Caitlin Corbett Dance Company

Dance Magazine, April, 2005 by Iris Fanger

CAITLIN CORBETT DANCE COMPANY TOWER AUDITORIUM, COLLEGE OF ART, BOSTON, MA DECEMBER 3-4, 2004

A 20th-anniversary concert is by definition a blast from the past; the surprise in Caitlin Corbett's celebration was how the program's four premieres drew on earlier works yet incorporated incremental changes.

Corbett, who was influenced by Judson Dance Theater and post-Judson choreographers, looks like no one else in Boston because she presents made-up movement rather than hand-me-downs: hunched up shoulders propelling her arms upward or out with extraordinary power, a torso coiling in or flinging itself out into space, a fall to the floor with a subsequent rise up as if fueled by an organic instinct, the whole of it infused with a languid ease and grace. As she's aged, she's trained younger dancers by framing a technique in her own image; as a performer, she has sunk the movement deeper onto her muscles and bones, making her appearances even more mesmerizing.

The first act consisted of earlier works, in their entirety or excerpts, including Corbett's eccentric solo Wigwam Ladies (1984), in which she performed a series of gestures and steps while dressed in white bunny fur bra and short, flouncy skirt. In Without Word (1998) Corbett and her most accomplished acolyte, Erin Koh, danced a lush duet for a pair of girlfriends. Daisy Duet (1999) revisited Corbett's interest in untrained dancers, in this case two good-humored men who paced obediently through a square-dance combination of instructions. The brief excerpt from Joycie's Pie (1992) for a dozen plain folks was more of the same, but enhanced by precise chorus-line formations arranged on varying body types.

Three Quartets, the premiere that led off the second act, revealed a transition for Corbett: She set it to Michael Nyman's String Quartet No. 2 rather than to sound collages by her partner and collaborator, Ann Steuernagel. More startling, the movement actually acknowledges the rhythms and dynamics of the music. Although women performed most of the pieces, Kaela Lee and Victor Tiernan traded balances and weight transfers in the mixed-gender duet Five or Six Things. Slow Bird was a unison charmer for Shepley Metcalf and her second-grader niece; in Oh, soloist Koh performed like a younger, equally virtuosic version of Corbett. These 12 works brought the choreographer, her dancers, and the viewers into the 21st century in a two-hour sweep of memory and prophetic shifts toward the future.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.caitlincorbett.com