a misfit in New York. Keigwin’s work is an artful synthesis of things we know how to watch—he tickles the synaptic pathways that we’ve already laid down, and does it well. It was just the thing for a summer night.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
