Basil Twist, "Petrushka Suite"
Monica Bill Barnes & Company, "I feel like"
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, "Go for Barocco"
DanceBrazil, "Culture in Motion"
Fall for Dance Festival
City Center, New York
September 26, 2009
by Tom Phillips
copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips
Saturday was comedy night at Fall for Dance. Three out of the four pieces on the bill were spoofs or takeoffs of one kind or another. Still, there was enough pure dance and theatrical magic to satisfy even the most serious-minded dance lover.
The most outright cut-ups, naturally, were the “ladies” of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, who performed their Balanchine travesty “Go for Barocco” with great sweep and just the right proportion of slapstick. But a more subtle and satisfying gender-bender was Monica Bill Barnes' “I feel like.” The blank space at the end of that sentence is the puzzle attacked by three women, trying to act out the role of a female in this post-feminist age. Barnes’s humor has long been a staple for hip audiences in small downtown venues, but here she demonstrates that she can rock a big house with a mixed audience just as well.
Long-limbed, rubber-faced Deborah Lohse begins the piece with a solo, or rather a duet for two sides of herself -- one sexy, flirtatious, and bold enough to flash glimpses of her navel, the other a basket case of anxious apprehension. Then Anna Bass and Ms. Barnes come on to punch up the former persona, shadow-boxing to show they can take care of themselves, even against a soundtrack of James Brown shouting “I feel like being a sex machine!” Me too! they seem to say, but curiously without much conviction. Defiantly, they pull their sweaters off their shoulders and lick their own skin, then cover up again. Barnes, whose very name is a gender-bender, acts out with wit and insight the plight of the macho woman, who has to forge her female identity by destroying it.
Barnes’s troupe was followed by the Trocks, whose muscular take on femininity served as a bridge to the program finale, which was a straight-out spectacle of macho mayhem. “Culture in Motion” by the all-male troupe DanceBrazil is a display of Brazilian capoeira, a martial art stylized into dance. New York has some of the most acrobatic street dancers in the world, but it seems the Brazilians have been doing this for a lot longer, and have developed some moves that would astonish the kids in the Times Square subway station. In pairs, they simulate aerial combat, whirling like helicopters with blade-like limbs cutting within millimeters of each other. And among their solo feats of strength was a handstand that slowly tipped into a sideways L-shape, with an impossible horizontal stretch of the torso and legs, supported only by the handstand.
The show began with a very different spectacle, a scene from "Petruskha" danced by Basil Twist’s puppets. We got some elegant classical ballet steps from the ballerina, some hot sex between her and the Moor, and plenty of laughs for the hapless clown. But sometimes it was hard to concentrate on the puppets. The real spectacle was the black-clad teams of puppeteers, three to a character, racing across the stage in super-close formation, ducking and weaving as they manipulated the head, arms and feet of their actors. They may have worked as hard as the capoeira fighters, and come just as close to calamity.
Copyright 2009 by Tom Phillips
