by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2011 by Leigh Witchel
- DNA Presents: Raw Directions
- “Flamenco Hoy”
- “Swan Lake” New York City Ballet
- “Aesthetic Destiny 1: Candy Mountain” Walter Dundervill
- “fay çe que vouldras,” “Femina” Donald Byrd/Pam Tanowitz
DNA Presents: Raw Directions
Dance New Amsterdam
New York, NY
February 10, 2011
Dance New Amsterdam’s “Raw Directions” is a program to give choreographers with some experience a platform and mentoring so that they can experiment with ideas that are new to them. Five choreographers presented works – three of them world premieres.
“I Just Want to See You Underwater” by Elizabeth Motley was inspired by a three day hallucination Motley had while affected by encephalitis – she believed herself a living watercolor. It’s hard for any dance to live up to that back story. The work opened on a long pile of thick blue ribbons laid from the back to the front of the stage. Three dancers lay in them, wrapping large handfuls round their heads.
While images were projected at the back of a dancer’s head among ribbons, the dancers, their heads shaking and bobbing, showed us the sign language of basic efforts – attempting to tie a knot or drive while impaired. At the end, they pushed the line of ribbons to the center and lay prone with their feet in them.
The soundtrack seemed at times like the buzzing of insects or an internal disturbance, at others, like music from a radio across the room.
An excerpt of “Swing Us Sky Rain(bow)” by Shani Nwando Ikerioha Collins Achille dealt with ambivalent interracial lesbian relationships. There were two couples, one wearing cartoon animal heads. They exchanged lives and conundrums.
The first couple, wearing a wolf head and a duck head, posed in stereotypical lovers’ poses while the duck held a bouquet of roses. The movement was alternately tender and violent, with the traces of an argument in their gestures. As things got more violent, they also got more obvious. One woman shoved a lollipop in and out of another’s mouth. Yes, we get it.
Jordan Fuch’s “Strange Planet” set a quintet in motley street clothing loping about to Talk Radio into unclear but hazardous situations – are they inside a collapsed building at one point? It closed with one dancer making a repeated daring leap several feet from a table into another’s arms. The piece was absurd and Pirandellian, but also amorphous, like the leftovers from an improvisation class.
Eunhee Lee “Oops!” a wry, loopy duet between Lee and Marcos Duran, was the most complete and ingratiating of the evening’s works. Duran arrived onstage wearing an orange tulle skirt on his head that concealed a salad spinner. He smiled with goofy delight as he pulled the string and started using it, first on his head, then his crotch.
Lee showed up with pasta overflowing out of her mouth which she passed to Duran for an exchange of bodily noodles. In a series of quick blackouts we saw their awkward, dysfunctional relationship, but it all ended with a tentative, optimistic grin.
Scott Lyons’ “The View” was as gay as it gets: a crazy funky tea party/talk show to Britney Spears with five women playing at being both panelists and drag queens. Lyons was fascinated with feminine stereotypes – the women also bourrée about on half-toe.
Lyons himself entered looking like Dame Sybil Bruncheon, a very funny drag queen from the late ‘80s who had the same metallic Chanel jacket-hats with veils-Barbie’s Drag Tea Party sensibilities.
Lyons is also funny, and holds the stage, but there was a little Larry Keigwin in him as well as Stanley Love. Like Love, he did more theater than dance, but like Keigwin, he asked women to stand in for drag queens.
“Flamenco Hoy”
New York City Center
New York, NY
February 16, 2011
“Flamenco Hoy” is film director Carlos Saura’s first stage production, and he went big: Broadway revue flamenco. The show is a series of numbers, but the star-crossed tone of the run was set when injuries sidelined a soloist and visa difficulties prevented a musician from participating. The disarray carried over into the rest of the piece.
The stage was set with large panels at either side that act as both décor and screen. In the opening number all the dancers, elegant in black, marched towards us, stamping and aiming for the kill.
The company featured two men with contrasting styles: Rafael Estévez and Nani Paños. Estévez sports camp shirts and stubble and is more settled. Paños is ballet trained; his blistering numbers featured tours and pirouettes; the first punctuated with a final strum for the guitarist.
Other numbers followed like gunfire including a first act finale staged as a rehearsal to a familiar Boccherini fandango. Saura’s production pressurized and enlarged the effects: the aggressive style and the mournful, nasal vocals, but also distorted an intimate, interactive art.
Opening night was hampered by messy production. Bad lighting projections and shadows unintentionally obscured the dancers’ faces. Because of the switching necessitated by the missing cast members, there were several missed light cues and at the worst moment a piano mistakenly removed and returned.
Saura’s Broadway inclinations and Antonio Alvarado’s costumes made things more camp as they went on. The technical glitches may have accentuated it, but also Laura Rozalén, a very large, commanding woman clad in sober black, reappeared for the finale in the same outfit but with hot pink fringe wrapped around and across her as if she had torn it from the bottom of a lampshade.
If he was going to push flamenco to Broadway, it’s a shame Saura didn’t go all the way and close with a version of “Boléro” or better yet, “I Will Survive?”
“Swan Lake”
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch Theater
New York, NY
February 17, 2011
In their debuts in the leads of “Swan Lake,” Teresa Reichlen flew a straight and well-traveled path, an interesting contrast to her prince, Tyler Angle, who made a case for his own idiosyncratic approach.
Entering for a clean, cool lakeside scene, Reichlen stressed her long lines and they served her well. The fluttering port de bras of the white acts looked good on her, but like many others, she is an easier, more direct black swan. As Odile, Reichlen was in full control of her variation, with leisurely balances and renversés. Her fouettés in the coda looked tentative and unfamiliar to her, but even so, it was a solid, promising debut.
Martins’ heavy on dance-light on thematic atmosphere setting of the first scene at court has always been problematic, and Angle’s prom king Prince doesn’t help there. His Siegfried is pretty and insular; with no intimation of a greater destiny, it’s not clear why he refuses the Queen’s request to marry.
But Angle’s interpretation of Siegfried seemed to be of a shallow man jolted into awareness, and he built that logically from scene to scene. The first intimation was in Act II, where he literally gained momentum in a fast, spirited variation that had him bouncing and racing around the stage.
His Act III variation was delivered with style and Angle came fully into his own with a highly personal interpretation of his downfall. His Siegfried was completely, utterly, duped and besotted with the wrong woman. Angle didn’t act as if Siegfried’s judgment was clouded by the sorcerer – he made it his own active, horrible mistake. He went to his mother overjoyed and got progressively more impatient and frustrated when von Rotbart repeated his query: “Do you love her? Will you marry her? Will you swear?” until he pushed von Rotbart out of the way, raced to center stage and made his tragic error.
Angle used the dramatic pressure to carry him through the final act. At the end, he trapped Reichlen in his arms as if she were the Firebird, but the spell wasn’t broken. Angle’s reading of the prince and his accenting of the mime was unorthodox, but honest. In Martins’ version Siegfried’s oath is a pivotal, repeated piece of mime. The final time Angle swears, rather than clearly miming as is usual, he barely makes the sign. It’s like a mumbled dream.
In supporting roles, the company is either going to make a principal out of Chase Finlay in the next few years or kill him. Finlay has strong, clear technique and beautiful lines, but he’s not yet a consistent partner. In a debut in Martins’ virtuoso pas de quatre, he lost his bearings on his exit in the coda from lack of endurance. You can see the links between him and Angle, who also had to build stamina. Along with Finlay, Martins cast Megan LeCrone, Rebecca Krohn and Savannah Lowery, the first two at their first outing and all three, tall women in parts most suitable for short women who are precision turners. In the Russian divertissement it was a pleasure to see Jennie Somogyi’s impetuous attack – a flash of the old, pre-injury Somogyi.
Throughout the season it was apparent that the company is redeveloping a senior corps: Amanda Hankes, Georgina Pazcoguin, Gwyneth Muller – all reliable dancers who get solo opportunities but also glue the corps together. Ashley Laracey and Lauren King are part of this group, and got their turn center stage in the Act I pas de trois. Laracey is more stereotypical of the company with long angular limbs and floppy wrists. King is purer water, but also less sharply flavored. Along with them and also on the rise, Christian Tworzyanski made a clean, secure debut as Benno.
“Aesthetic Destiny 1: Candy Mountain”
Walter Dundervill
Dance Theater Workshop
New York, NY
February 19, 2011
As the audience took its seats, Walter Dundervill calmly and methodically set up a complex landscape of cardboard shapes, cones and polygons, scattered all over the stage. He exited when finally finished. His dancers entered and immediately removed all of it.
That set the tone for the rest of the cryptically entertaining evening. Don’t expect to have any of your expectations met.
The cast of twelve was divided into two groups: an ensemble dressed in an assortment of outfits, including black wraparound unisex dresses, and a trio, Ben Boatright, Janet Dunson and Kevin Lovelady, in street clothing. Everyone started out lying on the floor in a sunburst, rolling over and moving their legs together and apart as if making snow angels.
The ensemble donned the removed paper cutouts as head ornaments and marched across the stage to heavy metal music that had a main theme from “Swan Lake” mixed in for good measure.
A plot emerged from the mist – sorta kinda. The trio started to speak dialogue from a bad drawing room comedy mixed with a spy thriller. One man was reluctant to leave, and the other two plotted to push him into action, or to start without him. The situation repeated with permutations. They repeated the dialogue, this time with the stage directions verbalized. And another time, shouting with a clotted accent.
Mysteries abounded. A taped package that never got opened was passed among the trio. At one point the musical accompaniment was inexplicably a driving safety song.
With neon strips, the performers created a Mondrian grid. The dancers wore patchwork costumes that are bustled up, and released those into skirts. Next, they gradually shed them on the floor, stripping down to briefs and dance belts. Creating a cloth mosaic that might have referred to a work Dundervill performed at DTW half a decade ago, Roseanne Spradlin’s “Survive Cycle,” the performers hopped through the rags like children.
The trio spoke: “I think we’ve gone as far as we can.” “Was it what you expected?” A slow final duet for two men ended things just at the point Dundervill needed to wrap things up.
Comprehensibility might not have been a virtue of the evening, but an assured sense of theater was. I won’t pretend to have a clue what Dundervill was up to, but I was interested by it the whole time.
“fay çe que vouldras,” “Femina”
Donald Byrd/Pam Tanowitz
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, NY
February 27, 2011
Works and Process offered the premiere of choreography of two works by composer John Zorn. Zorn’s music is chameleon-like; the first was an atonal piano piece from 2005 and the second work a recorded score composed in 2008 with divergent moods.
Donald Byrd’s Seattle-based Spectrum Dance Theater led off with “fay çe que vouldras,” a quintet dancing to the clangorous, arrhythmic score. It was reported later that the pianist had skipped a section and backtracked. Though the entire piece seemed musically insensitive, the music was not the sort where one could have known immediately, and we did not see it as it was musically intended.
It opened with the dancers poised onstage barefoot in maroon costumes, with one half-entering. The entire dance had that feeling, even with the dancers fully onstage, of a moment before the event.
One woman in a bustled skirt slowly moved across the back while the others danced athletically. There were panting and grappling duets as Byrd pushed the dancers to exhaustion in the long, demanding work. It ended as the dancers crossed one another in darkness and a cacophony rose from the piano.
The piano glitch may only have emphasized the differences between the choreographic methods of Byrd and Tanowitz that they discussed in a talk between the works moderated by composer Charles Wuorinen. Byrd acknowledged that what he does springs from listening to the music at first – he noted flashes of late Romanticism in the score – but then he goes his own way. Tanowitz made it clear that her piece was a response to the music. In both cases this was apparent.
Tanowitz talked about her intimidation from the score, and that she listened to it many times before tackling it. But she faced it head on. She opened out the space of the small theater. Her dancers entered the theater from a side door leading into the house and assembled in the pit. The walked on to the glowing stage as the curtain opened. Even during the dance, Tanowitz calmly ignored the bounds of the stage. Red-haired Ellie Kusner walked from the wings to circle the audience and exit where the dancers had all entered.
A couple, Brian Lawson and Jean Freebury, had the lion’s share of the work; a pastoral duet that might have happened en plein air. It was punctuated by Kusner who acted as a sculptural element. Tanowitz’s cool academic vocabulary, influenced by ballet via Cunningham, suited and acknowledged the score; it didn’t just share the stage with it.
Later on in the piece, Ashley Tuttle, a former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, showed up on pointe. When pointe work got involved, Tanowitz became dense and fussy. A relaxed and contemplative solo for Banu Ogan was more poised and controlled, and ended the work with her lying down half in the wings.
It seems Tanowitz is incapable of making something that isn’t lovely in some way. The recorded score was also lovely but wildly fluctuating in style, from harp moments recalling Debussy to a consort of viols. Tanowitz made the herculean effort of being sensitive to all of it. She didn’t ape the music, nor always followed it, but it was apparent that – as she said in her talk to describe the process of grappling with it – she was constantly listening to it.
copyright © 2011 by Leigh Witchel