New York. - 92 on 42 - Spartacus - From Far Away - Steptext - Read My Hips - dance review

Dance Magazine, July, 2002

Once Again, the Sound of
Dancing Feet
92 on 42: 92nd Street Y Harkness
Dance Project
The Duke on 42nd Street
New York, New York
February 13-March 17, 2002
Reviewed by Chris Dohse

The fifteen dances shown during 92 on 42 confirmed a few things: New York's dance worlds are many and various, the 92nd Street Y remains an important nexus of those worlds, and Harkness Director Joan Finkelstein, who curated the series, has an unfailing nose for talent. Housing at the Duke for the second year in a row was noteworthy as well: As Finkelstein pointed out when introducing each evening's program, nonprofit modern dance is now a visible presence on the city's "most commercial and arguably most exciting of blocks."

Nicholas Leichter combined signature moves from hip-hop, capoeira, and disco to celebrate romantic love in an explosive, post-MTV valentine called Bliss. Indistinguishable in terms of composition or vocabulary from Free the Angels, Bliss displayed energy and style but was somewhat limited by the music that inspired it. In Angels, partnering that might have been intimate was cheated into relentless pop rhythms. In the freer flow of Bliss, the dancers reached the deeper level of abandonment called for by Tom Browne's monster groove "Funkin' for Jamaica." Will Rawls was particularly loose, letting his long, long limbs really fly. In both works, however, though the beat suggested ecstasy, the dancers usually wore an oddly haughty veneer. They just didn't seem to be having much fun.

Neither of Leichter's large pieces quite matched the power of his simpler quartet, Undertow. Here, four men in black leather floor-length skirts made oblique references to Swan Lake's cygnets. Interlinked, they struggled against each other like inmates in a chain gang, then showed off with club cool, simultaneously violent, arrogant, narcissistic, virile, slinky, and isolated.

Keely Garfield, Rachel Lynch-John, and Lisa Townsend performed Garfield's crisp, character-driven phrases to deadpan perfection in Free Drinks for Ladies With Nuts. In wedding dresses and veils, they alternated between ladylike pretense and surrender to the urges of secret commotion under their skirts. For a moment, they would compose themselves into Taglioni et al. in Pas de Quatre, then grin ferociously to dance an awkward jig or play air ukulele. A sense of a child's game kept them from becoming too dire, as they shed their gowns to reveal burned-out, bedraggled honky-tonk gals. Lynch-John seemed to be all joints during a beautifully danced solo.

The actions in Garfield's dances follow an elusive, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole illogic. It seemed perfectly natural, then, that she should swoon innocently when Lawrence Goldhuber lifted her in Good Girl Daddy--Part 1, before knowingly patting his rump. In the duet My Sister Was a Refugee, Garfield and Lynch-John were identical, diminutive Frozen Charlottes, down to pigtails and cheekbones.

The Houdini-like mystery of Chamecki/ Lerner's 1996 Antonio Caido suggested the surreal fictions of Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. Luridly lit, fragmentary vignettes occurred amidst a visually compelling set featuring a large, suspended block of ice melting into an aquarium. Vivian Trimble's cheapo-horror-film score added to the sideshow atmosphere. Two moments, both performed atop a table-high, wheeled platform, stood out for their audacious movement invention. In one, a trio of dancers slapped arms and torsos onto the platform's surface without altering their inscrutable affects. In the other, Rosane Chamecki was suspended under the platform, tossed back and forth by the arms of others, who supported her through a remarkable series of unfolding, dangling embraces.

Hidden Form, another Chamecki/Lerner collaboration, evolved elliptically out of simple, indirect walking patterns. A trio with suddenly sexual overtones took shape as two male dancers, as blank as dolls, manipulated a female dancer's head, pushing her chin, commanding her gaze.

Sean Curran's From the Ether, With Instinct might do for the 1980s what Paul Taylor's Company B did for the 1940s. Issey Miyake's costumes certainly captured the gauche chic of the era, and Curran's vocabulary picked up its vernacular movement. What didn't match were the dancers' pert expressions, juxtaposed against the aloof, sarcastic songs of minimalist Welsh band Young Marble Giants.

In Sonata (We Are What We Were), a New York premiere, Curran allowed the dancing to carry its own narrative. A ring of chairs set around the perimeter of the space and a projection of clouds in a blue sky suggested an al fresco wedding scene. The dance's phrasing wasn't as free as in From the Ether, but the mise en scene was more successful, suggesting emptiness, geographical expanse, and absence, letting the mind play.

A silent, hallucinatory film of Wil Swanson dancing alone preceded the two distinct sections of his Naked Singularities. Manipulations of the video image elongated and shuddered his apparently improvised material, fragments of which were emphasized and reordered later by a company of eight. Bodies were caught in Swanson's tai chi-like movement streams like flotsam, to fling and slash through space before pausing for unexpected, subtle, and satisfying moments of calm. Swanson's dancers didn't seem to be performing so much as allowing the audience to observe their inexplicable behavior, which was variously shaded by changes in cadential emphasis, echo, or solo embellishment of patterns previously laid down.