“Shivastakam,” “Solo,” “Locomotor,” “Myelination”
Nrityagram, San Francisco Ballet, Stephen Petronio Company, Dorrance Dance
Fall for Dance, Program 4
City Center
New York, NY
October 8, 2015
by Leigh Witchel
© 2015 by Leigh Witchel
Fall for Dance is a study in contradictions. It's populist and low-priced, but hell to get a ticket. It's eclectic, but all the programs can seem alike. It’s got a formula that works, but you’ll get sick of it. Even at the budget ticket price, it's best not to gorge but to view strategically – and Program 4 was a wise choice.
Surupa Sen (kneeling) and Bijayini Satpathy in “Shivastakam.” Photo © Julieta Cervantes.
Unusually, the meat of the dance was slow adagio rather than what we’ve often seen here, mimed narration or fast allegro. Odissi is the most sinuous of the classical forms in India; in the poses you could see the S-curve in the spine with the hip displaced to achieve it. Satpathy also did developpés in attitude that moved from back to front as well as a high, slow extension to the side. Sen had some training in the US; if western adagio borrowed the arabesque, it felt here as if some ideas got repatriated.
The obligatory comic number was provided by San Francisco Ballet, performing Hans van Manen’s “Solo.” Counterintuitively, “Solo” is a short work performed by three men showing off in complex phrases of braided turns to a Bach violin partita. The steps were danced beautifully, but the flashes of humor quickly turned obvious. One head waggle or a silly walk on half-toe might be funny, but four became a leaden motif.
Van Manen’s choreography gave a traditional view of bravura technique; Stephen Petronio’s “Locomotor” offered an expanded view of virtuosity. It opened with former Cunningham dancer, now freelance guest artist and superwoman, Melissa Toogood tearing across the stage in complicated jumps and walks – backwards. Her coordination through the hazard and speed was riveting. Petronio’s own dancers kept up. Tiny but ferocious Jaqlin Medlin extruded rippling phrases from her articulated muscles, slashing through turns or extensions.
Created for the Petronio company’s 30th season, “Locomotor” was an assemblage, including movement chunks rediscovered by the dancers in archival research. As the score by Clams Casino picks up, bells tolling in the distance provide a beat. The dancers arc in a spiraling phrase on the side from wing to wing.
The main division in the piece is external: two of the dancers change from black to orange and the score begins to thump. The cast walked back and faced us like runway models before the spiraling phrases closed out the work to the score’s diminishing pulse. As is often the case with Petronio, the beauty was less in the structure of the whole than the long, liquid phrases.
The newest MacArthur Fellow, Michelle Dorrance, offered “Myelination,” a closer commissioned by the festival. The tattooing of drums into a galloping beat opened the piece. In the darkness, three dancers with their arms linked turned in and out insistently as they tapped. The curtain rose to reveal the full stage with three areas for tap and space behind for the musicians.
For the bulk of the piece, Dorrance let tap dancers do what tap dancers gonna do: show you their stuff. Featured hoofers came to the center and showed their favorite idiosyncratic syncopations and slides. The finale was the sure-fire kind: dancers crossed the stage from both sides to build to a close.
Dorrance has worked out an interesting hybrid, a tap composition with the scale and structure of musical theater but the individuality of concert tap. But she’ also done something that looked suspiciously like “SOUNDspace,” her contribution to Fall for Dance in 2013. Like the festival itself, her talent shouldn’t calcify into a formula.
© 2015 by Leigh Witchel
Bottom: Stephen Petronio Company in “Locomotor.” Photo © Julieta Cervantes.