Bielemeier Dance Project. - Lincoln Hall Auditorium, Portland, Oregon - Review - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1998 by Martha Ullman West

BIELEMEIER DANCE PROJECT LINCOLN HALL AUDITORIUM, PORTLAND, OREGON SEPTEMBER 25-27, 1998

Balletic, cinematic, funny, sad, brilliantly danced, and masterfully crafted--Odd Duck Lake, Gregg Bielemeier's new suite of dances, was all of that and more when it premiered in September before a Portland audience thirsty for first-class dancing.

That's precisely what it got as the members of the Gregg Bielemeier Dance Project executed movement that flowed like the water in Oregon's rivers, at times halted by rocky spots, at others driven by eddying currents, with occasional tumbles and pratfalls caused not so much by rapids as by the choreographer's highly developed sense of humor. Bielemeier's dances--complicated, textured, witty, and sophisticated--have the inevitability of a force of nature, albeit a humanized one.

It used to be that no one could execute Bielemeier's choreography as well as he could. It tends to have large sweeps of the extremities punctuated with agitated shakes of the fingers and tiny steps of the feet, but his present company includes some of the strongest dancers in this town. Joan Findlay, who has danced with Bielemeier for fifteen years; Jae Diego; and guest artists Randee Paufve, Rinda Chambers, and Linda K. Johnson, who repeated a dance commissioned for her solo concert last June, are able to inhabit the movement like a custom-fitted garment.

Others, like former ballet dancers Kristin Young, Daniel Kirk, and Eric Skinner, have effected a kind of cross-pollination of forms strikingly visible in this work. This is also true of Matthew Boyes, on loan from Oregon Ballet Theatre, who in his solo, particularly on the third night, presented an epiphany of crossover dancing, his spinal placement faultless but as flexible as licorice rope as he catapulted across the stage. Next to Bielemeier himself, Michael Barber may be one of the best comic dancers around. In "Swan Get Ting Up," costumed in a black dance belt and a transparent tinselly dress, Barber bared his soul as well as his bottom as he struggled through the Saint-Saens music, played live, with a twist, by 3 Leg Torso, a Portland music group that is an integral part of the Bielemeier Dance Project.

Bielemeier has struggled more than most to keep making work, always limited to small groups of dancers. That made the sight of a dozen dancers pouring onto the stage in a gush of intricate movement in the finale an incredibly poignant sight. Lyndee Mah's music direction and the purity of her singing, Paul Arensmeyer's innovative set pieces, and Bill Boese's sensitive lighting design were essential to a first-class, highly tourable show.