Sound and Sex

"SOUNDspace," "Mo(or)town/Redux,""Fratres,""The Rite of Spring."
Dorrance Dance, Doug Elkins Choreography, etc., The Royal Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company
Fall for Dance Festival, Program 4
New York City Center
New York, NY
October 2, 2013

By Leigh Witchel
Copyright © 2013 by Leigh Witchel

The fourth program in the exuberant onslaught of Fall for Dance started with a bang and ended with a gangbang. But from start to finish, it was also intelligently composed, diverse and emphasized strong choreography as well as performance.

The first two dances were abridged versions of works done at smaller venues. Michelle Dorrance revived her 75 minute tap work “SOUNDspace” excerpted to about one-third the length. The short version worked very well, achieving mass and scale while concentrating the structure.

Performed without musicians, the cast of 12 made their own accompaniment. Dorrance began with three tap dancers on graduated platforms, the largest platform in the center, as if it were an Olympic medal ceremony. But instead, the tappers traded a single phrase among them, and once completed, wove through a new phrase together. They built excitement with variations in force – and like the “Rite” that closed, with a repeated phrase of ostinato ticking.

The three descended and other trios and quartets moved across the front of the stage. The central group  featured Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards as a teacher figure; after her solo Dorrance and Jumaane Taylor tapped and she assessed happily, checking out their moves. “SOUNDspace” built up methodically to a finale for four couples who entered in a sliding cakewalk and the volume climbed to a roar to close the piece explosively.

“SOUNDspace” was more than a huge, exuberant jam. Dorrance judged her pacing expertly, as if she were building a symphony instead of a dance. Her attention to structure makes her a tap choreographer for those who love choreography as much as tap. But there's still pure dance pleasure. Apart from the music or the rhythm each phrase also had its own physical groove, and the dancers rode it like a wave.

Doug Elkins' “Mo(or)town/Redux” – his version of Othello via Motown, B-Boy dance and Jose Limon, was also shortened at the request of the festival for time constraints (though by much less, about ten minutes.) Yet largely to the good: This “Reader's Digest” (as Elkins called it informally) version is tight and more focused than it was at its run last December at the Baryshnikov Center.  “Mo(or)town” has gone from being a dance of promising ingenuity to a potent and illuminating transposition of Shakespeare’s play.

Either it got the coaching it needed, or the quartet of dancers figured things out – probably a happy combination of both: the cast looked far clearer about their characters. Details registered earlier: Iago (Alexander Dones) shot his fingers like a pistol and quickly stamped out an imaginary butt: he's a predator. The soundscape by Justin Levine and Matt Stine is a coup of archiving: unfamiliar versions of great hits, and moving forward to Amy Winehouse and back through Marvin Gaye in ways that make the bloodlines clear, but also unstick us in time.

Like Dorrance, Elkins is a master of the dance phrase. He is a natural mover himself, and like Dorrance his style is from popular dance, structured through the academy. It gives him clarity, but also means he worked a mighty groove, with plenty of help from Marvin Gaye singing “Got to Give it Up.” The cast formed a line as if at a late-70's disco, clapping and shimmying infectiously. Up front was Cori Marquis, who made much more of Emilia than a secondary role. She was an innocent; as duped as the others. But strong even as Iago used her, and the music echoed her concern: Iago took the ill-fated handkerchief from her to Winehouse's “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”

A tense, competitive duet followed for Iago and Kyle Marshall's Othello to James Brown's “Super Bad.” After Iago misled Othello with the handkerchief, his soliloquy was to a haunting, a capella version of Gaye's “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.” When we saw Marshall next, his suit vest was gone and his untucked shirt soaked with sweat. The fatal duet was to Otis Redding's “Try a Little Tenderness.” Mute with grief and anger, Othello couldn't determine the reality of what he believes. When Elkins moves 16th century Venice to 20th century Motown, the tragedy becomes closer to us as well: a study in domestic violence. Of the estimable quartet in the cast, Donnell Oakley as Desdemona had the toughest job – made tougher by her role being shaved. The good and faithful wife is a hard role to make interesting – like many others, Elkins paints her as reactive rather than active.

But the only real regret of this powerful revival was not seeing it on the same bill with “The Moor's Pavane” – done by American Ballet Theatre the night prior instead.

Liam Scarlett is young enough to be granted some absolution for using one of the most painfully overexposed scores of the late 20th century dance – Arvo Part's “Fratres.” Its vogue has subsided, although the tintinnabulation has not, but Scarlett's brief, eponymous encounter did have live cello and piano, and two Royal Ballet stars we rarely see on this side of the ocean, Zenaida Yanowsky and Rupert Pennefather.

Still a ballet to “Fratres” is a ballet to “Fratres”: the stage will be dark, the movement adagio and the dancers will wrap sinuously around one another in meaningful ways. It did help that a strong, intelligent partnership was doing the wrapping. Pennefather came behind Yanowsky, stooped low and dipped his head into her hand as if in supplication. But the brief work added up to more effect than emotion.

Perhaps “Fratres” was slight in isolation, but it still was a good counterpoint to “The Rite of Spring.” Martha Graham's version closed the evening forcefully. Graham's skill made a relatively small cast seem immense, and she formed her points like a tabloid writer used to a tight word count: blunt, yes, subtle, no.

She fashioned her own simple libretto: Eight couples were ruled over by the Shaman, Ben Schultz, a hunk of tattooed beefcake wearing a Halston caftan. The women were in simple gray dresses; the men bare-chested in black shorts. The Chosen One, Blakely White-McGuire, got singled out far earlier in the score – by the first adagio – for mating with the shaman as well as sacrifice.

The overture to the second tableau became preparation for the ritual. The women dress The Chosen One in a white dress; the men disrobe the Shaman to leave him topless, exposing his illustrated torso. There's little else other than full-tilt flailing that can be, or has ever been done to The Chosen One's solo, and White-McGuire threw herself into it. She was held aloft, hanging limply, by the men to close. Her encounter with Schultz was creepy and rape-like – “Mo(or)town's” intimate violence now blown up into exalted ritual. Schultz portrayed the Shaman as a charismatic monolith. Lording over the group from on high and roughing up White-McGuire, he seemed almost like Jim Jones.

Yet despite the sound craft, like “Fratres,” Graham's Rite descends into stereotype: from a prehistoric ritual into one of her Battle of the Sexes fought on the Fields of Pelvic Truth. It may be one of the most blunt and straightforward Rites out there – the one that's completely unafraid to come out and say it's all – and perhaps only – about having sex.

copyright © 2013 by Leigh Witchel

Top:  The Martha Graham Dance Company in “The Rite of Spring”
Bottom: Kyle Marshall in “Mo(or)town/Redux”