"4 x 4"
Compahnia de Dança Deborah Colker
City Center
New York, NY
October 22, 2009
By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2009 Carol Pardo
Take one choreographer, seventeen dancers, four Brazilian artists, a goodly helping of ambient music (much of it by Berna Ceppas), "Some Day My Prince Will Come" sung in a high treble, and a dash of Mozart. Add costumes and light. The result is "4 x 4" a collage of dances choreographed by Deborah Colker.
In "Cantos (Corners)", the sculptor and conceptual artists Cildo Meireles breaks up the traditional cube of stage space with six narrow free-standing corners like segments of a closet. These are home to the company's women, looking pretty fabulous in jewel-toned dresses that reveal a lot of flesh, particularly legs that seem to start at their armpits. The small spaces are by turns comforting, claustrophobic, or a jungle gyms. Later, the men appear atop each structure, potent an menacing from at least nine feet up. How they'll get down is one of the more compelling questions of the evening; to do so in one go would be to court serious injury. But get down they do. Thereafter, duets with one person off the ground and one horizontal, sometimes simultaneously, prevail.
If the organizing principle of "Cantos" is vertical, then that of the second, "Mesa (Table)" is horizontal. Set against a spring green drop, a combination conveyor belt and table, cool and metallic like a hospital gurney (decor courtesy of the sculptural collective Chelpa Ferro), moves across a thin strip at the front of the stage. It is the setting for a rotating series of pas de deux and pas de trois, sculptural in form and serene in tone, so that when one dancer dies a flying belly flop on to the table, it shakes things up.
When the lights come up on "Povinho (Some People)" we see why the preceding section was allotted such limited space. Victor Arruda's set includes both a backdrop and a floor cloth. On both, body parts--a head with the tongue sticking out, a torso seen from the rear, a human heart--are painted in saturated red blue or yellow and heavily outlined in black. The floor cloth, similarly painted, was invisible from the orchestra level, which may have been a good thing. For the faux-naive style of the set permeated the dance as well. Set to that recording of "Some Day My Prince Will Come," the dancers shook their booty and grabbed their crotches in response to the choreographer's interest in "those everyday movements that everyone does and doesn't want everyone to see ... like when you're picking your nose to pull out a booger". Intended, perhaps, to be daring, innocent or childlike, "Povinho" was only childish and puerile, lacking even a single moment of kinetic interest.
The curtain rose on "Vasos (Vases)" to reveal the choreographer at a grand piano. As she played the theme and variations from Mozart's "Piano Sonata No. 11," several the women appeared in eighteenth-century flak jackets, bare legs and point shoes. The leitmotiv was the all too prevalent extension as act of aggression. Behind them, their colleagues began to populate the stage with vases, ninety in all, laid on a diagonal to the proscenium plane. The stage was ripe with spatial tension. Here was the chance to develop the theme of limitation first broached in "Cantos". No dice. The choreographer seems to have run out of things to say or of the vocabulary with which to say them. There isn't even a moment of surprise as there had been earlier. Gringo Cardia, the last of the collaborators from the world of the visual arts, saved the day. Near the end of the piece metal objects--feathers? knives? bells? lights? (their aspect changes as they descend)-- are slowly lowered into the vases. The vases then levitate as the lights dim, their solid forms and shadows doing a much more interesting dance of their own.
This was an evening of diminishing returns. Though the choreographer wants to find new solutions to old problems, others have beaten her to it. Question gravity ("Cantos")? Elizabeth Streb. The illusion of movement continuing infinitely ("Mesa")? See the entrance of the Shades in "La Bayadère". Paul Taylor's "Diggity" and its metal cut-outs provide all the danger and daring which "Vasos" should have had. Would that it had been otherwise, that Deborah Colker's solutions could have joined those on this list rather than being supplated by them.
Photograph: Marcelo Lopes and Deborah Colker in "4 x 4" Cia de Dança Deborah Colker