danceviewtimes

Sensibilities

"Exuberant Fanfare”, “At the Seams”, 

“Lissajous” and “Du Vent et des Vages”

Bowen McCauley Dance Company

Terrace Theater

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

May 18, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

The entire program was titled “An Awakening”, and without doubt the evening’s choreographers, Lucy Bowen McCauley and Ilana Goldman, displayed the ferment and sensitivity of nascent feelings. The joyous opener, “Exuberant Fanfare” by Bowen McCauley, was very balletic. Bodies were turned-out and limbs were streamlined or smoothly folded, with steps and stances being linked together propulsively. The piece could have been even more danse d’ecole if its three women, or at least their leader, had worn toe shoes. The  two men stood, partnered and soloed with filigree leg-and-footwork  much as danseurs can in neoclassical ballet. The music, played live by violinist Leonid Sushansky and pianist Carlos Cesar Rodriguez, was Igor Stravinsky having fun recomposing scores from early 18th Century Italy. The shift of mood to the next piece was sharp.

 

Photo: BMDC in "Exuberant Fanfare." Photo by David Moss.

 

Seven Hypotheses

 

Dance Icons’ Thesis Concert

Choreography by Rachael Alexandra,

    Alicia E. Diaz de Leon, Jess Hoversen,

    Naomi Lang, Mariah Lopez Solonick,

    Paul Lytle and Mecca Mayers

Dance Loft on 14

Washington, DC

May 11, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Music by single composers served the first two dance works on the program. Each of the five following pieces of choreography used several composers, from three to six. Was it any wonder that the first two dances didn’t meander? The opener, Paul Lytle’s “Trilemma”, to a Leonard Bernstein score, was about the joy of dancing and contrasted, compactly, a balletic gal who had considerable training with a pair of rawer, also female, talents. The rawer talents brought Isadora Duncan to mind. It was apparent that Lytle knew the historic dance categories and was having fun exhibiting them. In the next piece, “The Light of Slow Descent”, Jess Hoversen deployed ten dancers. She was, I suspect, being didactic as she showed us how her team can be subdivided. A trio was followed by a quintet, by a solo, and by a quartet, etc. One of the dancers was highlighted teaching others. The choice of Arvo Part music seemed apt. Next came Mecca Mayers’ bafflingly titled “Recovering Undercover Over-Lover” to about a half a dozen compositions and texts including one by The Internet. Familiar and homey seemed the living room couch carried onto center-stage by a couple (female, male). It served them both as a love seat and as an exercise bar. Another woman appeared. There was awareness of the woman by the couple and vice versa. Eventually, seven dancers, two of them men, traipsed and turned, folded and unspanned on stage. Likely, the choreographer was showing us the influence of dancers’ expression of emotions (writhing, relief) on each other. Certainly the mere presence of other people is an influence in life. Nevertheless, Mayers’ dance outlasted its welcome, as did the program’s four further works that followed.

 

Photo: Mecca Mayers’ bafflingly titled “Recovering Undercover Over-Lover”. PHoto by Molly Schlechter.

 

Return

“Tracings”

Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company

Kogod Courtyard

National Portrait Gallery

Washington, DC

May 4, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

This time Dana Tai Soon Burgess didn’t make a new dance but restaged his 2003 work. If memory serves, it emerged with fresh bravura and with a lyric thrust from start to stop. Apparently the current version, with a duration of 43 minutes, is a bit shorter than the original that was shown at Kennedy Center. Aspects of ritual and of a legendary reality distill from the choreography, music and visuals. The story is about people, indentured Korean immigrants to American-dominated pineapple plantations on Pacific islands. Burgess shows the fate and transformations of these migrants from 1903 to now – three generations in 116 years. There is an Ancestress who witnesses and presides over the action. Four other women and five men convey currencies and the passage of time. One of the men (Kelly Moss Southall) seems a leader of the Koreans, perhaps dealing with the absent Americans and safeguarding the Ancestress. One of the women (Christin Arthur) experiences the lives of these immigrants in concentrated form and expresses herself impressively. It is this role and Arthur’s performance of it that give “Tracings” unexpected links to some historic pieces of dance history.

 

Photo: Christin Arthur, Anna Kang Burgess and Kelly Moss Southall. Photo by Jeff Malet.

 

Rarities

“The Legacy of The New Dance Group”

Choreography by Jane Dudley, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow and Talley Beatty

Coolidge Auditorium

The Library of Congress

Washington, DC

April 19, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Seldom anymore do we get to see live performances of historic modern dance or, as it is called with loving irony, of “old modern”. Once upon a time, it constituted a successful revolution, or at least a fashion. That was from the 1920s into the 1960s, and not only in America. Shown on Friday evening at The Library of Congress were half a dozen works of choreography from the past – one from 1934 and the others from the 1940s. All were solos, five of them danced by women and one by a man. The four original makers of these works had all experienced contact with Martha Graham (1894 – 1991), an exception in the sea of modern dance forgetfulness. The importance of the torso was apparent in all the dances. That central portion of human anatomy was subject to tensions almost constantly as it stretched and arched or coiled or was held ready. This charged torso defined the dancing as acts of willpower and emotion. Supplementary were the dancer’s arms and legs. Often  the arms and hands were very mobile, wrapping and unwrapping themselves around the torso, but they could also remain like oars at rest. The legs and feet moved the body from place to place in space yet seldom called attention to themselves as they do in ballet. What of the head and face?

Of Numbers and Nationality

“Le Corsaire”

The Mariinsky Ballet

Opera House

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

April 11, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Eighty-one dancers are listed by Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet in its current Kennedy Center program. That does not include the children who supplement in the grand, Act 3 divertissement of “Le Corsaire”. These junior dancers are local, from two ballet schools – the DC Kirov Academy and The Washington School of Ballet. Of the company’s regular dancers, 44 appear to be female and 37 male. The majority, unsurprisingly, likely are Russian but by no means all. At this performance, the title role of the chief pirate Conrad was danced by Xander Parish, whose initial training and performing took place in his native Britain at the Royal Ballet. How did Parish fit in with his current colleagues and compare with Timur Askerov, opening night’s space devouring Conrad, who is a Russian from Baku in Azerbaijan?

 

Too Many Cooks

“Le Corsaire”

The Mariinsky Ballet

Opera House

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

April 9, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

A minimum of five composers, four text smiths, plus ten choreographers and ballet masters was required to reconstruct the 19th Century ballet “Le Corsaire”, which the Mariinsky company has brought to Washington. It shows. The action is choppy, especially at the start of what is a three-act production with prologue and epilogue. Not even mentioned up front in the printed program’s list of credits is Lord Byron, whose poem “The Corsaire” triggered the first danced version in Paris in 1856. The version being shown here this week has extraordinary passages of choreography mired in a crude parody of pirate exploits and harem protocols. The dancers of the huge Mariinsky troupe do their acting director, Yuri Fateev, proud as dancers.

To Meld

“Wood Work”, “Shadow Lands”, “Teeming Waltzes”

The Washington Ballet

Harman Hall

Washington, DC

April 6, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

In the barrage of new ballets that Washington has had lately, only one eluded a fundamental sameness. It was Trey McIntyre’s “Teeming Waltzes”. I’m thinking not just of The Washington Ballet’s bill of three premiers but also of the Jones/Zane group’s trilogy, of the New York City Ballet’s two programs and of additional fare. Melding hipster configurations of anatomy with classical steps and stances is what most of the new choreography has in common. The fusion can be haunting on occasion, such as the balances for the New York company’s Taylor Stanley in Kyle Abraham’s “The Runaway”. For the Washington company, Ethan Stiefel combined the off-beat and the standard with whimsy at times and then with a bit of melancholy or in an atmosphere of eager anticipation. Stiefel’s “Wood Work” seemed a civilized, polite catalog of sentiments. What I didn’t get any sense of was the carpentry referred to in the title. Five dancer couples were featured. The music, a collection selected by the Danish String Quartet, was played live.

 

Omens

“Composer’s Holiday”, “Kammermusik No. 2”,

“Opus 19, The Dreamer”, “Symphony in C”

New York City Ballet

Opera House

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

April 2, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

The company’s new bosses, former dancers Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan, introduced this DC opening. Both were dressed casually. Their brief appearance in front of the curtains was followed by a premiere – Gianna Reisen’s “Composer’s Holiday” to Lukas Foss music. It is a ballet your local dance school might put on at its annual recital, crammed with entrances and exits but lacking sustained and developed passages of choreography. Reisen sets up situations for two female-male couples and for a corps de ballet of 8 that also splits into gender mixed pairs. The movement vocabulary is acrobatically neoclassical and the predominant pace is quite hurried. That the choreographer is young, still in her teens, does not excuse a world class company from responsibility for the presentation of this amateurish effort. The situation does not bode well for the new directorial regime. If you are wondering about Reisen, the program notes reveal that she was a 2017 graduate of the company’s affiliated School of American Ballet and is currently an apprentice dancer in Germany at the Semperopera Ballet in Dresden. The dancing of her piece by New York City Ballet was professional and had a lively pulse. There were relative newcomers for the leading roles - Mary Thomas McKinnon and Kennard Henson plus Emma von Enck and Roman Mejia. Fascinating in all the evening’s ballets were the intended contrasts between featured dancers and the corps.

 

Photo: "Composer's Holiday." New York City Ballet in Gianna Reisen’s Composer’s Holiday. Photo Credit Paul Kolnik.

Resilient

DEMO: Now

Terrace Theater

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

March 29, 2019

 

by George Jackson

copyright 2019 by George Jackson

 

Tap-dance made the latest in Damian Woetzel’s “Demo” series memorable, and there was just one tapper: Caleb Teicher. He is a thin, young fellow with a bleached blob at the front of his haircut. At rest, Teicher seems high strung. Dancing, he surfs atop a spectrum of moods that includes the joy of free mobility, the relief of secure landings and the itch to explore further. Three low tap tables served him as surfaces. They had been placed in a row across the stage, with some space between them. Teicher jumped from one table to another like a Nijinsky faun. His tapping had rhythmic nuance. He jabbed the toes proudly, relished standing on pointed heels for balancing and seemed to treasures clapping the full underfoot onto the sounding surfaces. His solo “TurnAround” was accompanied by two pianists – Kurt Crowley and Joel Wenhardt who played a medley of compositions by J.S. Bach, Joe Garland, Louis Prima, George Gershwin and John Adams. I’d like to see Teicher tackle a single composition, for he seems to be not just a vivid dancer but also a thoughtful choreographer.

 

There was much of this performance that my poor hearing made inaccessible – Damian Woetzel’s commentary, Sarah Kay’s poetic yarns to Caroline Shaw’s fiddling, etc. Among the participants, Dance Heginbotham’s danseur Victor Lozano had sensual intensity. Alas, the ballerina Patricia Delgado seemed to have become hard. Woetzel’s series of “Demo” performances will resume at Kennedy Center next season.    

Over Again

Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company of New York Live Arts

Analogy Trilogy – Dora:Tramontane

Eisenhower Theater

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Washington, DC

March 28, 2019

 

by George Jackson

© 2019 by George Jackson

 

What has become of yesterday’s rebels? In the instance of Bill T. Jones, this dancer remains a choreographer true to his Castor and Pollux vision of companionship with the late Arnie Zane (1948 – 1988).  Jones made “Dora” in 2015, basing it on oral interviews he conducted with Dora Amelan, a French/Belgian nurse who was Jewish and bravely, adventurously survived Nazi Germany’s domination of her countries. It has a cast of 9 dancers. Much of the time, one or more of the dancers talks into a microphone. The narration is not totally audible even to audience members with very sharp ears.