Minh Tran & Company

Dance Magazine, March, 2004 by Martha Ullman West

LINCOLN HALL

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

PORTLAND, OREGON

OCTOBER 23-25, 2003

THE CROSSING Borders program bears most of the hallmarks of Minh Tran's work, but unfortunately not all. He has assembled a company of some of Portland's most accomplished dancers; on the whole the costumes are luscious and appropriate; the set design for the principal premiere, Nocturnal Path, funded in part by the Doris Duke Fund for Dance of the National Dance Project, is both culturally and visually interesting; live music accompanies much of the evening.

However, even as a student, the Vietnamese-American artist quite successfully laminated ritualistic Asian opera dance onto the explosive movement vocabulary associated with contemporary American choreography, resulting in work that was uniquely and dynamically his. Sadly, not this time. Basically, Crossing Borders sounds one note, and sounds it for a long time. And that note is a vocabulary based on flexed feet and hands, angular Siva-like arms, and more turned-out second position plies than one wishes to see, mostly delivered at a glacial pace.

In the curtain-raising Cao-Shu/ Writing in Grass Style, both the music, which was performed by members of Portland Taiko, and the costumes, designed by the choreographer, were distractions from the dancing. As Jae Diego, Jennifer Hong-Berdine, Teresa Mathern, and Cydney Wilkes made their way through the ubiquitous plies, angular leaps, and stamping accents of the choreography, they seemed terrified of tripping over their floor-hitting, pennant-like sleeves. And while the music was quite splendidly rhythmic and powerful, much of the time it seemed separate from the dancing, making the piece look sloppily crafted and confused.

There is no confusion about the subject of Nocturnal Path, a four-section work that made up the second half of the evening. It began with a long ritual that at first, because of the richly colored satin costumes (by Mathern) and the set design (by Christine Bourdette), is strikingly beautiful. But as the dancers continue to perform basically the same movement as in Cao-Shu/Writing, and the revived 1994 Descending, performed in the first half, the mind wandered and the eye strayed. One section ("Chaos") contains some eye-catching, genuine dancing as the company moved swiftly through cat's-cradle patterns that were formed by elastic bands, but unison movement--a lot of it on the floor--looked more like exercise than a dance.

There are some redeeming moments. Two are provided by duets performed by the choreographer with Mike Barber. In the revival of The War Within, which was excerpted from The Road Home, a 1996 multimedia piece made by Tran based on his experiences as a boat person escaping Vietnam after the war, the two physically well-matched men run freely in a loop around the stage, dancing brilliantly the joyful release of moving after long and perilous confinement. In the last section of Nocturnal Path, the pair performs a handsomely crafted, intertwined sculptured duet with many shapely references to Asian art motifs.

Tran does know his craft--the reworking of Descending certainly demonstrates his ability to expand a piece made originally for three dancers to accommodate five. The costumes shimmer, and the dancers are gorgeous to look at, topless--which they are for part of it--or not. But the piece and the concert are too long and need editing. Since there are almost more words in the program about the funding for this concert than about the work, one wonders if this is choreography by the minute. That would be a pity: Less, in this instance, would definitely be more. FOR MORE INFORMATION wwwmtdance.org; 503.233.0996