Short And Sweet - MOSTLY - Altogether Different Festival

Dance Magazine, May, 2001 by Gus Jr Solomons

ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT JOYCE THEATER NEW YORK, NEW YORK JANUARY 10-28, 2001

This year's Altogether Different Festival press release boasted "In by 8 P.M./out by 9:11 (mostly)," indicating that this year's seven aesthetically disparate and more-than-usually intriguing troupes would stage short concerts, mounted with the Joyce's usual high-level production values. Is it possible postmodernists are learning that less is more?

Montreal-based Venezuelan Jose Navas directed Compagnie Flak in a movement style that combined Cunningham's angularity, slicing limbs, and quick stops and starts with sinewy wiggles, a la Trisha Brown. Clothed in the mantle of abstraction, the content of his hour-long Perfume de Gardenias--recurring nudity, a score compiled from Internet contributions by four composers, and Marc Parent's imaginative lighting--was clearly symbolically meaningful to the choreographer. But he gave no program clues about the intent of the visual eclat.

Bucking the trend toward brevity, Karole Armitage, a Merce Cunningham dancer in the 1970s, showed part or all of seven dances in Balanchine-esque neoclassic style. Six o'clock-high extensions and sullen hip thrusts ran rampant. There were no breaks between dances on each half of the program, and since the movement vocabulary varied little, changes of costume and music alone distinguished one piece from another. The legato, leggy virtuosity was disjointed: Highly skilled dancers, including the notably lanky technical whiz Ana Gonzaga, moved from one extreme position to the next, with spectacular amplitude, but little or no relationship to the music or each other. Only New York City Ballet guests Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans managed to give the 1999 duet Life Story emotional coherence.

The dances ranged from the 1993 Balanchine tribute I Had a Dream, commissioned by Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, to The Last Lap (1999), made for the White Oak Dance Project. The premiere Rave was a scanty piece d'occasion consisting mainly of lining up and posing. Each dancer was body-painted a different color: yellow, red, purple, blue, etcetera, in an apparent attempt at ecumenism that the all-white company lacks. And Nadaswaram (1998) was a foray into world dance, blending faux bharata natyam with faux hip-hop--a change of pace from the prevailing quasi-ballet.

Both Mark Dendy and Irene Hultman went for sheer entertainment. Black Tie Optional: Irene Hultman and Friends featured a stunning cast of elite New York dancers: Twyla Tharp alumni Jamie Bishton, Jodi Melnick, Gabrielle Malone, and Andrew Robinson, NYCB's Robert La Fosse, and Paul Taylor's Andrew Asnes. They and the incomparable Shelley Washington (who helped shape Tharp's signature style), in her return to performing after ten years away, joined Hultman in lighter-than-air concoctions, set to musical stylings by the likes of Tom Jones, Eartha Kitt, Dean Martin, and Rufus Wainwright. Actor/dancer Colin Gee on his unicycle provided refreshing entr'actes. The program featured occasional moments of inventiveness popped out of a matrix of jazzy squiggles and full frontal mugging.

I'm Going to my Room to be Cool Now and I Don't Want to be Disturbed was Dendy's unblushing crowd pleaser: a thirteen-part suite, set to funky rock'n'roll classics. Music by Grace Slick, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and others blared; Dale Knoth's psychedelic lighting flashed; and seven brash, beautiful dancers barged through Dendy's hyperactive, madcap moves with boundless energy. Refreshingly unself-conscious sexuality pervaded Dendy's work: everybody groped and flirted, regardless of gender. Statuesque powerhouse Ashley Gilbert flaunted herself to Janis Joplin's "Summertime," wily daredevil Nicole Berger limned Joplin's quirky "Mercedes Benz," and Timothy Bish flexed body-builder muscles to Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog." Impish sex-puppy Todd Anderson seduced Bish to Chaka Khan and Rufus's "Tell Me Something Good." Lithe, resilient Larry Keigwin, wearing only his Calvins, danced his own springy, but melancholy choreography to Bill Withers's "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone." Christalyn Wright grooved with Kegwin and Steven Ochoa to Jimi Hendrix's "Fire." Ochoa, in a fringe skirt, was Ike and Tina Turner's "Proud Mary," with the other guys as the backup group. A bouncy finale to Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" brought down the house.

Since embarking on his choreographic journey in 1995, former Ralph Lemon soloist Wally Cardona has been searching for his unique voice. He's found it. With the astute mentoring of "choreographic adviser" Phyllis Lamhut, a master of dance composition (who also worked with Dendy), Trance Territory emerged as Cardona's most focused and structurally concise work to date. It was a rich, raw, and unmannered evocation of ritual. The hypnotic power of insistently repetitive gestural patterns was enhanced by a canny choice of accompaniment: DJ $MALL [cts.]HANGE (a.k.a. James Dier) created a live mix of throbbing pulses and subsonic rambling.

In leathery costumes by Jill Anderson, Cardona swirled arms and trunk in tight, semaphore-like movement upstage, while downstage, Kathryn Sanders slouched to the ground in slow motion. Cardona's dancing was riveting, no matter who shared the stage with him. Later, Joanna Kotze and Sanders moved quietly at the edges of the luminous red and green grid that demarcated the floor, while Cardona and Matthew Winheld tumbled and lurched. The asymmetric rhythms of their unison duet invigorated the music's persistence. The rough-edged awkwardness of the movement was all the more expressive, done by bodies of such obvious technical power.