“Offering,” “2Parts Whole,” “Bird Stick Lady or Self Portrait, Sperryville,” “Interview/Innerview”
Deborah Wanner Dance
Chen Dance Center
New York, NY
April 15, 2010
By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
Deborah Wanner delivers what she believes. Wanner, who has danced and collaborated for over 20 years with a wide range of choreographers in downtown New York dance venues, is also a dance professor, videographer, and certified Feldenkrais practitioner. She’s a generous choreographer whose focus on relationship and transformation are built right into her process. Along with four expressive dancers, she opened the newly refurbished Chen Dance Center with the ambiguously titled “Close,” suggesting both intimacy and the opposite of openness.
When interacting with each other, the dancers’ movement was disciplined and clear, sometimes demanding closeness, sometimes closing each other out. This playing of opposites didn’t work when the group resorted to clichéd images; but the dancers’ clean performances pulled the audience through the clichés into less predictable places.
The evening’s opening piece paired live musician Peter Zummo with solo dancer Sam Ernst. Zummo moved onstage playing a breathy low trombone, more growl than tone, then partnered the dance, morphing into golden tones. Center stage was a circular wooden mandala-like design that Ernst stepped into as she moved onstage; it became the sculptured hoop skirt to her short, shiny costume. She swirled in it, balancing a pair of plates and became a circus performer. The plates and hoops were both props and limits: they centered on her fluid movements and balances, but they bound her freedom as the trombone wailed. Zummo’s music and their live partnership set a high bar for accompaniment; the taped music though the remainder of the program couldn’t live up to it.
In “2Parts Whole,” the only piece of the evening that was not a premiere, Alessandra Larson and Molly Lieber best evoked the ambivalence of the program’s title, as they moved from parallel movement to intertwined pairings and back again. They opened as twin ragdolls in frothy organza tops, flopped over, then moved on single bent legs in a slow tai chi of balances, close but not touching or connected. The lighting, designed by Kathy Kaufmann, trapped them within streaks of light and dark. Their limbs were propellers, bent and balanced; knees and elbows provided the propulsion, and like a pair of Coppelias, transformed them into puppets coming to life. Although the light had shifted and opened, it soon closed around them again in the opening forest of patterns, and Lieber’s legs held Larson’s head trapped, their closeness both chosen and enforced.
Wanner’s solo was the premiere of “Bird Stick Lady or Self Portrait, Sperryville,” a prop-heavy wander through a private wilderness. Long wooden branches were balanced on her head or incorporated into shadowed silhouettes. Her transformations into a Greek goddess and a crucified pilgrim were unoriginal, if fluid, images. Kate Hamilton costumed Wanner in a tight black top and a brilliant vermillion skirt that offered the most striking visual image of the solo, wide red wings against a brightly lit background.
In the written program, Wanner linked this piece to a two-week solo in the woods. The imagery was built on movement rooted in Wanner’s Feldenkrais training, and she used flexibility and strong yogic poses with long stretches of slow fluid motion. Her choreography for the other dances was more interesting than here. She credited the dancers as having an “integral part in the exploration and contribution of movement material,” and the other pieces reflected that diversity, and had more dramatic tension.
copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
Photos by Ian Douglas
Top: Debra Wanner in “Bird Stick Lady or Self Portrait, Sperryville”
Bottom: Fiona Evans, Molly Lieber, Sam Ernst, Alessandra Larson in “Interview/Innerview”