Archives for 2007

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on November 2, 2007.

Julieta Cervantes and John Jasperse perform in “Misuse Liable to Prosecution” in this image released to the media on Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007. Photographer: Julieta Cervantes/John Jasperse Company via Bloomberg News

Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) — A few dancers you can barely see wander through a forest made from hundreds of suspended plastic coat hangers, lights boldly flickering among them like errant stars. It’s not a dance moment, really, but it is a theatrical one, and one of the most beautiful and clever in John Jasperse’s new “Misuse liable to prosecution.” The piece and its eclectic percussive score by Zeena Parkins, mistress of the electric harp, were commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for its 25th Next Wave Festival.

As you enter the BAM Harvey Theater, where the piece will play through Saturday, Jasperse lies supine upstage, his upended legs crocheting a scarf for a giant with the thick orange extension cord familiar from construction sites. A lean, fluid man of 44 with an unassuming manner, given to making eccentric behavior look normal, he moves on to address the audience through an orange traffic cone serving as a megaphone.

Without rancor, he delivers a slew of statistics revealing how skewed the scale of monetary reward is in our society. Judge Judy makes millions more than the justices of the Supreme Court combined. He himself — a star and a veteran in the world of experimental dance, though he’s too modest to say so — earns $26,000 a year as head of his company. His dancers receive $15 an hour rehearsal pay.

Milk Crates

The warning that gives the work its title is usually emblazoned on plastic milk crates that people with limited means — students and artists, for example — grab off the street, repurposing them for personal use. Indeed, every item in the piece, Jasperse declares, from decor to costumes and props, has been found, borrowed or stolen. The point of “Misuse” is to explore our culture of consumption and waste and how those who don’t make much sometimes make do. Jasperse does so genially and ingeniously.

As usual, Jasperse has the dancers interact with the “stuff” of his piece, and so we get a dance for two women with dozens of plastic water bottles that they line up between their legs, letting a floor-level light gleam through them until they look like giant diamonds. Then they crunch the bottles into trash.

All five dancers join for a choral segment that involves meticulously folding well-worn jeans, then viciously whipping them about like lariats. After much playful manipulation, a limp bean-bag chair becomes a shroud for Jasperse’s head and an inflatable mattress collapses over a female dancer’s, so both end up groping their way through the hanger forest, bare-legged and blind.

Their Bodies, Themselves

Even more interesting are passages in which the dancers, in pairs, simply use the resources of their own bodies, extending themselves beyond the borders of formal technique. Jasperse credits his dancers’ contributions to the choreography, and a fascinating double duet has an air of improvisation. The performers tangle with each other as if to discover new uses for their limbs or the ways in which a pair of bodies can interact without romance to nudge them along. The movement begins gently, with an air of exploration, then grows wilder and more powerful until the quartet crawls offstage, ungainly but game to the last.

Parkins’s score, live and pre-recorded, is all over the map. Orphan objects (broken typewriters, tea kettles and the like) are used to evoke cars, trains, birds or eerie whisperers. We are assured, too, that the D.J.’d material comes from vinyl records played on found turntables.

Through Nov. 3 at the BAM Harvey Theater, Fulton Street at Ashland Place in Brooklyn. Information: +1-718-636-4100; http://www.bam.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 30, 2007.

Kristi Boone, Misty Copeland and Marcelo Gomes perform in “C. to C. (Close to Chuck),” in this photograph released to the media on October 29, 2007. Photographer: Gene Schiavone/American Ballet Theatre via Bloomberg News

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — A strong sultry beauty in a dark gleaming unitard struggles endlessly in her powerful partner’s embrace. Or is it a stranglehold?

The forceful episode serves as the centerpiece of choreographer-on-the-rise Benjamin Millepied’s new “From Here On Out” for American Ballet Theater, performing at New York’s City Center this week. The duet’s subject seems to be a cruel co-dependency that masquerades as love. Remarkably, the choreography conveys no human feeling, neither depicting nor eliciting empathy. Its extravagant shapes and ferocious energy are merely decorative.

The balance of the ballet has five other anonymous, look- alike couples making the stage vibrate with their attack — as partners and in phalanxes, the sexes sometimes set against each other.

The important components are unbelievably svelte, fluid bodies, killer speed and menacing glamour. Nico Muhly’s score, percussive and haunted, fits the occasion perfectly. The overall effect is a sleek portrait of contemporary high-end urban life. The ballet — cleverly constructed, to be sure — offers a snapshot of the direction classical ballet is taking today.

`C. to C.’

If Millepied’s ballet pictures the world as an ominous place, the currently popular Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo contends that its inhabitants are chronically spastic. He applies this signature style to his new “C. to C. (Close to Chuck),” which looks like a sextet of robots aiming to add sex to their skill set.

The dance is choreographed to Philip Glass’s “A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close,” the score played onstage by pianist Bruce Levingston. Close, whose art figures as a backdrop, is the painter who heroically managed to continue his career after being paralyzed by a spinal aneurysm. Close, Glass and Elo all build their art from small fragments, hypnotically repeated with slight variations. However, the painter and composer make the whole cohere, brilliantly. I can’t say the same for the choreographer.

In “C. to C.,” as usual, he has his dancers executing disconnected, unfathomable gestures, even occasionally breaking into a few brief flowing phrases. Invariably, though, potential partners can’t relate to each other with any ease or joy — or even meaningful hostility. The costumes, by the fashion designer Ralph Rucci, are striking, until the wearers have to shed their stiff black skirts and move.

`Ballo Della Regina’

The brief season managed to cram in several terrific golden oldies, among them George Balanchine’s 1978 “Ballo della Regina,” an abstract piece for a hierarchy of women and a single man, set to an outtake from Verdi’s “Don Carlos” that begs to be danced. Originally it showcased the scintillating technique and unaffected style — both echt-American qualities – – of the New York City Ballet’s Merrill Ashley. As staged by Ashley for ABT, the production is a little miracle — crisp and clear, as if it were happening in the sky on a bright, windswept day.

I saw Gillian Murphy in the ballerina role and, while no dancer can ever replace another, she did Ashley proud. Murphy’s partner, David Hallberg, charging through space, whirling as if in a vortex, eclipsed even his personal best. The four soloists and the corps de ballet looked elated, as if they’d been schooled in a mode of dancing they’d never dreamed of.

The revival of Antony Tudor’s 1975 “The Leaves Are Fading,” a plotless nostalgic idyll, served as a reminder of the choreographer’s long-term association with ABT and the profound feeling a physical gesture can convey. Staged by Amanda McKerrow and John Gardner, both of whom once danced in it, it hasn’t yet retrieved the flow and spontaneity with which Tudor himself had his dancers perform his ingenious designs.

Still to come is the company premiere of Twyla Tharp’s 1979 “Baker’s Dozen,” an early work full of ingenious, ramshackle joy. All three blasts from the past are only a small part of the proof that the 1970s was an exceptionally rich period for choreography. What does the first decade of the 21st century offer to equal it?

Through Nov. 4 at City Center, 131 W. 55th St. Information: +1-212-581-1212; http://www.abt.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

American Ballet Theatre: Antony Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading / New York City Center, NYC / October 24, 26, 28, 31, and November 3.

Julie Kent, Marcelo Gomes and Melissa Thomas of American Ballet Theatre in Antony Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.

The Leaves Are Fading is an evocation of youthful love and friendship framed by one of the most famous unadorned cross-stage walks in ballet history. The path is traced by a woman in a ground-brushing, apple-green dress, seemingly lost in thought. Though she is onstage only at the opening and close of Leaves, the half-hour of dancing between her brief appearances seems to emanate from her thoughts and mood. She lends the ballet its fragrance of nostalgia.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 26, 2007. To read it, click here.

Compañía Nacional de Danza / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / October 16, 18-20, 2007

Compañía Nacional de Danza’s Yolanda Martín in Nacho Duato’s White Darkness. Photo by Fernando Marcos.

The strongest element of Compañía Nacional de Danza’s show was the dancers themselves, who were greeted by roars of deserved adulation on the curtain calls. They are a feisty bunch . . . and their dancing, ebullient or ferocious as the occasion requires, is contagious, an advertisement for life.

The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 18, 2007. To read it, click here.

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) — Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company opens its debut season with dances by William Forsythe, Edwaard Liang, Liv Lorent and Michael Clark. At Wednesday’s premiere in Manhattan’s City Center, the deconstructed-ballet pas de deux from Forsythe’s “Slingerland” (where the ballerina’s tutu looked like an outsize potato chip) had Wendy Whelan magically making all the eerie maneuvers fluent.

Otherwise, the highly anticipated event featured Wheeldon, Wheeldon and more Wheeldon: two substantial pieces and various bagatelles by the 34-year-old choreographer, launching the next stage in his career as artistic director of his own company after six years as resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet.

Named for one of Wheeldon’s signature works, Morphoses is just now a pickup group of sympathetic moonlighting stars and stars-to-be. With former City Ballet principal Lourdes Lopez as executive director, the group has survived a long run-up of organization and fundraising. It has been offered a home by the City Center and secured support that includes commissioning dances from London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater.

Despite the excitement and hope that sheer novelty generate, the future of Morphoses seems iffy, judging from the first performance.

Of the longer works, “There Where She Loved,” danced to songs by Chopin and Kurt Weill, offers loosely knit, cannily designed takes on romance, blithe and — in an extended duet for Maria Kowroski and Michael Nunn — otherwise. “Fools’ Paradise,” for nine dancers, is simply unfathomable, a puzzle of marvelously adept bodies variously arranged for pictorial effect and a decor of shooting stars.

Suave Craft

Technically, Wheeldon’s choreography shows wide range and suave craft, but the work rarely engages the viewer emotionally. That’s the problem in a nutshell. It’s not even evident that Wheeldon’s own feelings are engaged.

Wheeldon has led a charmed life as a choreographer since 2001, when his gift for making dances was so evident to the New York City Ballet that the company created the position of resident choreographer for him. His work has also been in demand from major companies worldwide; everyone wants a Wheeldon.

Sacrificing this enviable state of affairs for the chancy alternative of starting his own company proves Wheeldon’s conviction, though his goals are clearly still evolving and occasionally naive. Ignoring the fact that classical ballet is rooted in tradition, for example, Wheeldon declares he’s ready to slough off the past (including saying goodbye to Balanchine) to make cool, sexy dances — his words — that will lure a younger audience.

Collaborative Art

He also wants his relationship to his dancers to be collaborative, while despotism remains the default mode in most classical companies. There’s a good argument for it when the leader has genius and is not unduly concerned with individual dancers’ personal happiness.

If Wheeldon is to maintain a real company, he will need substantial financial backing on an ongoing basis. This may be hard to come by once the first flush of enthusiasm for his venture begins to fade.

It’s time for Wheeldon to start making dances that are more than just a handsome but superficial idea of what’s contemporary, studded with everything he’s dutifully absorbed from dancing the works of Ashton and MacMillan in London, then Balanchine and Robbins in New York. He needs to dig deeper, if only because even his admirers are starting to complain.

At 131 W. 55th St., through Oct. 21. Information: +1-212-581-1212; http://www.morphoses.org.

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on October 8, 2007.

Fall for Dance Festival / New York City Center, NYC / September 26 – October 6, 2007

If you’re already a dance fan, you’re still welcome to come (after all, seasoned viewers really appreciate the bargain rate of $10 for any seat in New York’s huge, prestigious City Center). Bear in mind though, that the annual Fall for Dance Festival was not designed primarily for you. The brainchild of Arlene Shuler, it’s meant to seduce newbies, with its program of succinct takes from four or five different companies in its run of ten showings of six different programs. These programs are artfully contrived to encompass such a wide variety of dance genres–Twyla Tharp rubbing eloquent shoulders with the Kirov Ballet, postmodernists abutting practitioners of traditional Indian dance–that only a cultural clod could come away without discovering something to like. Now in its fourth year, with other cities wisely copycatting the idea (among them, Orange County Performing Artscenter, OCT 11-14), Fall for Dance has statistics to prove its significant contribution to increasing the audience for an art that could deliver ecstasy to far more people than it’s reaching.

Opening night’s first image was breathtaking: a bare-chested Michael Trusnovic–tall, strikingly pale and fair-haired, with pecs out of an ad for a gym–leapt forward on an imaginary diagonal route, one leg piercing the air before him, the other tucked up under him like a bird’s in flight, his gaze directed to a faraway, perhaps heavenly, horizon. Just seconds later, five buddies charged after him, full of the same muscular grace. A trio of women arrives eventually to soften and deepen their force, adding piquancy and tenderness, but this piece, Arden Court, remains a guys’ dance in which Paul Taylor emphasizes his conviction that the human animal morphs with ease between angel and gargoyle, beautiful and damned.

Have I mentioned the choreography’s musical savvy? Have I mentioned its intricate but always accessible structure, which has a divine logic to it, yet is full of surprises? No? Well, next time. Meanwhile, much praise is due to the dancers, who performed as if this were the occasion they’d be remembered by forever.

Ekaterina Kondaurova and Islom Baimuradov of the Kirov Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo by Nina Alovert.

The middle of the program comprised a pair of small pieces: Middle Duet, by Alexei Ratmansky, who heads the Bolshoi Ballet, and a solo, Varnam, by the Indian dancer Shantala Shivalinggappa.

The Ratmansky, seen earlier in New York with City Ballet performers, has its partners practically welded to each other, while the woman puts the famous Russian-School placement and fluidity at the service of postmodern impulses. The man supports her antics with a submissive cooperation that evolves into understandable sullenness. Ratmansky’s choreography is both deft and witty concerning the manners and methods of ballet partnering. The Kirov Ballet duo that performed it, Ekaterina Kondaurova and Islom Baimuradov, were likewise deft and very charming.

In her pleated-skirt-over-trousers outfit of raspberry and gold, Shantala Shivalinggappa, choreographer and dancer for her offering, looked like a decorative figurine. She is a beautiful young woman who possesses, in the highest degree, the animated face, “speaking” eyes, and extraordinarily articulate fingers of her trade. When she works in place, telling her story in traditional mudras, her body takes on a wonderful sculptural quality, yet I found her too squarely tied to the beat of the onstage musicians. While her technical prowess was striking, she seemed–as if her imagination remains unkindled–to lack the quality we dare to call soul.

Of course it was a pleasure to see Twyla Tharp’s 1973 Deuce Coupe again and, you’d think, an inspired idea to cast it with Juilliard students, who combine crossover dance skills with the raw appeal of youth. Yet this production, staged by William Whitener, who was in the original version commissioned by the Joffrey Ballet, suggested that today’s youth, though technically glib, may not “get” the awkward passions of yesteryear’s young. What can the Beach Boys’ songs evoke in teens and twenty-somethings reared on rap?

The Juilliard dancers gave the piece a respectable rendition–one that at least conveyed the idea of it, if not its flesh and blood. Several of the male solos registered as tours de force, while Mary Ellen Beaudreau rightly aimed for the persistent calm of the girl in white who threads her way through the raucous, often stoned crowd, executing steps from the classical ballet lexicon in alphabetical order.

In the last three and a half decades, Tharp has gone on to create dances that are even more savvy than this one, but not one that’s as innocent, poignant, or so much fun. Like Jerome Robbins’s 1944 Fancy Free, Deuce Coupe comes from a time that will never return, and it’s good to be reminded of it.

For me, three of the five items on the October 4th program vied for Best in Show: the plangent duet from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain, sensitively danced by Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall; Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance, a line dance for five women that delivers this choreographer’s intelligence and wit in a nutshell; and Noche Flamenca, whose Soledad Barrio invariably takes you to the dark places of the soul and strips you of your protective blindfold.

Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall in Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain. Photo by Paul Kolnik.

Apart from the dancing itself, the most thrilling thing about the Fall for Dance performances was the audience, which had the vivacity of a bunch of high school students. The full houses applauded every item (even the abstruse ones) enthusiastically, cheered their favorites, and filled the pauses between numbers with animated chatter. It was a privilege to be in their midst. Their openness to joy–indeed, expectation of it–was contagious. I just hope, as do the Fall for Dance producers, that some of them will turn into veterans like the colleague I ran into in the lobby and asked, teasing, “So, are you going to fall for dance?” “I fell for dance a long time ago,” he replied, “and never got up.”

© VoiceofDance.com 2007

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on October 3, 2007.

The book jacket for “Nureyev: The Life” by Julie Kavanagh is pictured in this undated handout image. Source: Pantheon/Schocken Books via Bloomberg News

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) — At its height, Rudolf Nureyev’s dancing combined the feral power and beauty of his movement with a passionate, volatile temperament. He transformed his raw gifts into a sleek professional style — part Russian, part European – -without ever giving up his spontaneity. Wildly flamboyant and deeply soulful by turns, he seemed to live the characters he portrayed as if they were his alter egos.

Julie Kavanagh’s “Nureyev: The Life” relates in great detail the saga of a boy born of Tatar stock in 1938, who achieved fame equal to Nijinsky’s and died, after a long battle with AIDS, in 1993.

Julie Kavanagh, author of “Nureyev: The Life,” poses on Jan. 23, 2007. Photographer: Arthur Elgort. Source: Pantheon/Schocken Books via Bloomberg News

Her obsession with minutiae sometimes undermines the drama of Nureyev’s life, though the tale of his defection to the West is told with energy. To her credit, Kavanagh makes it clear that Nureyev was born to dance to his own tune and that, despite the damage he did to others and some dire consequences for himself, he was an incomparable artist who made the world a more thrilling place.

As a child during World War II, Nureyev, his mother and three sisters (his father was nearly always away on military duties), led a life of bleak deprivation near the provincial town of Ufa. When he was 7, his mother snuck her four children into a ballet performance on a single ticket. By the time the final curtain fell, Nureyev had committed himself heart and soul to dance.

His innate gift for dancing — spirited, musical, enhanced by his charismatic personality — had surfaced early on in kindergarten folk dancing. His innate rebelliousness appeared early, too, as did his ability to use people to further his career.

Insatiable Hunger for Art

From adolescence on, Nureyev demonstrated an insatiable hunger for the arts — dance, of course, which he pursued with a future saint’s sense of vocation — but also music, painting, theater, books and architecture. He was equally curious about people from foreign milieus, forging acquaintances the Soviet system would strictly forbid.

In the course of his life, Nureyev had a half-dozen nearly impossible dreams. He wanted — indeed, expected — to be recognized as the greatest dancer in the world. Even when age and illness had diminished his incomparable technique, ecstatic viewers thought he was just that.

He was determined to train at St. Petersburg’s celebrated Vaganova Academy, which fed the Kirov Ballet, to him the epitome of aristocratic elegance. Against all odds, he managed do so, worked fanatically and became one of the company’s best hopes.

Spontaneous Defection

Then he needed to escape from the repression of the Soviet system, aggravated in his case by his homosexuality and the conservative rigidity of the Kirov at that time. His dramatic defection — long dreamed of but spontaneously achieved in a Paris airport — came in 1961 and led to his international career.

Nureyev also yearned to absorb the cool perfection of the Danish legend Erik Bruhn. Polar opposites in temperament and style, they did indeed influence each other’s dancing and conducted an intense and tempestuous love affair to boot.

He danced with Margot Fonteyn, the Royal Ballet’s prima ballerina, an adored exemplar of radiant lyricism and almost 20 years his senior. Their partnership became legendary.

Only one wish remained unfulfilled: He longed to dance for Balanchine, a pairing that failed because Balanchine was certain his choreography would be undermined by superstars.

All in all, Nureyev did better for himself than most mortals.

“Nureyev: The Life” is published by Pantheon Books in the U.S. and by Fig Tree Press in the U.K. (782 pages, $37.50, 25 pounds).

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on September 28, 2007.

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) — Everyone who cares about classical ballet eagerly awaits the next great choreographer. But major dance-making talents are few and far between. The “New Ballet” program of chamber-scale pieces unveiled Sept. 27 at Columbia University’s Miller Theater just rammed that point home.

George Steel, the energetic director of the Miller, a performing-arts venue with ambitious and inventive programming, is determined to include dance in the mix.

For the current program of three commissioned dances (the scores aren’t brand new, only contemporary) he has joined forces with a woman equally intent on sponsoring new dance — Mary Sharp Cronson, the founder and producer of Works & Process at the Guggenheim.

The strongest work on the program was the Italian Luca Veggetti’s “Four/Voice,” set to a score by Paolo Aralla. But it earns that accolade largely because it’s as sleekly handsome as a layout in a glossy magazine. Four remarkably strong, attractive dancers, in form-fitting black, white and translucent “second skins,” move against a dark scrim with prophetic messages traveling across it, then before a luminous gray one marked only with a thin white horizontal line close to the floor.

The Armani-cool design elements, in which Veggetti had a hand, emphasize the fact that the relationship of the human figures, especially when they’re partnering violently, seems to be entirely physical, almost architectural.

Suspended Poses

The dancers are at their most beautiful, actually, suspended in poses that seem to be freeze-frames of an ongoing event we might just as well imagine as see.

The ballet has nearly run its handsome but affectless course when the choreographer realizes that dance, even abstract ballet, is drama and something needs to happen. So he has one woman reach out to her guy, awkwardly and tentatively. He almost responds but then, realizing that feeling is a dangerous business, assumes a macho untouchable stance. As the piece ends, she turns away and, still more unsure of herself, approaches the other woman. It’s a story all right, but so predictable and trite it seems unworthy even of the empty gorgeousness that preceded it.

Amanda Miller, an American who founded the Berlin-based Pretty Ugly Dance Company in 1992, used two pieces by Fred Frith for her “dogwood.” The quartet — for two men and two women, one of them mannishly dressed — seems to borrow its brooding mood from Antony Tudor and its long-limbed stretches through space from Merce Cunningham.

Supporting players in this essay on troubled relationships are four straight-backed chairs designed by Seth Tillett. The color of raw wood, they’re carved like intricately edged pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The dancers circle them warily, then sit in them to carry on mute conversations evoking the impossibility of understanding one another or just to ruminate, hopeless and alone.

Limited in its vocabulary, frustratingly inconclusive in its action, the dance nevertheless hints at a poetic gift in its maker. I’d like to see what she comes up with next.

`Sweet Alchemy’

Alison Chase’s “Sweet Alchemy,” set to selections from John Adams’s intriguingly titled “John’s Book of Alleged Dances,” was the weakest item on view. Chase, a key figure in the genesis of Pilobolus Dance Theater and a longtime participant in that troupe’s collaborative choreography, has a daring imagination spiced by a wicked sense of humor.

This new piece, though, an idyll of sorts for three loving couples, went absolutely nowhere (except, intermittently, to Pilobolusland, where human figures turn themselves into the multilimbed creatures of grotesque fantasy).

The evening’s performers, a majority from the New York City Ballet, were top-notch. The Sirius Quartet and additional soloists delivered their forward-looking scores with brightness and clarity, reinforcing the argument that, without live music, dance is incomplete.

Through Sept. 30 at Miller Theater, Broadway at West 116th Street. Information: +1-212–854-7799; http://www.millertheater.com.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on September 27, 2007.

New York Baroque Dance Company, with Company XIV and Concert Royal: “Points of Departure” / Mark Morris Dance Center, James and Martha Duffy Performance Space / Brooklyn, NY / September 21, 22, 28, and 29, 2007

New York Baroque Dance Company in Seth Williams’s Point of Departure. Photo by Chris Woltmann.

First it happened in the world of cookery–fusion cuisine replaced the more single-minded foreign cuisine as the next new thing. And before we knew it, the impulse migrated to the dance world with the same prevalence and fervor.

Classical ballet, of course, has for a couple of centuries been picking up “outsider” ways of moving–folk dance, jazz–and infusing its straight-laced principles with them, much to its advantage, shifting and growing slowly and organically, the way spoken language does. More abruptly, modern dance and ballet, once sworn adversaries, made friends, and we acquired the term “crossover choreographer.” To adapt themselves to the concert stage, which is hardly their native–or even a congenial–element, flamenco and the tango have co-opted elements like narrative. More recently, classical Indian dance has looked beyond its traditional borders to annex other genres of movement from our now globalized culture.

No surprise, then, that the New York Baroque Dance Company, led by Catherine Turocy, the esteemed and charming scholar-performer of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century dance that prefigured ballet, should have masterminded a show called “Points of Departure.” At Brooklyn’s Mark Morris Dance Center in late September, her company–augmented by Austin McCormick’s Company XIV, and, where live music was used, accompanied by James Richman’s admirable Concert Royal–presented a handful of pieces that used the movement style and themes of Baroque dance as a springboard into contemporaneity. Being a longtime admirer of Turocy’s customary efforts, I wish I had loved them more.

The most ambitious item on the program, Seth Williams’s Point of Departure proved to be the best of the offerings by a long shot. Why? Because it looks like a dance, not a self-conscious contrivance. Pointedly, its six performers wear handsome white and tan outfits that let them move freely, all the while subtly referencing period costume. In the first part of the piece, full of vivacity and bounce, the choreography makes you think of Baroque dance loosened up. Then, especially in its patterns and implied emotions, it begins to look like modern dance inspired (perhaps rather too literally) by Paul Taylor. The live music enhanced the proceedings immensely and the piece took on a let-joy-be-unconfined air. The standout among the dancers was Laura Careless, dulcet, buoyant, tender, and blessed with curly strawberry blonde hair.

Another group piece, Austin McCormick’s Trompe L’Oeil provided a highfalutin program note about juxtaposing “the meditative/spiritual side…and the grotesquely distorted side of the Baroque.” What we actually saw was a half-dozen barefoot dancers in fragments of Baroque costume and gilded face-paint, with golden masks worn on the back of their heads. In murky light, the players murkily enacted a tale of unstained romance menaced by the devil that lurks in us all. Davon Rainey, as the threatening yet irresistible persona, was the most compelling dancer of the lot.

New York Baroque Dance Company in Austin McCormick’s Trompe L’Oeil. Photo by Chris Woltmann.

Two women from NYBDC performed long (far too long) solos of their own creation; both dancers have much to learn about choreography. The innately dramatic Sarah Edgar offered Armida Abbandonata, though, without access to the press release, you’d have been unlikely to know that it referred specifically to “the unrequited love suffered by [a] ravishing Persian sorceress, queen and warrior.” Trying to figure out what the hell is going on naturally distracts one’s attention from the dancing itself, which was pretty, anguished, and finally vehement.

My favorite moment had Edgar scooping up the paper flowers she’d initially laid out to define the space she would use, lifting her arms over her head, and letting the crushed petals rain down on her body. Affecting too was the subsequent passage in which she crouched over her heart and belly in sorrow that translated into physical agony, then suddenly stood erect to move ferociously, embarking on a grief-fuelled revenge. I think this piece is salvageable and recommend Doris Humphrey’s still-useful advice: “Cut it in half and fix the rest.”

Patricia Beaman’s Accumulating Venus was little more than a bagatelle–done gravely, alas, rather than lightly–about costume, the main feature of which was a length of vibrant persimmon curlicues suggesting the unruly fleece of a mythological animal given to erotic misbehavior. The piece consisted largely of a reverse strip-tease in which the dancer gradually donned the underpinnings of the female Baroque wardrobe, including the corset that confines–nearly immobilizes–the torso and the wire construction that enlarges the hips to Earth Mother proportions. The most vivid moment had the “fleece” shift from the role of cloak to that of a blanket of flowers covering the supine dancer as if she lay in her coffin.

Beaman incorporated the arm and hand behavior of Baroque dancing into her choreography, such as it was, and riffed weirdly on the period footwork, but these references looked obligatory and perfunctory. The marvelous costume was designed by Leslie Weinberg and constructed by Christian Milk.

New York Baroque Dance Company in Catherine Turocy’s Prelude. Photo by Chris Woltmann.

The program was framed by a pair of Turocy efforts to make the event cohere. Prelude featured a pair of female dancers in the ornate pannier-skirted gowns of the Baroque–all jewel tones and gilt–demonstrating the sedate carriage of the form (with its core of seductive mischief), its gently undulating arms decorated with filigreed work from wrist to fingertips, and its precise, frisky footwork. Caprice closed the show with all the evening’s dancers outfitted for modern night life, in a structured improvisation. Just as in Baroque practice, where caprice meant improv and its demands were intended to cultivate and display the individuality of a performing artist, this piece, though slight and ramshackle, gave each participant a chance to shine. Turocy herself, with her gift for making rhythm visible, and Seth Williams, borrowing some spiffy moves from break dancing, provided the most delight.

© VoiceofDance.com 2007