"Adir Adirim", "Transfigured Night (Excerpts)", "Danke Schoen", "Rauschen 13"
BodyTRAFFIC
Z Space at Theater Artaud
San Francisco, CA
July 6, 2010
by Rita Felciano
Copyright © by Rita Felciano, 2010
So little cultural interchange takes place between the Bay Area and Southern California that sometimes one thinks that they have been plopped down on different continents. That's why the under-the-radar, one-night only appearance by the three year old BodyTRAFFIC from Los Angeles proved such a welcome surprise. The more so, since on their first outing to San Francisco these excellent dancers also introduced Israeli choreographers Barak Marshall and the team of Guy Weizman and Roni Haver. With the local premiere of Alex Ketley's trio "Rauschen 13", BodyTRAFFIC offered an invigorating, detailed and admirable evening of contemporary dance.
Since I am not familiar with the company, I hesitate to generalize about its stylistic predilections though it was striking that all four works favored a fierce, highly controlled physicality in which kamikaze attacks melt like butter and a potential punch evaporates in a flick of the finger. Throughout the choreography veered between extremes of speed and stasis, control and abandon, indifference and commitment. The works also--refreshingly--made its points with music, movement and gestures.
Both of Marshall's pieces were short. He set the speed-freak "Adir Adirim" (Praise to God) to infectious music by Balkan Beatbox on four dancers (Tina Finkelman Berkett, Hai Cohen, Ja Young Kim and Merrett Miller). Encasing wide plies as if in cement, he deployed upper body rolls, jerky arm gestures and hiccupping shoulders in a fast game of one-upmanship unisons that looked as competitive as it was playful. At one point they hopped across the stage in deep plies like so many frogs. Breaking out of the group, individuals uncannily stepped back into the patterns. "Adir," which curled back to its beginning, looked like folk-dancing for the 21st century. For the intriguing "Danke Schoen", to Wayne Newton's evergreen, eight dancers lined up with their arms outstretched and their fingers opening and closing like a flower. After some of peeled off, never to be seen again, the remaining quartet paired off into shifting couples that re-arranged themselves and each other's bodies with a relaxed yet committed determination. Rich gestural language--devoid of any literal meanings--served to enhance he stripped down athletic interchanges in which the dancers sometimes seemed to acknowledge each other only to withdrew into neutral task-oriented attitudes.
Weizman and Haver's haunting"Transfigured Night" used parts of Schoenberg's eponymous score for a piece dominated by stops and starts. Even though seen in excerpts only, there was something very disturbing about the work's setting up of these never full-filled expectations. How much of the fragmentation was due to these being excerpts, I couldn't tell. Some of it looked like a movie that simply stopped running. Long sections were performed in silence; music came in, only to disappear again. A male dancer's beautiful balletic turn went nowhere. A woman lifted her knee towards her partner's chest, and then they simply return to their seats. A female duet aborted before a foot was set down. Couples started a phrase and simply abandoned it. A partner simply crumbled to the floor. In a trio two men manipulated a catatonic woman in point shoes, apparently deciding in the spur of the moment who was going to what to her next. Even though the pacing was fast and often fierce, much of Transfigured" looked as if inhabited by ghosts. It ended with a woman embracing a bloody red flower to her chest.
Ketley's "Rauschen 13", an abstract, formally stringent trio for the astounding Finkelman Berkett, Julie Rose Friedrich and Jordan Isadore, took full of advantage of these dancers' speed and refined athleticism. It was set to a noise dominated score that at times suggested waves or wind storms. A couple of times the dancers responded by blowing air of their own. Ketley's infused his non-stop, stage-embracing choreography with little details that put touch of the ordinary onto, and perhaps "humanized," these dancer athletes. Fingers became tools of exploration, sometimes acting like antennas, other times they simply lifted a shirt. "Rauschen" clearly paid tribute to Finkelman Berkett as dancer -- superfast, supersexy, superexpressive.
BodyTRAFFIC needs to come back, hopefully with a new repertoire and better advance notice than the presenting San Francisco Conservatory of Dance was able to provide.
