"We Give Ourselves Away at Every Moment: An EVENT for Merce"
Jon Kinzel, Susan Marshall, Lucinda Childs, Faye Driscoll, Bill T. Jones
River to River Festival
Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City
New York, NY
July 26, 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
He must have been smiling up there. On a perfect summer evening, after a month of painful heat, five distinguished and compelling choreographers created works to celebrate Merce Cunningham on the first anniversary after his death. An appreciative audience watched, lounging in Rockefeller Park around a large white stage ringed by the New York skyline and a perfect Hudson River dusk.
This evening, lovingly curated by Annie-B Parson and Will Knapp, made a point of honoring the experience of creators in the dance country where Merce was king. Not all of them had direct connections to Cunningham, but, as described by Parson, “we all have absorbed his ideas around abstraction and sequencing and music.” Simply creating or repurposing work (as Cunningham did in his “Events,”) and using this exceptional outdoor theater in the round, evoked him.
Four excerpts from Lucinda Childs were the heart of the program. A female duet from “Interior Drama,” was Childs in a nutshell: danced to the rhythm of a Phillip Glass score, the verticality of the dancers echoed the sharp edges of the skyline, and the quickness of increasingly complex steps created a pulsing energy. The dancers wove the stage in a breathless pattern of synched beats from the duet through the three larger cast pieces that followed. A male quartet got a little lost in counting the beats of the silent “Radial Courses,” but they eventually caught up with each other. The overall quality of the four dance slices and the crispness of the movement were reminders of both Childs’ – and Cunningham’s - discipline and geometric specificity.
Except for the recorded music accompanying the Lucinda Childs group, the evening’s live accompaniment was composed and played by Kotchy. He backed all of the other choreographers in a wandering electric soundtrack, beginning with Jon Kinzel’s “Drastic Cut and Responsible Ballet,” a sober opening duet with Vicky Shick. A percussive score behind Kinzel’s opening solo shifted to gentler tones as Shick joined him in their diagonal duet. The music, sometimes soft and lilting, became an electric wake-up call as Nikki Zialcita strode, grimaced, and yelled at us in Driscoll’s sharp-edged “837 Venice Boulevard.” Then the music softened again. The flow of the evening, one troupe seamlessly moving on stage as the previous dancers moved off, was partly thanks to the curators, but partly the gift of the musicians.
In several pieces an older dancer joined a younger, and served as guide and mentor to the movement. The flow was exactly right – Faye Driscoll’s wildly animalistic humanity charging in between the cool perfection of Childs’ geometry and Bill T. Jones rich morphing trio. Susan Marshall’s “Quartet with Child” was one of the highlights, and starred the youngest cast member. Three men and a woman moved in and out of soft duets and trios, all the while cradling Gideon S. H. Dyordjevic, a remarkably calm 5 month old who was passed from dancer to dancer. This infant represented the alpha to Cunningham’s omega and evoked all of the generations between. The weaving of the dancers in and out of solos and partnerships, and their entwining and protecting the baby, felt like a medieval Madonna and Child with saints – come sweetly to life in the 21st century.
The program’s other mesmerizing piece was Bill T. Jones’ revolving and interlocking trio, excerpted from “Poem/Arsenale.” His dancers, Talli Jackon, Shyla-Vie Jenkins, and Jennifer Nugent, were the limbs of one complex body or the mental threads of one evolving thought. As one dancer curled around another’s ankle, a third arched back over back. From high to low poses and gliding around the stage, the center of this trio kept shifting its center, with each dancer taking a turn at the core. In the end, after his trio of dancers left the stage, Jones delighted the crowd and surprised even the event organizers when he took the stage himself to the lyric of “Red River Valley.” He removed his hat and his shirt, his sculpted feet shifted heel to toe, and his still powerfully muscled body moved in a long diagonal spanning the floor. Those huge expressive hands danced one more time in honor of the master, before he launched himself into the arms of his waiting trio of acolytes, a generation honoring their descent from Cunningham’s legacy.
copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
Photos by Abbey Braden
Middle: Jon Kinzel and Vicki Shick in "Drastic Cut and Responsible Ballet"
Bottom: Bill T. Jones in "Poem/Arsenale/Excerpt"
