Dance

Floor show

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:43 GMT

Sara Hook at Harvard
Sara Hook explains the title of her cabaret piece Salad Days as a reference to youth and indiscretion.

PATRIOT ACT UP: Mary Cochran was the perky drum majorette who’s transitioned from football field
to ballet stage.

Sara Hook explains the title of her cabaret piece Salad Days as a reference to youth and indiscretion. At Harvard Dance Center on Saturday night, quite a lot of the evening looked more like grown-up and decadent. Hook’s New York–based group featured former Paul Taylor dancer Mary Cochran and three other women, with David Parker as a guest artist, in five brief portraits choreographed over the past 10 years.

What really held the parts of the evening together for me was Hook’s take on female performers. As distinct characters or anonymous dancer-dancers, they all appeared flawed, flummoxed, but determined to scramble over any choreographic hurdle.

Cochran opened the performance with Patriot Act UP (2004), as the perky drum majorette who’s transitioned from football field to ballet stage in things like George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes. To a rousing drumbeat and a Sousa march, Cochran ripped through a precision routine, one mechanical move to the beat, an encyclopedia of struts and prances, head tilts, simpering smiles, lifted shoulders and phony salutes. Driven to keep up with the music, she worked feverishly to please, pulling one foolish prop after another out of her jacket as she grew more strained and artificial.

Rue (1998) did have a quality of naïveté, and it most closely suited the ingénue roles Cochran played so memorably in the Taylor repertory. To Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh” (sung on tape by a sweet soprano), Cochran wafted with a sort of deranged romanticism. Wearing a dilapidated long tutu and a pink Dynel wig, she conveyed the raptures of a lovelorn but slightly unsteady ballerina. In the midst of some breathy advance, she’d fall flat, recover awkwardly, go on again until the next stumble. At the end of the song she staggered out backwards, still pleading with both hands to her invisible lover.

Three vignettes made up The Valeska Trilogy, a homage, or perhaps a satire, invoking the transgressive Weimar cabaret performer Valeska Gert. Cochran first played an adorable but unsteady music-hall entertainer, with banal ballet enchaînements. Then came cheap exhibitionism, as she lashed from kitschy Charlestons to auto-erotic writhings. Finally she subsided into a desperate proto-modern dance.

Ambling

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:34:08 GMT

Caitlin Corbett’s dance for the masses
Tom’s Wealth: A Dance for the Masses , which premiered last weekend at the Tsai Center, is about the physical equivalent of these toys and talismans.

TOM’S WEALTH: Mr. Sawyer’s assets got translated into movement by everyday people.

The assets of Tom Sawyer, as quoted by Caitlin Corbett from Mark Twain, consist of worthless objects you could pick up and stick in your pocket, broken treasures you can’t throw away, and a motherless animal or two. Tom’s Wealth: A Dance for the Masses, which premiered last weekend at the Tsai Center, is about the physical equivalent of these toys and talismans.

Corbett has been working for a year or so with some 30 “non-dancers” of all ages and types. From the way she deployed them among the members of her own company, Leah Bergmann, Erin Koh, Rebecca Lay, Kaela Lee, and Marjorie Morgan, I gather she takes the word “masses” in a sociological sense: dance for the common man, not dance for crusading crowds at a rally. She’s attracted to simple movements and the beauty of ordinary souls.

For this variegated group Corbett seems to have chiseled down a movement style I remember as being quite complex into some brief, basic, and low-intensity combinations of arm gestures, skips and runs, turns and falls. The five company dancers make the lexicon more elaborate, and subgroups of the masses develop it through repetition or doubling.

One phrase ends with a fall onto the back, arms and flexed legs hanging in the air above the body. You get to see this robotic shape many times during the piece. When the dancers turn on their sides, the same pose looks entirely different, more three-dimensional. And when several people fall into it at once, the stage seems to acquire a set of horizontal levels.

Corbett’s choreographic structures are more interesting than the simple body movements that convey them. In frequent counterpoint patterns, a large group of people move in unison or stand in place while a few individuals weave through them. The five company members do a long sequence of arm semaphores, back falls, and vigorous arm swings that carry the whole body out into a leg extension or a side jump. Five more dancers arrive and do their version of the phrase in canon with the first group.

In one sequence, a dancer has a shadow behind her doing the same movements. At some point the shadow steps in front, but instead of getting to be the leader, she falls and her partner steps over her. The shadow dance resumes as before.

Winged feet

DEBRA CASH — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:21:11 GMT

Dance around town
Dance highlights from the fall season.

IN ON BLUE Jorma Elo’s 2008 work will be part of Boston Ballet’s October 10 gala.

CAITLIN CORBETT DANCE COMPANY considers the contemporary American crisis and the virtues of simplicity through the prism of Tom Sawyer, with a cast of five professional and 30 non-professional men, women, and children, in Tom’s Wealth: A Dance for the Masses. It premieres at the Tsai Performance Center at Boston University (September 19-20; 617.353.8725 orwww.caitlincorbettdance.org). On Martha’s Vineyard, recipients of the YARD’s prestigious choreographers’ residencies — HOWARD KATZ, BELINDA MCGUIRE, ANDREA MILLER, and SARAH WILBUR — present work that includes multi-generational community engagement (September 19-21; 508.645.9662). AL KINDÎ & THE WHIRLING DERVISHES OF DAMASCUS, with the great liturgical singer Sheikh Hamza Shakkûr, bring the devotions of Sufism to Sanders Theatre (September 20; 617.876.4275 orwww.worldmusic.org).

Down on the Cape, DANCELOOP CHICAGO comes to the Crown and Anchor under the auspices of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival with the premiere of Lorita!, a dance adaptation of Williams’s short story “Happy August Tenth” (September 27; 866.789.TENN). Dancer NETA PULVERMACHER considers how To Fold a Big Bang and explores the nature of physical collisions in a series of performances and residence activities at MIT’s Kresge Little Theater (September 12-27; 617.253.2877). “SARA HOOK’S SALAD DAYS” satirizes society’s obsession with youth and celebrity with a Weimar-influenced new-vaudeville program that features members of DAVID PARKER AND THE BANG GROUP at the Harvard Dance Center (September 27; 617.495.8683).

Tony Williams’s BALLETROX is forming a new, chamber-sized multicultural professional dance company that will be featured at the free inauguration of the Rose Kennedy Greenway October 4 (617.524.3066 orwww.balletrox.org). “TWIST AND SHOUT,” an evening of dance, music, and spoken word at Roxbury Community College featuring Nia Dance Troupe, Girlz of Imani, and Aleye, benefits the lively and esteem-building youth programs at the OrigiNation Cultural Arts Center (October 4; 617.541.1875).

The GREEN STREET FALL FUNDRAISER featuring dancer Clarence Brooks has a preview October 3 and a full performance with goodies on October 4 at Green Street’s dance studios in Central Square (617.864.3191). Guest artists from BOSTON BALLET II perform a new work by Francisco Martinez on a program shared by DAWN KRAMER with video artist Stephen Buck, MICHAEL JAHODA, SUN HO KIM, MARGOT PARSONS, DEANNA PELLECCHIA with musician Ed Broms, and MICKI TAYLOR-PINNEY in collaboration with LYNN MODELL and ANN BROWN ALLEN at Boston University Dance Theatre (October 3-4; 617.358.2500). JOSÉ MATEO BALLET THEATRE’s 22nd season opens with a new work set to John Adams’s Fearful Symmetries at the Sanctuary Theatre in Harvard Square (October 10-26; 617.354.7467 orwww.ballettheatre.org)

Koozåpalooza

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:48:15 GMT

Cirque du Soleil at Bayside
The show could almost have been a metaphor for the national state of boisterous excitability.

It’s been pretty noisy around here the last few weeks. What with the Olympics, the conventions, the hype, the punditry, and the outraged blogomanes of all persuasions, the whole country’s been engulfed in a non-stop slugfest, and even the spectators compete for who yells the loudest. Koozå, the new Cirque du Soleil extravaganza, doesn’t provide any relief.

Pitching its big tent at Bayside Expo Center, Koozå opened last Friday for a month-long run (through October 12). The show could almost have been a metaphor for the national state of boisterous excitability. Not a soothing evening, with the band’s volume cranked way up over the ambient air-conditioner whine of the tent, and the clowns running around shouting and farting into their mikes, and the audience having the shrieks on cue.

The only time things calmed down was when Yao Deng Bo, with Zen-like concentration, stacked up eight chairs one by one. After making sure each new chair was precisely lined up, and testing his own balance, he’d slowly heave himself into a single-hand stand with his legs in a split, or unfold into some other improbable posture. He never cracked a smile until he lowered the chairs to his helpers and jumped to the floor.

Koozå isn’t a theme show like some other Cirque du Soleil creations. It’s just a line-up of circus acts — acrobatics, juggling, oddball specialties — linked together by a chorus of dancers and the ever-annoying clowns. Of course the costuming is gorgeous — yes, Cirque du Soleil proves that even a unitard can be gorgeous. With dazzling lighting effects, the simple set opens out like a set of billowing sails, and the one-ring space seems to expand and contract to suit each new marvel.

The trapezes and trampolines and platforms get rigged and moved about with terrific efficiency by invisible techies and the cast members themselves. Teamwork is crucial to these daredevils. The audience may scream at the acrobat who pulls off a triple somersault in the air, but it takes all 13 members of the “Teeterboard” closing number to see that the tumbler gets a good launch and comes back to earth alive.

Dainty cabaret

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:09:32 GMT

Keigwin + Company bring the elements to Jacob’s Pillow
Larry Keigwin’s genial take on the perennially popular theme of the four elements (water, fire, earth, air) didn’t add anything profound to the cosmic intelligence.

“EARTH”: This element was defined by reptilian movement.

Larry Keigwin’s genial take on the perennially popular theme of the four elements (water, fire, earth, air) didn’t add anything profound to the cosmic intelligence. Performed by his company last week in Jacob’s Pillow’s Doris Duke Studio Theatre, Elements consisted of 16 individually titled sketches, each about four and a half minutes long, with no more substance than the foam that inspired them.

Keigwin can extract great mileage out of a tiny idea, like the contemporary choreographer he most resembles, David Parker. But unlike Parker, he doesn’t make the leap from mundane comedy to the sublime reaches of absurdity. “Water” introduces the company, who are clad in bath towels and seemingly nothing else. As they step in and out of a line-up, discreetly rearranging the towels, we’re longing to see one miscalculation, but the choreography prevents any untoward exposure. By the end of the fourth “Water” droplet, when we’ve given up on this, the last dancer does flash his butt, just as he’s disappearing into the wings.

In between these coy moments, Ying-Ying Shiau (“Sea”), in a teeny weeny polka-dot bikini, is partnered by three men in terrycloth bathrobes (accompanied by Cole Porter’s anything-but-coy “Let’s Do It”), and Alexander Gish (“Spa”) imitates Carmen Miranda in a towel and a towel turban. Liz Riga hands him restorative bottles of water, and he thinks up silly things to do with them before handing them back.

The first part of “Fire” seemed to be riffing on the idea of movement that swirls upward, enhanced by the extended sleeves on the dancers’ costumes (“Flicker”). To a Chopin Nocturne, Jenn Freeman, Nicole Wolcott, and Julian Barnett (“Simmer”) face what might be an invisible dressing-room mirror, trying out stagy postures and faces. Implicit rivalries get quickly extinguished. Wolcott spins from one spotlit area of the stage to another (“Burn”). Patsy Cline is singing “Crazy” but Wolcott is mouthing different words, maybe angry ones.

“Earth” summons up reptilian movement. Keigwin’s solo, “Gecko,” was the one authentically weird dance of the show. The audience Thursday night gazed uncomfortably at his darting tongue, his quick, predatory gestures, his distended yet withdrawn limbs and shoulders. The other dancers extrapolated his lizardly quickness into group dances and a slippery, circling solo by Liz Riga (“Dragon”).

Lukewarm

JEFFREY GANTZ — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:34:21 GMT

Trey McIntyre at the Pillow
Are we in the midst of a dance boom?

SURRENDER: The idea was plausible; the execution was not.

Are we in the midst of a dance boom? You’d have to think so from the way hot-shot choreographers are going out and forming their own companies. The latest is 38-year-old Trey McIntyre, who debuted his Trey McIntyre Project, a summer endeavor with pick-up dancers, at Jacob’s Pillow in 2005. Now the Trey McIntyre Project is going full-time, with a year-round complement of 10 dancers (among them former Boston Ballet soloist Lia Cirio and former Boston Ballet II member Sam Shapiro) and a permanent base in Boise, Idaho. After a White Oak residency in Florida last month, McIntyre brought his Project back to the Pillow for a Northeast debut that offered two world premieres, Surrender and Leatherwing Bat, alongside his 2003 piece The Reassuring Effects (Of Form and Poetry). I wish I could say I found the form and the poetry of this new company reassuring.

Surrender’s is an obvious but workable opposites-attract conceit, with Chanel DaSilva as the girl in the cerise and black party dress and Jason Hartley as the guy in the blue wrestling singlet with white trim and red helmet and kneepads (USA!? USA!?). She starts gyrating to Grand Funk Railroad’s version of “The Loco-Motion”; he enters and lunges awkwardly at her; she doesn’t even look surprised. There are all the expected advances and retreats, flingings and swingings; she keeps pulling her hand away. The music shifts into the “Dance of the Mirlitons” from act two of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker — cute, but neither dancer tries to do anything balletic, or silly. Then — surprise! — she kicks off her heels and he doffs his helmet and we get, without apparent irony, Regina Spektor singing John Lennon’s “Real Love.” At the end, they stand side by side; you just know she’s going to extend her hand and he’s going to take it.

Leatherwing Bat is set to songs from the 1969 children’s album Peter, Paul and Mommy, and its focus is a loner played by Brett Perry who hovers on the outskirts as the other dancers — John Michael Schert, Virginia Pilgrim, Annali Rose, Dylan G-Bowley, and Lia Cirio — create duos and trios to the lullaby likes of “I Have a Song To Song, O!” and “Day Is Done.” “Going to the Zoo” sees the ensemble cradling Perry for a moment before exploding into the “Mommy’s takin’ us to the zoo tomorrow!” finale. In “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” Perry finds a friend (Schert), but we all know how that ends. There’s some humor involving a recurrent paper airplane, and some imitating of zoo animals; to make the Peter, Paul and Mary selections seem anything but sappy, however, the dancers would have to act like real kids, mischievous and playful and heartless. Instead, McIntyre gives us heart-on-sleeve earnest.

Legs plus

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:06:30 GMT

Aspen Santa Fe at Jacob’s Pillow
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s program at Jacob’s Pillow last week sampled four choreographers while showing off the dynamic 11-member company.

“AWWW, CUTE”: Itzak Galili’s Chameleon didn’t go much farther than that in its social commentary.

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s program at Jacob’s Pillow last week sampled four choreographers while showing off the dynamic 11-member company. The dances, all made during the last decade, revealed some limitations of contemporary dance style.

You’d expect that access to every and any kind of technique would make for exciting dancing. That, of course, has been the assumption of contemporary dancemakers for decades, but the process has reached a kind of stasis that’s broken only by some exceptional choreographer. We get lots of moves, lots of surprises, beautiful bodies, but no serious challenges. The style functions fine with the audience, which knows it’s seeing something that’s more refined than a TV dance show but just as kicky.

Helen Pickett’s Petal, commissioned for Aspen Santa Fe and premiered last winter, was a stream of ballet-inflected duets and formations for four women in bright yellow swimsuits and pointe shoes and four men in blue muscle shirts and pants. The usual situations got played out: neatly structured choruses, duets that looked like struggles, a trio where two men manipulated a woman. During small encounters and formal movement displays, people would exit determinedly, as if they had important things to do off stage. They’d slip back in and begin some new phrase off to the side while something else was going on.

Pickett’s movement called attention to its balletic foundations with anti-balletic misalignments and feistiness, none more or less distinguished than the others. The dancers often looked as if they were wriggling out of voluminous, ill-designed garments.

Jorma Elo also tries to make unusual movement. His 1st Flash (2003), to Jean Sibelius’s super-romantic Violin Concerto, was a collection of energetic shapes and gestures. At the beginning, dancers rushed on stage, stopped, shook their hands violently, and went away. The whole dance goes in bursts like this. The dancers always seemed to be building up to a stop, or collecting energy to begin moving again from some scrunched or angular position.

There’s not much emotional or physical throughline to this spasmodic process. I seized gratefully on moments that bore some social nuance. Two women looped and relooped their arms around each other’s arms, finding tricky new spaces to cut through. They seemed to be involved in this game, and perhaps in each other, until a man ran over and cut between them. He shoved one of the women away and took over the loop game. None of them seemed fazed.

Funny bones

JEFFREY GANTZ — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:41:11 GMT

Stockholm 59° North at the Pillow
It was the darkly comic offerings of Mats Ek in the middle, and the personable interpretations that gave the evening its distinction.

CICADA: Was Nadja Sellrup supposed to be molting?

A sense of humor is as essential to the soul as dance is to the body. That’s not a truism, and perhaps it’s not even true, but it applies to the program that Stockholm 59° North brought to Jacob’s Pillow two weeks back. The company, which is made up of principals and soloists from the Royal Swedish Ballet, bookended its bill with two serious pieces, Cristina Caprioli’s Cicada (in its world premiere) and Nacho Duato’s Castrati, but it was the darkly comic offerings of Mats Ek in the middle — a pas de deux from Apartment and Pas de Danse — and the personable interpretations that gave the evening its distinction.

In Apartment, a young woman (Marie Lindqvist Friday night) in a simple, almost folky blouse and full skirt appears and knocks at the lighted stage-left door that’s the set’s only feature. A man in a sleeveless shirt (Andrey Leonovich) comes out and they engage in a goofy duet with hints of violence, like Punch and Judy, or Raggedy Ann and Andy playing hopscotch and other children’s games. He disappears behind the door, she follows, the music (Swedish band Fläskkvartetten’s “Innocence”) screams, and, behind the door, we see him ride her off stage.

Pas de Danse finds a man in a white jacket and pants (company director Jens Rosén) alone in the vast interior of a barn or hangar. He hunches his shoulders, looks apprehensive, slaps his face, takes out a large white handkerchief and blows his nose. A woman in a blue dress with a flowing skirt (Jeannette Diaz-Barboza) comes on and tries, with limited success, to get his attention. More nose blowing. An identically attired couple (Oscar Salomonsson and Kristina Oom), except with the colors reversed, run on and it’s party time, as everybody dances up a storm to the accordion-laced strains of Abba member Benny Andersson’s birthday waltz for his second wife, Mona. The man and woman in blue run off together. The man in white reverts. The woman in white sighs and strolls off in the opposite direction. The handkerchief comes out again.

Cicada is summed up by its music: Kevin Volans’s two-piano work of the same name, which in variety and textural interest was dwarfed by the singing of actual dog-day cicadas outside. Nadja Sellrup led off, in a black coat and a chartreuse jumper with a barrel skirt and pockets, walking, posing, balancing, stretching. She was joined by Diaz-Barboza, Oom, Hugo Therkelson, and Pascal Jansson, in similar outfits, black and yellow and gray, the ladies in pointe shoes, all in various combinations of movement, some in canon, incorporating ballet steps like penchée arabesque. It looked generic even before Ek’s two pieces were presented, and more so after. Perhaps the dancers in their jumpers were meant to suggest cicadas molting from their skins.

Soft power

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:12:36 GMT

Sara Rudner at Concord Academy and the ICA
It's neither a set piece of choreography nor an improvised free-for-all.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Nothing in these “Dancing-on-View” performances looked like any known
dance technique, but it all looked like dancing.

Sara Rudner has been making “Dancing-on-View” since 1975. Last week, she brought this extraordinary work to Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance and the Institute for Contemporary Art. “Dancing-on-View” is neither a set piece of choreography nor an improvised free-for-all. You could call it a series of gambits and structures, an evolving research into how bodies can be maximally expressive and minimally stressed, a generator of lifetime dancing pleasure.

For four showings in the Concord Academy dance studio and two long afternoons at the ICA, Rudner assembled nine New York colleagues and eight Boston dancers. They’d been working here together for the past three weeks to produce 35 phrases or chapters of movement. One imagines the segments could be performed in random sequence, collage fashion, but on Wednesday night at Concord and Saturday at the ICA they were done in the same order, and the event took us through build-ups and cooldowns, surprises, reprises, and conclusions, as in a conventional dance piece. Except for the informality.

“Dancing-on-View” imposes a curious duality. We look at super dancers performing with tremendous accomplishment, and at the same time we see them at ground level, as explorers committed to the idea that there’s always more to be learned about themselves and their collective enterprise. Everything has an air of being in progress. To achieve perfect ensemble coordination, they stop and rehearse tiny chunks over and over. They show us refined beginnings and endings, but the endings are provisional, the beginnings continuations. Dancers replace other dancers, learn one another’s roles. The piece will go on into the next decade or the next century.

The audience is thoughtfully provided with a “menu” of items. One dancer sits at the side with a stopwatch to announce the title of each new segment and give the names of featured dancers, so we can learn who they are. Emily Beattie, Kellie Edwards. Carey Foster, Sunny Hitt, Amelia Mitter-Burke, Catherine Murcek, Marissa Palley, and Megan Schenk made up the Boston contingent. The New Yorkers were Megan Boyd, Ashley Byler, Erin Crawley-Woods, Peggy Gould, Anneke Hansen, Rachel Lehrer, Lynne Schlesinger-Ruedeman, Maggie Thom, and Lori Yuill. Plus the incomparable Rudner.

Post-traumatic earth

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:59:32 GMT

Eiko + Koma and Tere O’Connor at Concord
With the most unassertive, seemingly egoless moves, Eiko & Koma can evoke the sensations and moods of a universe.

RAMMED EARTH Tere O’Connor’s piece examines social behavior as quirky, brainy, and possibly
purposeless.

“Beauty Ecstasy Serenity Anxiety” is how Margaret Leng Tan inscribed the CD liner notes on some of the music she played for Eiko & Koma’s Mourning last Thursday at Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance. Those words could have described not only the powerful piano pieces by John Cage, Bunita Marcus, and Somei Satoh but also the dance itself. With the most unassertive, seemingly egoless moves, Eiko & Koma can evoke the sensations and moods of a universe, and Tan matched them in theatrical as well as musical intensity.

As she strokes a prepared piano, with each key tuned to two tones that produce eerie overtones (Cage’s In the Name of the Holocaust), you look at a leaf-covered ramp and a high, indeterminate brown shape with leaves or shreds of bark peeling off its surface. Two bodies lie in the leaf litter, their heads straining back toward the audience. Shadowing this tableau was my own unforgettable picture of the World Trade Center collapsing on 9/11.

All of Eiko & Koma’s concerns are in this first image: the fusion of human and natural worlds; the stillness; the mysterious open metaphors that slowly shift under changing light and sound and movement. Mourning is based on some of their earlier pieces, like Offering, which was seen at Northeastern University in 2003. But in a way, you could say all their pieces are one piece, with slight changes of focus. The constant element is their earthbound, polymorphous movement.

As they begin to edge toward each other in the leaves, you can see distinct differences between them. Koma’s moves are effortful, spasmodic. He seems to be working against himself even when he’s covering a minute distance or giving in to gravity. Eiko slips through the slowest, oddest rotations. She seems to have no joints, but there are times when she looks broken, her limbs dangling or horribly wounded. Both of them are naked except for black furry sacks that encase their torsos. You hardly ever see their faces, and they never stand upright on their own two legs.

Koma often seems like some lumbering animal, butting Eiko’s curled-up body from behind or reaching out an inarticulate hand to touch her. She claws at bunches of leaves. She slides onto him, hurls into him without using her arms. They make tiny moans and toothy hisses and grunts. They keep colliding in some kind of sexual need, then rolling apart.

States of unrest

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:09:07 GMT

Hofesh Schechter, Natural Dance Theatre, Ko + Edge at the Pillow
“Dance is a tool to look at other things,” choreographer Hofesh Shechter told an interviewer, but during the company’s US debut at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend you’d be forgiven for just looking at the fantastically virile dancing.

ALICE: Shinji Nakamura’s meditation on his Japanese childhood after World War II as seen through
the lens of Lewis Carroll.

“Dance is a tool to look at other things,” London-based Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter told an interviewer, but during the company’s US debut at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend you’d be forgiven for just looking at the fantastically virile dancing. In Uprising (2006), seven men lope along the floor on their knuckles like fluidly moving apes, wrestle, bang foreheads, and use contained fury as a way to shape and disguise their demands for closeness. Movement seems to shake out of them like restless ions scattering out of the ends of their limbs.

Emerging from haze and opaque shafts of light designed by Lee Curran that turn the stage into a smoky barroom or a claustrophobic dungeon, the dancing in both Uprising and 2007’s In Your Rooms is arranged with rare spatial sophistication. The delicate maneuvers of a twitching walk-on-elbows crawl is blocked by a tender lift that hogs the attention. It’s all hide-and-seek: you know you’re missing something, but there’s a thrill that so much is going on simultaneously.

Shechter says that Uprising is inspired less by the intifadah at home than by the youth uprising in the Paris suburbs in 2006. Still, if the piece’s closing moment, with its evocation of a bunch of young revolutionaries carrying a red flag and storming a barricade, has a smart-ass smirk, that’s part of Shechter’s reading of this culture of self-dramatizing hypermasculinity. You can tell he knows these guys. He’s been there.

Neither Uprising nor In Your Rooms speaks directly to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis — it would appear that Shechter left his native Jerusalem in part to avoid making all of his art in a context of permanent conflict. Nonetheless, it can’t help shadowing them. In Your Rooms incorporates a voiceover text about the challenge of creating harmony out of chaos, gibberish polemics studded with nuggets of truth and a stunned man who stands with a sign that reads “Don’t follow leaders” and then on the opposite side “Follow me.”

In Your Rooms, with its cluster of shifting episodes, takes place in a kind of crouch: the six men and five women freeze with their hands above their heads as if warding off a blow, and later they stride forward drumming insistently on their thighs. Argumentative, defiant, they pump their fists at the musicians hovering overhead, at one another, and at an opponent somewhere yonder. The dance is deliberately interrupted, its insistent rhythms pushed by a score that mixes growling electronica and Middle-Eastern-verging-on-Indian modalities performed live by a string quintet. Shechter, who once played drums in a jazz band, wrote the music with violinist Nell Catchpole.

Modern romantics

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:36:10 GMT

Mark Morris’s Romeo & Juliet ; Lar Lubovitch at the Pillow
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare is less of a statement than a supposition: what if we did it a different way?

ROMEO & JULIET The dances seemed repetitious and less interesting than the way he staged
the story and the characters.

Mark Morris’s displaced romanticism is the perfect high-art solution for our times. Morris believes in happy endings, but he probably doesn’t trust them. He reveres great music but shields us from its passions with caricature and formal gesture. In his new production of Romeo and Juliet, the subject is love, but the word always has quotes around it. Widely celebrated in advance of its premiere last weekend at Bard College, this Romeo carries a cautious subtitle, directing us not to take the Shakespearean icon literally. Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare is less of a statement than a supposition: what if we did it a different way?

Two years ago, Princeton musicologist Simon Morrison discovered that the majestic score of Sergei Prokofiev, which has fueled many balletic interpretations, had been doctored to satisfy the guardians of Soviet political correctness. Prokofiev intended something more modest and less traditional, something that overturned Shakespeare to grant the star-crossed lovers a life together — or an afterlife.

The composer practiced Christian Science, and his ambiguous 1935 ending may have transported the protagonists from the material plane that constitutes temporal life to a place where there can be no suffering or separation. Perhaps the spiritual tinge of this reversal offended Soviet atheism. It’s not clear how Prokofiev and his collaborator, theater director Simon Radlov, would have translated their philosophical and social conception if the authorities had allowed it to be produced. By the time the revised music was choreographed five years later, by Leonid Lavrovsky for Konstantin Sergeyev, Galina Ulanova, and the Kirov Ballet, the lovers died tragically and the feuding families reconciled over their bodies, as Shakespeare decreed.

Morrison reconstructed the original score, which is thinner in orchestration than its puffed-out Sovietized version and differs in many other respects from the ballet we know. I’ll leave it to the music scholars to trace the restorations and diversions, but the dance aspect is original with Morris. This is not a period retrieval, like Millicent Hodson’s 2005 constructivist interpretation of Le pas d’acier, another Prokofiev score that was never produced as he originally intended. Instead, Morris has choreographed a dazzling theater piece that comments on Shakespeare’s play, with previous balletic renderings of the play and the whole genre of large-scale 19th-century story ballets in mind as well.

Young and old

JANINE PARKER — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:44:25 GMT

Mark Morris at Tanglewood
The presence of company veterans infuses Mark Morris Dance Group with a maturity that both grounded and lifted this presentation to a higher plane.

POETS AND CLOWNS MMDG: offers romance with a nose for the absurd.

Youth, it’s said, is wasted on the young, and that used to be an almost universal truth in the dance world, where dancers could be “retired” by age 26 or so, just when their life — and therefore their art — was beginning to deepen. Now it’s de rigueur for dancers to ripen, as they perform into their upper 30s, 40s, even 50s. Often they can still kick their ears, but who cares, listen to what they’re saying.

Such gravitas enriched the appearance of the Mark Morris Dance Group last week at Tanglewood’s lovely Seiji Ozawa Hall. The program promised a breezy evening of dancers waltzing and viewers sighing to Brahms and Schubert (with a bit of Barber thrown in to keep everyone sharp). Performed one way, it could have been too much waltzing and sighing, too much pretty. Of course, the Morris youngsters have much to offer; the point is that the presence of company veterans infuses MMDG with a maturity that both grounded and lifted this presentation to a higher plane.

Especially telling is the way the company performed the 1989 Love Song Waltzes, which is set to Brahms’s first set of Liebeslieder Walzer. The dancers manage this homage to Romanticism without descending into sentimentality or, worse, winking sarcasm. Morris is known for his humor and his nose for the absurd: where appropriate, he’s the Snarky King, but Love Song Waltzes doesn’t come across like some elaborate joke. The mixture of movement flows from formal (low piqué arabesques, with rounded arms and proudly erect torsos) to silly (the parody of the ballet pirouette preparation, head a-bobbing, arms swinging and changing through positions — shall we turn en dehors or en dedans?) to lush (the gorgeously unapologetic sweep of big, lunging balances and waltz turns). There was an uncanny tautness among the dancers Thursday night.

Whereas that piece strikes a melancholic chord, New Love Song Waltzes, choreographed in 1982, feels like the younger, inexperienced (in mood, not construction) sibling, always picking itself up and dusting itself off with optimism. From Michelle Yard’s opening cartwheels through the sweet conclusion — Yard’s sweeping arms and torso seeming to gather and comfort the community — New Waltzes embodies the world of these crazy kids today, with their friendly but no-strings-attached hook-ups.

Rite of darkness

DEBRA CASH — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:49:59 GMT

Heddy Maalem’s Sacre
Le Sacre du Printemps , with 14 dancers hailing from Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Nigeria, and Mozambique, takes on black-on-black violence .

BLACK-ON-BLACK VIOLENCE Maalem depicts contemporary African savagery.

Last weekend, as I sat in the audience for Compagnie Heddy Maalem’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at Jacob’s Pillow, Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe had just declared himself the winner of a presidential election for which he was the only candidate on the ballot. His triumph, if you can call it that, appears to have been engineered in part by having thugs go from house to house and beat every man, woman and child who was not supporting him. Opposing candidate Morgan Tsvangirai fled for his life and took shelter in the Dutch embassy in Harare.

Political juxtapositions came to mind because Maalem — a 57-year-old choreographer based in Toulouse, and with a background in both boxing and aikido — identifies himself as a child of war. He’s the son of a French mother and an Algerian father; his family fled North Africa when he was a boy. Yet whereas his familial fury is aimed squarely at the distortions of colonialism, his Le Sacre du Printemps, with 14 dancers hailing from Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Nigeria, and Mozambique, takes on black-on-black violence. Maalem has headed unblinkingly into the dangerous territory of white projection. Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 evocation of a pre-Christian Russian fertility rite shudders alongside Maalem’s 2004 depiction of contemporary African savagery.

While considering a new version of Sacre, Maalem made an emotionally jarring trip to Lagos, Nigeria. As he explained to Jacob’s Pillow scholar Philip Szporer, he eased into the project with a simpler, thematically related exploration that became the 2000 short dance-for-camera work “Black Spring” created with filmmaker Benoit Dervaux. In “Black Spring,” the images race alongside the movement variations like flashes of memory. During Maalem’s Sacre, blurred representations are the backdrop to interludes of mechanical sounds by Benoit De Clerck carved into a recording of Pierre Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in the monumental Stravinsky score. Nature — swaying fronds and open water and blasted baobab trees — gives way to images of urban density in both sets of clips, as Dervaux’s camera sweeps across stacks of cloth, piles of garbage, and the overlapping corrugated roofs of shanties.

Maalem’s Sacre opens with two sculptural figures silhouetted against flashes of lightning. One bends to the floor, the other stands with her neck bent, hands clasping and opening like a spiny star. As the lights come up, the ensemble emerges onto the stage like cautious animals entering a glade.

Prodigies old and new

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:03:48 GMT

Tharp’s Rabbit and Rogue at ABT, Ratmansky and Robbins at NYCB
Tharp’s dances almost invariably have a euphoric effect on their first audiences, even when they miss their mark and don’t hold up over the long run.

RABBIT AND ROGUE: In Twyla Tharp’s metaphysics, dancing can transform chaos into utopia.

NEW YORK — Five minutes after the curtain came down on Twyla Tharp’s new ballet, Rabbit and Rogue, at the Metropolitan Opera House, a woman waiting for a bus was on the phone telling a friend to buy a ticket. “You have to see this!” she exclaimed. “This is the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever seen.” On the bus, another woman saw me looking over the program and asked what the story of the ballet was. Her friend thought it was an abstract ballet, and their discussion continued.

Next day the critics were savage, but it tells you something about a ballet when the audience leaves the theater with questions.

Tharp’s dances almost invariably have a euphoric effect on their first audiences, even when they miss their mark and don’t hold up over the long run. Rabbit and Rogue followed in the direction of her recent work, preserving the exhilarating, non-stop virtuosity she’s able to pull out of dancers, and sparking some speculation about “meaning” through her use of character devices.

Rabbit and Rogue, which premiered June 3 and ran for a week during American Ballet Theatre’s spring season at the Met, has two male leads, two secondary couples, a tertiary quartet, and a 12-member corps de ballet. It’s as formally structured as In the Upper Room or Tharp’s last ballet for ABT, Variations on a Themeby Haydn (2000), but it’s more than pure form. Tharp admitted in an interview that the leading men represent contrasting brothers, or the conflicting sides of one personality, but beyond that she wouldn’t elaborate on a private throughline that could encompass anything from dysfunctional families (hers, anyone’s) to cosmic evolution.

The surface of the ballet yields little help on that level, and though I might intuitively try to read her mind, during my one viewing I kept coming across a different set of markers. Early on, I realized that Danny Elfman’s gamelan-influenced score was insistently driving the dancers. The ceaseless momentum prevents you from being anything more than stunned, before the next stunning thing occurs. The whole stage seemed to be in perpetual motion, like a movie chase that never ends, only shifts camera locations.

Before the dance was done, I decided that Tharp was constructing the work with a movie editor’s technique, cutting back and forth from one set of characters to another. Each set plays its own role and sometimes interacts with the others, but what you pay attention to is the individual movement clusters, the dancing designs as they unfold. It’s like a TV serial, where three or four plot elements arise, break off, intersect, separate again, and maybe resolve, within an hour’s installment.

Dido's fate

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:05:38 GMT

Mark Morris at the Majestic
Henry Purcell might not have approved Mark Morris’s contemporary take on Dido and Aeneas, but he probably would have recognized it for its formality and anti-naturalism.

Henry Purcell might not have approved Mark Morris’s contemporary take on Dido and Aeneas, which the Celebrity Series brought to the Cutler Majestic Theatre last week, but he probably would have recognized it for its formality and anti-naturalism. The opera, completed by 1689 and based on what was little more than a footnote in Virgil’s Aeneid, concerns the betrayal of Dido, the queen of Carthage, by one of the great explorer warriors of ancient times. A jealous Sorceress tricks Aeneas into forsaking his lover. Dido proudly rejects his offer to ignore his own destiny and stay with her. When he sails away, she immolates herself.

The opera condensed mythology’s elaborate plot line, omitting the storms and shipwrecks, the politics of Mediterranean empires, and the rivalries of the gods, to concentrate on a love affair stained by fate and character flaws. Mark Morris reduced it even more, to eliminate the costumes, sets, and dances of Purcell’s Baroque period. For his production, now almost 20 years old, he devised a modern masque for dancers in black sarongs and sleeveless tops. What’s “authentic” about this Dido and Aeneas is its formal movement style and the choreographic interaction of chorus and principals. And the fact that it honors the music even though the fine singers and orchestra of Emmanuel Music, conducted by Morris himself, were out of sight of the audience.

All the stage movement is severely stylized, even the pantomime gestures that resemble their literal antecedents. When it begins, two women are seated stiffly on the ends of a bench. Behind them, nine other dancers are standing in a line. During the overture, the chorus advances downstage with rapid but imperceptible tiptoe steps and grandiose arm gestures. Like everything else that follows, each gesture is self-contained and bang-on a musical beat, and carved into the surrounding space like a frieze on a Greek amphora.

Dido’s confidante Belinda (Maile Okamura), shaking her hands at the end of outstretched arms like someone shooing away chickens, urges her friend to shake off her despondency and welcome Aeneas (Craig Biesecker). When the hero arrives, the chorus dances and the lovers move closer together with an almost stealthy eroticism. It’s like a standard ballet counterpoint between principals and ensemble, but the visual and rhythmic relationship is also a dramatic one.

Altar and ego

JEFFREY GANTZ — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:16:40 GMT

Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas

MIRROR IMAGES? Amber Darragh and Craig Biesecker are at their best when they’re dancing with each other.

Boston saw the second-ever set of performances of Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas, in June 1989 (it had premiered in Brussels in March), but apart from a one-afternoon stand in September 1995, the work hasn’t been back. It’s one of his most celebrated pieces: Anna Kisselgoff gave it a mostly favorable review in the New York Times; Thea Singer and Lloyd Schwartz were both enchanted in their 1989 side-by-side Phoenix reviews of the Mark Morris group’s dancing and Emmanuel Music’s performance of Henry Purcell’s circa 1689 opera (with, opening night, no less than the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Dido); and even Laura Jacobs in her New Criterion essay “Bubble Boy” — which takes Mark to task for his more recent efforts — admits to liking the work. I don’t recall whether I saw Dido in 1989 or 1995 or both, but I do remember that I thought it a clunky, tedious, heavy-breathing embodiment of Purcell that exacerbated Baroque opera’s tendency to preen and posture — not to mention moralize. Or was it meant to be camp? At least a decade later, and perhaps a little wiser, I visited the Image Entertainment DVD (which was shot in 1995) in the hope of an more enlightened reaction. All I got was a flashback to James Wolcott’s infamous 2007 Vanity Fair blog “Joanie Loves Chunky,” in which he talks of watching the New Yorker’s “Joan Acocella skipping with Mark Morris across the verdant green with a rose between her teeth as he popped himself open another can of beer.”

Dido and Aeneas is back this week for five performances (three of them remaining: tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm) at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, and Morris, who had always danced two of the work’s lead roles, Dido and the Sorceress, has moved from the stage into the pit, where he’s conducting Emmanuel Music. (These performances are dedicated to Emmanuel Music founder Craig Smith, who died last year; he had led the Brussels premiere and the subsequent Boston dates.) For a time Morris was dividing his former roles: Amber Darragh would do Dido and Bradon McDonald the Sorceress one evening, and then they’d reverse the casting the next night. Now he again has one dancer doing both roles in the same performance, the way a single ballerina does Odette and Odile in SwanLake. Darragh danced Wednesday and last night; McDonald will do the weekend performances.

Where the chips fell

MARCIA B. SIEGEL — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:51:56 GMT

Marjorie Morgan, Karl Cronin, Lucinda Childs, and Boston Ballet
Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.

MARJORIE MORGAN Dancing Deborah Hay, she makes her whole body available to what her mind
and imagination suggest every moment.

Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.

As part of the Dance Complex’s Tuesdays at Noon concerts in honor of Dance Month, Marjorie Morgan and Karl Cronin performed works by postmodern dance pioneer Deborah Hay. Boom Boom Boom and The Runner aren’t set dances but interpretations. In workshops with Hay (Morgan attended one in 2000, Cronin in 2007), dancers acquire a set of open-ended instructions they can carry out as they wish. There must be hundreds of ways to get from stage right to stage left in two minutes. Every solution is another dance, individualistic and unrepeatable.

Morgan entered the space crouched over, with branches attached to her head, and in her hands a small baton and a dry-sounding rattle. Like an animal of indeterminate species, or maybe a menagerie of beasts one after the other, she prowled the space. Her attention was riveted on adjusting her balance, moving parts of her body in microscopic but precise directions, registering how every shift made her feel. Her movement and pre-verbal exclamations seemed to be generated by these interior promptings, and each gesture held the seeds of another image.

Marjorie Morgan makes her whole body available to what her mind and imagination suggest every moment. You couldn’t possibly recover the sequence of her journey, or the oddness of her movement, the pleasure and surprise of it, and the dread.

Karl Cronin, a tall, thin young man, wore a knee brace over one trouser leg, and one sock and one bare foot in rubber clogs. His dance was also a succession of ideas, but they seemed almost deliberately chosen, not inevitably connected though unforeseen like Morgan’s. His movement looked less fictitious, more technical — repeated beats of one foot, scuffling walks, wordless syllables, musical phrases in different registers. I decided somewhere in the middle of the dance that his feet were behaving differently from each other, maybe even holding dialogues with each other. It turned out he’d been dancing with an injury.

Russian revel?

JEFFREY GANTZ — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:11:31 GMT

Looking ahead to Ballets Russes 2009
The Russians are coming!

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO A stand-up entertainer in cuffs that would have pleased Alexandre Benois.

The Russians are coming! Or at least, the Ballets Russes. Next year, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Serge Diaghilev’s creation, Ballets Russes 2009 will bring to Boston a week-long festival — May 16-23 — that will include an academic conference at BU, film screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, lectures at the French Library and Cultural Center, a New England Conservatory performance of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, a Boston Pops program of Ballets Russes music, and a Boston Ballet program of Ballets Russes works: Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Fokine’s Le Pavillon d’Armide and Le Spectre de la Rose, and Jorma Elo’s new version of Le Sacre du Printemps. To raise money for, and awareness of, the event, the Ballets Russes 2009 folks staged a “Russian Revel” last night at the Cutler Majestic Theatre.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Ballets Russes. Conceived in the aborted Russian Revolution of 1905, when both the Conservatory of Music and the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg went on strike, and born in Paris in 1909, it was the matrix of 20th-century ballet. Its creations included Les Sylphides, Schéhérazade, Firebird, Petrouchka, L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Apollon Musagète, and Prodigal Son. Among its stars: choreographers Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Léonide Massine, and George Balanchine; dancers Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Nijinsky, Serge Lifar, and Alexandra Danilova; set and costume designers Léon Bakst and Alexandre Benois; artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braques, Maurice Utrillo, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and Georges Rouault; composers Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel. Diaghilev also presented opera, introducing Paris to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina and Borodin’s Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ivan the Terrible (The Maid of Pskov). Indeed, the ethos of the Ballets Russes was an artistic synthesis that had its roots in Diaghilev’s St. Petersburg journal Mir iskusstva (“The World of Art”), which he edited from 1898 to 1904, and his productions were as noted for their sets and costumes as for their choreography and the performances. After his death, in 1929, two touring companies carried on, one (under Serge Denham) as Ballet Russe, the other (under Colonel Vassily de Basil) as the Original Ballet Russe. Their descendants include the Royal Ballet in England and American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet in America.

What's left behind

DEBRA CASH — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:38:59 GMT

Tap Olé at the Regent, Rachid Ouramdane at the ICA, Prometheus at Boston Conservatory
Tap Olé is less a new-fangled bicultural fusion than a return to tap dancing’s foundational swingtime.

TAP OLÉ: Unison hoofing right out of 1940s Hollywood.

A week ago Friday, on the stage of Arlington’s Regent Theatre, dancer/producer Josh Hilberman asked for a moment of silence to mark the passing of legendary tap master Jimmy Slyde. Slyde’s death that morning just as the Boston community was celebrating International Tap Day — Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s birthday, May 25 — was sort of like having Thomas Jefferson and John Adams die on the Fourth of July. Slyde, according to his friends, had always insisted that someone who had passed away hadn’t left but had left behind, so it was fitting that the silence should soon be broken by the clangor of the art form he did so much to preserve and advance. Tap Olé, a quartet of hip thirtysomethings from Barcelona debuting their full-evening show here in the States, made a joyful noise. Jimmy Slyde would have loved it.

Tap Olé is less a new-fangled bicultural fusion than a return to tap dancing’s foundational swingtime. Alejandro Pérez Gracia bent his contemporary flamenco guitar riffs bluesward like a Clapton wanna-be, eliciting a raised eyebrow from straight man Roger Raventós: the two were not beyond lacing their rumba with corny television themes and Beatles hits. Flamenco dancing is barely to be found in Tap Olé’s style, beyond a matador-like hand at the waist or a curling wrist overhead. How could it be? Flamenco is brooding and inward; tap, at least in the style Tap Olé has mastered, ingratiates itself with its audience. What Tap Olé does take from flamenco is fearlessness in the face of changing time signatures and the gift of making surprising decisions to accentuate the off-beat. For both the musicians and the dancers, Tap Olé’s syncopations seemed to derive equally from jazz and compas, a combination that got a special wink in Tap Olé’s performance of Chick Corea’s “Spain.”

Petite Roser Font has a bright sound to her footwork and a talent for spinning smoothly while her feet are playing out intricate musical arrangements. Occasionally she strikes a Shirley Temple “good ship Lollipop” pose that no American tap dancer would dare do, and she gets away with it. Guillem Alonso is more of a poet, whether emptying a bag of sand onto the stage in gorgeous ribbons, jack-in-the-boxing into the air, or increasing the intensity of his phrasing by adding to its density in sheer taps-per-second. Together these dancers can handle unison hoofing as crisp as any you would have heard on a 1940s Hollywood sound stage.