`Last Dance' Doc Outshines Show - Pilobolus Dance Theater - Dance Review

Dance Magazine, Nov, 2002 by Gia Kourlas

Pilobolus Dance Theatre Joyce Theater New York, New York June 24-July 20, 2002

To its intensely loyal audiences, Pilobolus Dance Theatre is more an institution than a dance company--fans seem as likely to miss the company's annual Joyce Theater season as a religious zealot would skip church. But to a dance aficionado, the repertoire presented by the popular troupe is inconsistent. There is Untitled, the 1975 classic credited to a wealth of choreographers (Robby Barnett, Alison Chase, Martha Clarke, Moses Pendleton, Michael Tracy, and Jonathan Wolken), in which two towering Edwardian women transform a picnic into a surreal event, and a couple of luminous selections from Chase, including her premiere, Ben's Admonition. And then, unfortunately, there is everything else.

Of the three New York premieres presented at The Joyce, Ben's Admonition, though brief, was easily the most satisfying. Set to a score by Paul Sullivan, featuring both sparse piano music and electronic sounds, Admonition showcases Ras Mikey C and Matt Kent, each of whom were shirtless but for cargo pants and black boots designed by Angelina Avallone. As they dangled a few feet off the ground--suspended from thick ropes--they appeared at once urban and otherworldly. Clearly, Chase's ability to conquer both qualities is a credit to her choreographic sophistication and understanding of theater. Though the scenarios that illuminated the stage (the relationship between the pair constantly changes) were brief, they were filled with wit and small surprises, even when the dancers hooked their fingers in each other's pockets and spun around in dreamy slow motion.

Tracy's new work, The Brass Ring, which premiered at the recent Olympic games, is less like watching dance than sport; perhaps that is the point, given its place of origin. But the largely happy selection of all-American music--which includes Aaron Copland and Scott Joplin--lends this full-company piece for C, Kent, Otis Cook, Mark Fucik, Renee Jaworski, and Jennifer Macavinta a decided air of vapidness in both its monotonous assortment of movement (acrobatic and circusy, with little room for much else) and Americana-flavored soundtrack, which is ultimately less moving than sappy. Inventiveness is lacking in The Brass Ring, as it also is in the choreographer's Symbiosis (2001), a duet that was mysteriously included on the same program and which was all too similar to the premiere in its barrage of senseless acrobatic maneuvers. Did the artistic directors want their own pieces to be shown back to back? Or was this simply a critical theatrical error?

Judging from the pattern that emerged in all three programs, however, the answer obviously lies in the former. The Four Humours, the latest collaboration between Barnett and Wolken--they are the only artistic directors who continue to work together--was included in the same evening as their 2000 work Davenen, set to music by Frank London as played by the Klezmatics. The full-company work, an exploration of the act of prayer, is a meandering disaster of a piece that can't seem to decide if it is cute or serious.

Ultimately, the same thematic dilemma is true of Humours. A quartet for Fucik, Jaworski, Kent, and Macavinta, Humours delves into the four temperaments--sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic--but it does little more than to restage them on the dancers' bodies in broad, cartoonish strokes. Dancers wear a bizarre assortment of layers--by Avallone--which resemble hospital garments or worse. (Kent's head, for instance, was not only wrapped in bandages but boasted a bloodstain.) The dance is ultimately sophomoric and surface; what could have been an interesting reinterpretation of the humors is just a pat piece of choreography that shows the earnest Kent, in particular, at his Charlie Chaplin-worst. Mercifully, he was given the opportunity to redeem himself as the equally sinister and hilarious demon character in Chase's wonderful Monkey and the White Bone Demon, which was created last season. In it, Kent, as the White Bone Demon, danced on stilts in an attempt to outwit a fearless, loyal monkey who is escorting a monk to the West. He was priceless.

In the end, a great deal more drama was found, not on the Joyce stage, but in Mirra Bank's absorbing documentary Last Dance, which featured all of Pilobolus's artistic directors except Chase. She seems to distance herself from the group, even residing on the coast of Maine, not in Connecticut, where the company is based. Bank's film documents the creation of A Selection (2001), the group's collaboration (and battles) with the author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who was intent on making a dance-theater work based on the Holocaust. The piece is eventually made, but the artistic arguments--both petty and important--that viewers witness are absolutely riveting.

In the film, Wolken, easily the most tempestuous of the choreographers as far as the artistic process is concerned (Tracy is incredulous at his lack of regard for Sendak's feelings; Barnett seems to be trapped in the middle), comments in his grand, loquacious way: "In the world of making dances, the myth is that you come into the room with something wonderful to express. It's not that. What really happens is you come into the room with an active mind and an open body and all kinds of things emerge." Judging from the majority of Pilobolus pieces presented at The Joyce, the mind may be active, but the imagination is lacking. Far too often, what emerges isn't interesting movement or ideas--but material that likely shouldn't have left the studio in the first place.