Washington, DC
October 6 –11, 2015
by George Jackson
copyright © 2015 by George Jackson
Dance on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stages makes me keenly aware of the conditions and mechanics of watching. Both of these stages (there’s a North stage and a South one) offer the viewer live as well as virtual scenes. Right above the actual stage is a giant screen that shows what is happening on stage in real time. Recently added have been two smaller screens, one on each side of the physical stage. Now, when a ballerina dances a solo on stage, we can see her four times simultaneously. Focusing on the real woman isn’t easy. The screen images, even if I keep them peripheral, may be more intensely lit, sharper, more colorful and more close-up. Especially the big screen overhead often provides more detail. The temptation is to avoid reality – theatrical reality though it surely is. These days it is still sports arenas that usually are equipped with such imaging devices, but it may be just a matter of time before all venues have them. Then, will there be a reason to indulge in the ritual of attending the theater? People might as well stay away and watch on their sets at home or on their mobiles. My feeling that stepping up to and in to a theater is akin to approaching a sacred place undoubtedly seems old fashioned. I like to do it even when there’s no performance going on.
I just had that experience at the Artisphere, an ultramodern auditorium in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia. A dance about climate change by Lucy Bowen McCauley was supposed to premiere there on October 8 but Arlington County funding that had supported the theater since 10/10/2010 has disappeared after four and a half years. The Artisphere’s glass doors to the adjoining office building are shut tight. One can look into the lobby but not walk in. That the premiere had been shifted to something called the Climate Exploratorium I didn’t realize until too late. McCauley’s modern dance group will be celebrating its two decades of existence in late October at Dance Place.
This year’s choreography commissions by the Kennedy Center focused on familial relations as subject matter, displayed dancers of diverse backgrounds (racial and technical) and had characteristics associated with contemporary dance. However, Chandini Darby’s and Robert J. Priore’s premieres differed significantly as works of art.
Darby, on October 6, spilled big, generous motion into “The Stories That Bind Us”. Like many contemporaries, Darby disregards form and it took poetry plus commentary to hold together the stories and the seven dancers (one, a man) of her Beauty for Ashes Project. The warmth of feeling generated wasn’t, though, just in the program notes. It became tangible on the real stage (the Millennium North one) and even distilled into the screen images.
One of Emerson’s former dancers, Christopher K. Morgan, celebrated his own company’s 5th anniversary at American Dance Institute in Rockville, Maryland the weekend of October 9. The most legible of his works was “Inconstancy”, in which two similar couples shift back and forth between fantasizing lyrically and enacting farce. Puzzling was Morgan’s “Selective Sync” because of its similarity to another piece on the program, Tiffanie Carson’s “Deprivation”. The movement material of both involves toning the body, testing mobility, finding stasis and doing other acts of physical awareness. Carson’s dancers use this limited language to isolate themselves, confront each other or join together. Morgan’s dancers seem simply to be tuning up, shifting and equilibrating for activity’s sake.
The director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Virginia Johnson, seems to like returning home and bringing her company along. She grew up in Washington and was trained here before becoming a notable ballerina. She has been a writer and editor, too, having founded the dance magazine Pointe. For her and the company’s recent visit, on the weekend of October 9 at Harman Hall, Johnson skipped relying on Robert Garland, the highly competent and rather traditional craftsman who is Harlem’s resident choreographer. Instead there were contemporary works with their movement material from disparate sources, their casual connection to sound, and their inconsequentially sequenced sections substituting for form.
The choreographers were Darrell Grand Moultrie, Donald Byrd and Nacho Duato. Moultrie’s “Vessels”, to repetitive music by Ezio Bosso, contained streamlined versions of warm-up motions, classroom steps and partnering maneuvers. Still, this allowed the dancers to be dancers. Byrd’s “Contested Space” juxtaposed the casual, the controlled and the contorted as one heard cacophony by Amon Tobin. The many abrupt changes in Byrd’s piece make it look like a Forsythe ballet, only heavier due to floor work and the dancers sometimes seeming weighed down. Duato’s material came from ballet, from the ballroom and from the street. Speed was the principal spice with which he tried to perk up his combinations. Another device was labeling dancers with letters that, in the right allignment, spell out “think”. Oh yes, for balletomanes Harlem offered George Balanchine’s classical or, if you will, neoclassical “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux”. Nayara Lopes had the requisite darting quality for it and Francis Lawrence the dash, but there were minor blemishes – a hesitancy here, a near stumble there - and neither partner always managed to stretch sumptuously when this was called for. I didn’t get to see the long cast, Chrystin Fentroy and Jorge Andres Villarini, in the Balanchine. One of the company’s women, Silken Kelly, had a plush quality that was most welcome in the Moultrie, and even in the Byrd and Duato pieces.
Peabody Dance in Baltimore held a day of general and demonstration classes, historic videos and discussion on October 11. The occasion’s master teachers were Marcia Dale Weary (Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet), Arantxa Ochoa (School of the Pennsylvania Ballet), Rhodie Jorgenson (Maryland Youth Ballet, Kennedy Center) and Kee-Juan Han (School of the Washington Ballet). Students from five different schools filled the maze of corridors winding through the institute’s old buildings at Mt. Vernon Place.
Because of concurrent sessions, it was impossible to catch everything going on. I started out seeing part of the men’s class and part of the partnering class, both taught by Han. The presence of about 20 boys and young men crowded the room. Space became even tighter when the girls and young women arrived. Han handled the situation adroitly and with humor, keeping movement going and correcting in ways that propelled. Weary’s demonstration with about 15 girls was remarkable for its simplicity and rigor. All her pupils snapped into position at the same instant, with the same impact. I was reminded of descriptions of Josephine Weiss’s Viennese Children who had danced in Baltimore in 1847. Weary’s pupils all had balletic bodies, so must have been carefully chosen. There was a section of exercises intended to produce turnout that was astonishingly upright and mobile. Ochoa, still in top dance form herself, then took these girls thru intricate and vivid variations of timing. I didn’t get to any of Jorgensen’s sessions but, of course, have seen the local children she trains so well for companies visiting the Kennedy Center.
Jockeying the videos was critic Robert Greskovic (Wall Street Journal). He showed us three differently beautiful pas de deux: from Bournonville’s “Kermesse in Bruges” with Mette-Ida Kirk and Ib Andersen, from an Enrique Martinez staging of “Coppelia” with Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and from Balanchine’s “Chaconne” with Suzanne Farrell and Sean Lavery. All had been filmed in the 20th Century. Discussing teaching topics that ranged from dance technical matters to expression of personality and concepts of beauty were doyenne Barbara Weisberger, Peabody’s Anna-Marie Rabassi-Davis and Melissa Stafford, Greskovic, and also dance teachers such as Timothy Fox (ex-NYC Ballet) who were part of the day’s audience.
Photo: Robert J. Priore's "Speak Easy." Photo by Paul Emerson.