Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. - Ted Shawn Theatre, Studio/Theatre, and Inside/Out Stage, Becket, Massachusetts - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Amanda Smith

Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival Ted Shawn Theatre, Studio/Theatre, and Inside/Out Stage, Becket, Massachusetts June 14-September 4,1994 Reviewed by Amanda Smith

The season this year at Jacob's Pillow--"The Pillow," as it's affectionately called--was a particularly rich one, a marvelous summer buffet not just of performances, formal and informal, but of lovely, surprising moments: Dancers and choreographers glimpsed strolling on the grounds lush with'. masses of black-eyed Susans and young dance students in Grecian togas spied posing on rocks, illuminated by the lights of cars leaving the parking lot at night.

The Pillow breathes dance history. Memorabilisi on display in the Barn, sagely curated by Norton Owen, celebrated the hundredth year of Martha Graham's birth, and featured an ellusive, affectionate letter from Graham to the Pillow's founder, Ted Shawn. But the Graham company's appearance was the disappointment of the season, especially in an Appalachian Spring, that poised work of Americana, thrown into imbalance by jwpw Herring's neurotic, frantic Bride and, worse, Pascal Rioult's Revivalist-as-European-grotesque, a cross between a nitwit and a gargoyle. The bright spot was Ethan Brown, borrowed from American Ballet Theatre, lovely, fresh, direct as the Husbandman.

One of the profoundest pleasures of the season took place on the outside stage one evening as mists hung in the air and softened the Berkshire hills in the distance and rain was about to fall: the Cambodian Artists Project, under the direction of Sam-Ang Sam, showing court dances exquisite in their beauty and refinement. Resplendent in their costumes and headdresses of gold, the dancers glided slowly in lilting movements, their fingers arched backward. Amarin Sam almost stole the show as a mischievous monkey--at four years old the most diminutive dancer imaginable.

The international aspect of the season was reflective of executive director Sam Miller's discerning taste. (This was Mille's final season before he left to head the New England Foundation for the Arts. Among his international coups was Japanese puppeteer Hoichi Okamoto, under the company name of Dondoro, presenting the extraordinary Kiyohime Mandara, a tragic tale of passion, one evening in the Studio/Theatre. Carrying a life-size puppet for the duration of the hourlong piece, Okamoto portrayed, alternately, both man and woman, his handling of weight so extraordinary it was sometimes impossible to discern who was human, who was puppet.

Netherlands Darice Theater 3, created for dancers over forty, offered the pleasure of watching at close range four mature dancers with profound knowledge of stagecraft, although the choreography was heavy with European angst and light on locomotion. American Martha Clarke provided the most distinguished and illuminating pieces of choreography: Nocturne, danced by Sabine Kupferberg, a broken bird protecting her breast, and the Magritte-like Dammerung for Martine van Hamel and Gary Chryst, both looking wonderful. Gerard Lemaitre was the charming fourth company member.

Of Americans on view in the Studio/Theatre, Trisha Brown gave audiences a peek at a work in progress, Bach I, brilliant in its form, dancers melting out of lines and reforming them with rare subtlety. Ron Brown/Evidence premiered Dirt Road, continuing to show the young choreographer to be exceptionally intelligent and talented, although he missed what should have been the ending, a conclusive moment (the dancers arrayed in a powerful line at the rear of the stage) which was unfortunately followed by another section.

Of the large American companies on the main stage, Rhythm in Shoes, the terrific Dayton, Ohio-based tap-and-clog company directed by Sharon Leahy, was an unexpected treat. From their dramatic, compelling Streets of the Capitol to their hootin' and hollerin', rollicking hoedown of a finale, Rhythm Tracks, their use of tap, clogging, and percussive rhythm in general was not just lively and accomplished; it was intelligent, tasteful, and provocative.

And finally there was Mark Morris, inheritor and utilizer of virtually every tradition on view during the season, a one-man ocean into which it all flows. Morris and his dancers in the Mark Morris Dance Group are still having fun doing it, even when the underbelly of the piece is dark, as it is in Morris's new Lucky Charms. The dancers in their bright sequins suggest cheer-leaders, but emotionally they twist on. spits, dragged across the stage to strains of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" (as quoted by Jacques Ibert). The charms of the title are amulets you'd hold out to stave off a vampire.

The Office, originally commissioned by Zivili [see Reviews/National, August 1994, p. 59!, is Morris's beautiful, poignant set of folk dances evoking the tragically besieged Balkans. Dancers are summoned offstage one after the other by a stern woman with a clipboard, as all of us are summoned finally. An acknowledgment of universal mortality, but does it hold its own as a political statement and in the context of Morris's own repertoire? Oh, yes.