Whether in choreography or therapy, exploring big themes for years doesn't always leads to startling insight. Often, it just leads to more exploration. Vendetta Mathea has been “examining the foundations of human nature” for a long time; in the current version of “Homme/Animal,” her findings are passionate, but muddy. The Detroit-born choreographer, who has lived and worked in France for 30 years, has created a small, tightly knit dance troupe that includes her own children. The company moves powerfully and meshes beautifully, but the dance roamed in a random mix of choreographic styles to a score that bounced between noise and drumbeat, with some chants occasionally mixed in.
It’s hard to watch the men-monkeys of "Khmeropédies III: Source/Primate" and not be convinced they are evolution's missing link. Long before Darwin ignited his debate in the West, Cambodia had made that lineage clear through dance. In her dance offering for the Season of Cambodia festival, French-Cambodian choreographer Emmanuèlle Phuon has added to the richness of the Cambodian classical dance with a mix of anthropology and the contemporary artistic license. The layers take Phuon and the dancers of Cambodia’s Amrita Performing Arts company back to where they started. These dancers have become primates.
With her carefully crafted movement, a large and beautiful cast of dancers, and a translucent dark scrim splitting the action in two, it feels like you can’t possibly see everything in Vicky Shick’s “Everything You See.” If you wait and watch patiently, though, all things come. The duets and trios glimpsed through the dark curtain (as you watch the solos or quintets on your own side) migrate into view. Blinking might mean missing something good -- and don’t expect to see everything at once.
Traditional Japanese theater, set in space and silence, hints at hidden treasures. For “Sanbaso,” the classic noh and kyogen work offered by collaborators Mansai Nomura and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the Guggenheim Museum’s spiral atrium offered an evocative modern twist. The work, based on ancient Shinto rituals and performed in a tradition over 600 years old, filled the dramatic setting with haunting dance and music that seemed both ancient and contemporary.
In a close to perfect pairing of format and work, Liz Gerring offered us the tools to reveal the mysteries of “she dreams in code,” her work at the Harkness Festival. This year’s “Stripped/Dressed” festival, curated by 92Y’s Artist-in-Residence Doug Varone, asks the creators to discuss their work before it is played. Gerring informally introduced the audience to the piece through descriptions of its most compelling aspects– athleticism, repetition, clarity, musical collaboration – as her skilled dancers offered examples. With the keys to the code offered, the compelling movement and patterns became accessible to a mesmerized audience.
Ten years is a long time to immerse yourself in an idea, but Jennifer Monson has dedicated a decade to her exploration of nature, art, and community through the metaphor of birds since 2002 with “BIRD BRAIN Osprey Migration. In a retrospective look, “Live Dancing Archive” incorporates video from the “Bird Brain” work, a web archive of images and ideas, and a live performance by Monson.
For a work inspired by fractal geometry and Walsh functions - ideas that beg to be looked up - Karole Armitage’s “Mechanics of the Dance Machine” is pretty tame. Showing off the lineage of her Balanchine and Cunningham training, Armitage mixed classical moves, Bach, and pointe work with modern movement, music, and costuming, and added changing checkerboard lighting, yet failed to evoke geometric mysteries – and was less innovative that its hype suggested. What she did capture well, as she has often done, were the many guises and angles of relationships, as pairs of dancers levered on and off of each other and through space in well-disciplined form.
David Parsons’ crowd-pleasing style hasn’t developed much since the 1980s, but he and his dancers still deliver a show rooted in joy and athletic energy. Their five-work program at the Joyce traced those qualities from Parsons’ 1982 signature solo “Caught,” to the present. The centerpiece was the New York premiere of “Dawn to Dusk,” Parsons’ inventive film and dance travelogue. An excerpt of his 2012 homage to the Everglades and South Florida, most of the piece was a visually compelling (if somewhat confusing) wander through gorgeous marshland, but disappointed when it closed as a thinly disguised commercial for Miami nightlife.
Dance training is much more than physical conditioning and coordination. It’s easy to take the rigor and complexity for granted. Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin edifies and delights her audience by unpeeling the layers in “Untrained,” her 2009 work for four men - two dancers and two regular guys. The movement itself was fairly pedestrian and the non-dancers’ skills were about what you’d expect for untrained dancers. But the piece was engaging and all of the players worth watching, as much for their personalities and their willingness as for precision or choreographic patterns.
Fabulous Beast Theatre claimed the luck of the Irish in bringing “Rian” to Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, as the ship bearing their production was diverted to Philadelphia by Hurricane Sandy. Despite their troubles, the troupe had improvised a simple set of raised upstage platforms, and had recovered their costumes. Director/choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan described the challenge of the weather and made a simple appeal for forbearance in a sweetly humorous curtain speech. That opening was smoothly integrated into a performance that was long on charm and cultural infusion, but short on creative choreography or the re-imagination of familiar Irish forms.
Whether in choreography or therapy, exploring big themes for years doesn't always leads to startling insight. Often, it just leads to more exploration. Vendetta Mathea has been “examining the foundations of human nature” for a long time; in the current version of “Homme/Animal,” her findings are passionate, but muddy. The Detroit-born choreographer, who has lived and worked in France for 30 years, has created a small, tightly knit dance troupe that includes her own children. The company moves powerfully and meshes beautifully, but the dance roamed in a random mix of choreographic styles to a score that bounced between noise and drumbeat, with some chants occasionally mixed in.
