Big Dance Theater at Jacob’s Pillow

(July 28, 2011) – An hour-long work which lies somewhere in a liminal space between dance and theater, Supernatural Wife – enjoying its U.S. premiere in the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow through Sunday, July 31 — is delicately wrought and luminous. Co-Artistic Directors of Big Dance Theater, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar created this work in collaboration with the cast as a retelling of Euripides’ Alkestis featuring movement, dramatic text, song, scenic design, and digital projections.

In the beginning, the performers sit facing each other around the edge of a white circle on the floor. Two men rise and begin to jog in place, executing a series of complex hand gestures that seem as though they could be a hybridization of American Sign Language, everyday movements, and classical ballet port de bras. They are joined, one by one, by four others, until they all jog and gesture together. The vocabulary expands into folk dance-esque hops and skips with arms raised, but their expressions are far from celebratory: this is, after all, a tragedy. Or is it?

The story of Alkestis can be summarized as follows: King Admetus (portrayed here by Molly Hickok) evades death by allowing another to die in his place, but that other winds up being his beloved wife, Alkestis (Tymberly Canale). Luckily for both of them, Herakles (Pete Simpson) stops by Ademetus’ home and, upon learning of Alkestis’ demise, travels to the Underworld to bring her back. The couple is reunited. “That’s how this went,” quips Chris Giarmo, whose role in the production seems something akin to Sarcastic Stage Manager; he sits off to the side of the action interjecting stage directions and notes through a microphone, periodically joining in the dancing.

Each performer does his or her fair share of talking, singing, and dancing, and each has a part to which he or she seems uniquely suited. Elizabeth DeMent, a performer endowed with steely control and grace, represents a servant in Admetus and Alkestis’ household, aiding and often echoing her masters in both movement and speech. Entrusted with the most technically challenging choreography is Aaron Mattocks, who portrays Death with cold, unrelenting power. Mattocks moves sinuously, eerily, embodying a specter who can drop to the ground effortlessly at any moment and is always poised and waiting.

Other characters — Alkestis and Admetus’ children, Admetus’ father — are represented via recordings played on TV monitors. Video projected onto the back wall of the stage features images of weeping women, lyrics to a song being sung by the performers, a flickering candle. Props include a pair of red velvet curtains, a pair of bricks, a full drum kit, and an ornate chandelier “shot” irreverently from the ceiling by Herakles. Costume changes indicate changes of character and also changes of condition within a character: when Canale slips into a gauzy black over-dress, we understand that Alkestis has passed into the Underworld.

The ending is particularly strong. Hickok, whose depiction of Admetus is unpredictable yet touching, reaches a new level of emotional tenderness as she touches Canale’s arm, visibly shuddering at the thought of touching a woman she thinks is not her wife, and the moment in which she realizes that it is Alkestis is heart-wrenching.

But it is Canale’s final solo as Alkestis returns from the Underworld that is absolutely gripping. Simpson (as Herakles) has said that she will not be able to speak for several days until she has completely shed the traces of death, and this dance looks to be an effort to do so. It’s in the same vocabulary of narrative-infused gesture and low jumps and skips as the rest of the piece, but Canale imbues the movement with a new depth that speaks to a journey to and from a place beyond where living humans may visit. And Giarmo’s final words speak to a straightforward sense of humor and wisdom that can only come from artists as adventurous, well-rounded, and prepared to laugh in the face of tragedy as Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar.

LDP at Jacob’s Pillow

(July 27, 2011) -  In the mixed bill of three works that made up their Jacob’s Pillow debut, Laboratory Dance Project (LDP) displayed a remarkable deftness and versatility. Called “young, fresh, and lively” by Pillow director Ella Baff, LDP is comprised of graduates of the Korean National University of Arts and led by founding member and current artistic director Chang Ho Shin. The three choreographers, including Shin, bring a diverse array of experience and training to their work, and the remarkable dancers tackle each with gusto.

Mi Sook Jeon’s Are You Happy to See Me? begins with a prone body face-down in a small rectangle of light. As a distorted clip of Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” plays, the dancer (Dongkyu Kim) forces himself up away from the floor and falls back onto it. At once fluid and charged with a sharp urgency, he struggles against inertia, wrestling himself into dancing. A second, larger rectangle of light appears, and Kim is joined by five others as the music shifts to a stark, rhythmic score.

In one memorable section, Chang Ho Shin is held horizontally on the shoulders of several dancers while Kihun Kim executes a whirling, quicksilver solo with particular attention to slicing movements of the arms. The Piaf sample plays again and the ensemble dances together, almost feminine in their sensuality yet unapologetically masculine in their physicality. There’s a sense of defiance in their embodiment of this contradiction. Happy ends with Dongkyu Kim in the same rectangle of light in which he began, but this time he stands, looking at himself and then looking out at us, reaching out a hand. It’s a simple gesture, but in the context of what has preceded it, it contains a plethora of meanings.

Modern Feeling, choreographed and performed by Insoo Lee with Jinyook Ryu, explores impulse and reaction in a martial arts-infused duet. The Ted Shawn Theatre stage is bare except for two chairs, the two men are dressed in slacks and button-down shirts, and there’s a sense of intimacy as we watch them coax, taunt, and fight each other, as if we had stumbled into their living room. The continuity of energy between their bodies as they push and pull each other is very satisfying, as is the inventive way in which they initiate movement through points of contact.

The last piece on the program, No Comment, is lauded as the company’s signature work, and it’s easy to see why: the dancers explode with power that has been only hinted at until now. After an opening solo (accompanied by Shin, who beats his chest with a fist) resplendent with feline agility, Sung Hoon Kim “conducts” a series of traveling cartwheels, flips, and intensely acrobatic leaps from one side of the stage to the other, as though the ensemble were an orchestra. And like an orchestra, they find their power both in their individual strengths and in the collective energy of the unison sections. Their movements are rarely perfectly synchronized, but it’s wonderful to see that much force and ability at work. When the lights flicker down, the audience is on their feet, and it’s hard to tell who is more exhilarated.

zoe | juniper’s World Premiere at the Pillow

(July 21, 2011) The Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow has been transformed, by way of white floor paneling, towering screens, powerful sounds, and eerie characters, into another world. Audience members filing in to take their seats are met by rippling water projected onto a panel which significantly reduces the depth of the normally large stage, a projection which foreshadows the rippling beauty and strangeness of the events to come. The world we have entered belongs to the creative team of Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey, doing artistic business as zoe | juniper, and odd beauty characterizes the entirety of the hour-long world premiere of A Crack in Everything.

Zoe Scofield’s choreography bears traces of diverse influence. Her ballet training is reflected in her attention to line, while molasses-slow gestures recall Japanese butoh. Wacky isolations of the head, limbs, and torso give way to undulations that travel throughout the body. Fantastically deep lunges reminiscent of Andrea Miller (whose work can be seen next Saturday on students of the School at Jacob’s Pillow) and other Batsheva/Ohad Naharin/Gaga-influenced choreographers juxtapose elegant, arching backs. What is truly Scofield’s are the unexpected ways and orders in which she links each gesture or phrase to the next. And, of course, there is the added effect of Shuey’s contributions.

A Crack in Everything is above all visually arresting. In addition to Shuey’s innovative use of filmed dance, wherein by changes of lighting the dancers onstage are at times mimicked, contrasted, or replaced by virtual versions of themselves, decadent layered costumes by Erik Andor render the four women and one man of the company luxuriously gilded. Scofield uses all of these elements to her advantage, allowing the focus to shift from tableau to movement to tableau again. In one particularly striking section, one of the women of the company traces her own outline in red ink against the sheer panel at the front of the stage. The lighting illuminates several events occurring behind the panel, including a vigorous duet for Anna Schon and Raja Kelly, another woman with her back to the audience who periodically bursts into fits of spasmodic gesture, and a black-hooded figure slowly making its way forward. It’s a lot to take in, but there’s just enough balance between consistency and variation in the movement to be gripping without being overwhelming.

Duets between Schon and Kelly happen several times throughout the course of the work, and each time a fascinating paradox occurs. Schon, by far the most petite member of the company, consistently overpowers the towering Kelly. Her compact, supple body oozes a kind of sensuality and magnetism that extends far beyond her edges, while he doesn’t quite seem to use his entire physicality. A good performer, one can only imagine the kind of effect Kelly would have if he were to project his energy in the same way that Schon does. Particularly remarkable is the way in which, even as her lower body contorts in impossibly deep pliés, Schon’s head remains isolated, adding to the otherworldly, sub-human feel of the movement.

There’s a mesmerizing, eerie quality to each dancer’s performance, to the score (by Greg Haines with samples from Johann Johannson, Schubert, and Morgan Henderson), and to the often dim yet evocative lighting. It is so hypnotic that when, following a rousing sequence in which four dancers perform in unison while Scofield moves upstage of them, the lights shift, leaving Scofield illuminated in a throbbing rectangle for mere moments before she collapses and they go dark altogether, it’s hard to say whether an hour or much less time has passed. It is a bizarre and wonderful rabbit hole we have fallen down, and upon emerging there is much to ponder.

DanzAbierta in U.S. Debut at Jacob’s Pillow

(July 14, 2011) – In an engagement marking its highly anticipated U.S. debut, DanzAbierta, Cuba’s most significant contemporary dance ensemble, performed at Jacob’s Pillow last night. Comprised of five dancers, DanzAbierta was discovered by Pillow director Ella Baff during a whirlwind visit to Havana, where she saw approximately 30 companies in 5 days, somehow remaining “alert enough to see that this company was really something special.”

MalSon, by the company’s resident choreographer, Susana Pous, opens with projected credits in the style of a movie, and the dramatic flair that its performers bring to its execution lives up to this premise. The two men and three women of DanzAbierta are physically bravura. They fly through jumps, turns, and lifts with vigor and a palpable sense of daring — and, in the case of the women, high-heeled shoes. Each one radiates power in a series of athletic, physically challenging duets. Particularly captivating from the very beginning are the pair of Marilyn Castillo and Yoan Matos, whose space-eating lunges and expressive faces contrast the less sensual, sharper duo of Yaima Cruz and Abel Berenguer. Cruz in particular is at times explosively knifelike, notably during a sequence where she moves from one performer to another, vamping and demanding attention from their blank presences.

Several times throughout the hour-long work one or more of the dancers wears a glassy, unrecognizing expression. At times this choice seems very deliberate and effective, as when Matos and Berenguer transform into frozen dolls that Castillo and Saro Silva move around and dance with; at others, it seems more like a lack of direction. Silva in particular looks unsettlingly deadpan during a number of otherwise exciting moments. Otherwise an excellent performer, this blank countenance sets Silva apart as less engaged and, to an extent, less engaging.

Pous relies heavily on the impressive, almost acrobatic abilities of these dancers. And what abilities they are: Matos twirls Castillo over his head seemingly effortlessly, and each takes a turn climbing onto and jumping or “falling” off of a large gray block that reaches well over their heads. This is the sort of exhilarating, heart-pumping stuff that we expect from a program billed as a “love letter to Havana”. But what might have better filled that role would have been a work in which these dancers were allowed to explore subtlety, nuance, and a more sensitive range of emotion. They exude passion for what they do; rather than challenging their bodies, which are clearly capable of fantastic physicality, Pous ought to tap further into their emotional capacities.

Getting Some Fun Out of Life with Louise Lecavalier

(July 14, 2011) Watching “A Few Minutes of Lock”, one falls under the impression that Louise Lecavalier is not susceptible to gravity. As she flings her small, muscular body into the air, into the arms of dancer Keir Knight, or onto the floor, there is a sense of abandon that recalls performances of contact improvisation. The way she spirals against the floor, allowing the natural circular movements of her body to absorb the shock of impact, appears at once organic and inhuman. Her unpredictable shifts from slow movements to sharp, staccato gestures are superhuman as well; a whirlwind, to look away from Lecavalier for one moment is to miss a dozen motions flickering past. The silken electricity of her movement in “Minutes of Lock” speaks to her reign as a “rock star of the dance world” (as introduced by Jacob’s Pillow director Ella Baff, a rock star in her own right) and as the muse of La La La Human Steps director Edouard Lock, to whom the title of the work alludes.

We watch “A Few Minutes of Lock” having already fallen in love with Louise Lecavalier. This relatively brief work is preceded on the program by the U.S. premiere of Nigel Charnock’s “Children”, a duet performed by Lecavalier with Patrick Lamothe. “Children” begins with a shrill electronic drone, a flickering strobe light, and Lecavalier running on all fours, dressed in black, her blonde hair loose. She throws herself up and down with the playful abandon of a child who has not yet learned to be afraid of bruises. Floppy but still controlled in her physicality, she is both animalistic and completely human. In what will become a repeated motif, she ends this first solo standing, facing the audience, looking long and hard at us. There is inquiry on her face, curiosity, as if she were about to open her mouth and ask us what we thought.

This curiosity continues to drive the work as Lecavalier is joined onstage by Lamothe, a fine dancer who hardly manages to appear anything but convenient beside his intensely enigmatic partner. They move in unison phrases, then in fast, physically intense partnering; they lead each other from place to place and use handheld lights to illuminate each others’ movements. Charnock’s choreography is at once quirky and unpretentious, and Lecavalier and Lamothe play it straight, while allowing for an inherently human comedy to peek through every so often. This comedy, as well as Lecavalier’s articulate yet casual movement style and the fabulously witty music choices (duets to Billie Holiday’s “Getting Some Fun Out of Life” and Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” stand out), call to mind the performances of a standout artist from last year’s festival: Monica Bill Barnes.

The music, the lighting, the use of props such as water bottles (empty and full), pillows, and long sticks—they are all perfectly matched. The relationship between Lecavalier and Lamothe evolves beautifully, from playful aggression to sexual frustration to poignant longing. To a ballad sung by Maria Callas, they throw water into the air above their heads and collapse, each taking turns at being shaken, cajoled, and revived by the other until they both stand, locked in an embrace, rocking slowly on their feet as the lights slowly fade. They have grown up, and the notes included in the program from Nigel Charnock reverberate in our minds: “What have you lost? You have lost nothing. Stop looking. It is already perfect.” And so it is.

Spellbinding Kidd Pivot at Jacob’s Pillow

(July 7, 2011) There are things that are easy to say about the work of Crystal Pite. It’s smart, yes; it deals with powerful themes, such as disaster (natural, personal, global); it bears the influence of William Forsythe, with whom Pite danced for several years. It is interdisciplinary and all at once narrative and non-narrative, linear and tangential.

These are the things one finds oneself saying to mask the reality: that there are few, if any, words apt enough to serve in articulating the profound experience of a performance of Pite’s work by the ensemble known as Kidd Pivot. In a pre-performance talk, Jacob’s Pillow Scholar-in-Residence Philip Szporer quoted Pite as saying that she “need[s] to think of [her] role in this creation as disturber”, and the sentiment of this statement rings true when the clamor has subsided at the end of Dark Matters, the company’s evening-length presentation which continues its run at the Pillow through Sunday. Pite has disturbed the waters of contemporary dance, instigating a close examination of the role this movement form does—or should—play in the greater art world and in society at large.

Dark Matters opens with a spotlight creeping onto the stage, sliding up and down a set of panels that establish a room onstage. A dancer swathed in a black velvet jumpsuit slips out from behind one such panel, flicks on a stereo, and disappears again as a resonant voice (Christopher Gaze) intones lines from Voltaire’s “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” and a second black-clad dancer slides along the floor like a snake. These sneaking figures evoke a sense of spying on something forbidden, something occult. In the semi-darkness, one of them guides a man (Peter Chu) dressed in tan slacks and beige shirt to a table, where he sits and begins to work. In a series of brief vignettes separated by the raising and lowering of light (which throughout the piece is impeccably designed by Robert Sondergaard), Chu constructs a puppet out of cardboard.

When the puppet is completed, dancers (each in a black velvet jumpsuit with black gloves, socks, and masks) affix poles to its appendages and manipulate it in a series of duets with Chu. They begin tenderly: the puppet walks along his creator’s body as Chu shifts to provide dynamic planes for it to move on. But they grow increasingly violent as the puppet becomes more demanding and more physically independent. Finally they come to blows in an armed duet: Chu with a cardboard axe, the puppet with a fatal pair of scissors. We don’t for a moment doubt that this paper marionette could—and does—end the life of his maker.

Throughout the first half of Dark Matters, the focus has been primarily on the narrative of the work, particularly as aided by the visual elements of this production. After the death of the puppet-maker, these elements literally come crashing down as the dancers in black topple the panels and a row of lights drops to lurch threateningly over the stage. One black figure surveys the wreckage, pulling a limp Chu to his feet and manipulating him until he can move on his own.

It’s all very effective. The Voltaire text addresses the theme without lecturing on it, the set and props clearly establish a world that remains abstract, and the scarcity of actual “dancing” makes the moments in which it does occur all the more satisfying. Pite has hooked us completely. So when we return after intermission to find that the stage has been cleared (save for one prone body) and discover almost immediately upon the commencement of the second half that it is much more focused on actual, physical movement, the question arises: does Pite say as much with her pure dance as she does with her more theatrically augmented work?

The answer is unequivocally yes. In the hour (which could just as easily have been twenty minutes or three hours) that follows, five dancers in pedestrian-inspired clothing and one still encased in black execute a series of some of the most phenomenal solos, duets, trios, and group sections this writer has ever seen. The partnering, rarely sentimental, is astonishing. Each dancer is tremendously gifted in his or her own facility, and combined they become twice more than the sum of their parts; just as a single movement ripples sensually through dancer Cindy Salgado’s body, so does it continue through her partner, Yannick Matthon. The performers act upon each other as forces of natural energy in intensely physical sequences.

Throughout this spellbinding dance-dream, the lone figure in black plays a variety of different roles. She (by process of elimination we ascertain that she is Sandra Marín Garcia) precipitates and supports movement, rearranging and reinforcing the other performers. She imbues them with fluid energy, sometimes without any physical contact. At times she joins in their ensemble sections as if she were one of them, and for the moment she is. She floats out from upstage where, reminiscent of lighting artist Jennifer Tipton’s design for Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room, haze has made the back wall drop away; later she crawls unnoticed past the feet of the audience members in the front row, rising all of a sudden and emerging as if from our ranks. What exactly she represents is not made explicitly clear, and her anonymity presents us with the need to contextualize her not only within the piece itself, but within our personal perceptions of performance and of interaction.

The end, bittersweet simply because we do not want it to come, is staggeringly beautiful. Garcia strips away her black layers, revealing a muscled and almost surprisingly human body. She has barely had time to adjust her knee pads when Chu joins her onstage, and for the first time all evening two dancers acknowledge each other as fellow humans. Their duet possesses the same continuous line and energy as those which preceded it, but its tenderness and refocused attention make it absolutely heart-wrenching. It seems that Pite has conceded to the reality that love can be as impactful and as much a “mockery of fate” as any natural disaster, and conferred upon it the honor of being a subject for her work. Disturber, dancer, award-winning choreographer; Crystal Pite is as much a force to be reckoned with as any earthquake.

On Reviewing Kidd Pivot

“It’s impossible to be eloquent enough in describing the dance-theatrical feat that choreographer Crystal Pite and her troupe, Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM, have pulled off in Dark Matters”

 

So says a writer for the Seattle Times. Nevertheless, I’m going to try. I’ll be seeing Kidd Pivot on Thursday–check back early Friday morning for my review!

Jane Comfort & Co. Surprise at Jacob’s Pillow

(July 1, 2011) “It’s always a surprise with Jane,” said Ella Baff, executive director of Jacob’s Pillow, as she welcomed audiences to Jane Comfort and Company’s performance in the Doris Duke Theater on Thursday night.  On the program were two works, Beauty and Underground River, and surprising they were—but maybe not in the way you would expect.

Beauty begins with a woman—Lisa Niedermeyer, a former company member returning as a guest in this engagement—getting ready to go out. With no apparent perception of the audience, she primps and preens in front of a mirrored vanity for most of the piece: putting on makeup, shaving her legs, wrestling herself into a pair of Spanx, etc. Her focus makes these routine and familiar tasks mesmerizing and a little frightening as we watch her transformation.

But the main event of the work is a beauty pageant: the “Barbie Beauty Contest”. Four dancers dressed in gaudy leotards pivot and pose robotically, only moving as much as Mattel’s plastic toy could have, as a voiceover dialogue between an emcee and each “Barbie” brings peals of laughter from the audience (“Do you have any causes that you champion?” “I do, actually. Swans.”). Comfort creates a series of vignettes such as this one, each different in specific content, all addressing the theme of society’s warped perception of feminine beauty. It’s a work of extremes—extreme appearances, extreme movement, and extreme discomfort as we observe how universally we are all implicated in the perpetuation of these unnatural ideals.

Men are implicated through Sean Donovan, the only male performer, who appears in a range of roles: as a runway coach, a video-blogger discussing “I.O.I.’s” (Indicators of Interest), a personal trainer, and a plastic surgeon who draws abstract circles and lines on the body of dancer Lucie Baker, presumably identifying “problem spots”. Women are implicated when, even during a monologue about preferring tomboyish activities, Baker straps on high-heeled leather boots in which she and the other dancers perform an explicitly sexual music video-style number, suggesting that they have not yet found the courage to rebel that we—and Comfort—wish they could. And we as spectators are implicated when, at the end of the piece, the house lights are illuminated and a select number of audience members are handed pencils and paper and asked to vote for the evening’s Barbie Beauty Queen. The results are tallied, a queen is chosen (Petra van Noort), and she stands stiff and alone as the “losers” strip off their makeup and change from their gaudy costumes into street clothes, gathering their things and walking offstage together. They are relaxed and as beautiful as we have seen them.

Underground River deals with darker stuff. Again, a voiceover dialogue informs us that there are characters here: Cara, a young girl, her parents, and a doctor. As the three adults coax Cara into squeezing their hands or signaling them with a blink, four women—Baker, van Noort, Leslie Cuyjet, and Elinor Harrison—perform fluid, sweeping movement phrases, sing, and manipulate puppets by Basil Twist. In addition to how expertly she works in a multidisciplinary format, River is a testament to Comfort’s inventive use of text as a sound score. The performers almost never obliquely “perform” the words. Rather, they interpret the meaning and respond to the rhythms and melodies of the voices. As Cara is limited in her communication to the smallest gestures, the four dancers are restricted to abstraction. It’s moving in its simplicity, and in the honesty and unafraid presences before us on the stage. Comfort’s choreographic voice is articulate, insightful, and strong, and her medium (the dancers, movements, sounds, and visual elements of her work) communicates a series of messages that beg and deserve to be heard.