By Christian Viveros-Fauné
By Miriam Felton-Dansky
By Tom Sellar
By Tom Sellar
By Jessica Dawson
By Tom Sellar
By R. C. Baker
By Tom Sellar
The piece's elegant structure sets off its raucous tone. A tilting, lurching swatch of movement becomes a theme to be varied. So does calling: hollering for pigs and cows to gather, emitting a high cry when lost in the woods, calling square-dance figures. Everything's a bit haywire. As the terrific performers pass through P.S. 122's rear door, they open and slam a miniature screen door beside it. In a backcountry voice, Charlotte Griffin tells of being lost. Later she, DJ Mendel, and Faye Driscoll appear to lip-synch an old man's voice telling the same story in exactly the same waythe original of Griffin's copy. The lips don't match the sound, but Tom O'Connor and Fritha Pengelly mime aspects of "lost."
What with chairs at the back and electric fans blowing intermittently, the space has the look of a Saturday night dance in a mountain town. Neumann cleverly fills square-dance patterns with odd, rambunctious movement (like a mom with two rowdy boys, Erin Wilson holds off Neumann and O'Connor by their heads while they lean into her hands and jump about in place). And he inserts a real square-dance shuffle walk where no patterns exist (side-by-side, twitching their skirts, and giggling a little, Driscoll and Ruthie Epstein trip through and exit). Lisa Walter in a fluffy dress (costumes by Stacy Dawson) barks square-dance calls to Mendel, and the small dance steps incited by "move right, move left" mingle raunchily in our minds with Walter's previous tale of motel sex. I love the community's manners, the way people take each other in, shyly try to copy, get drunk, act up. The behavior is "real," but, despite the verbal material, it's dancing that makes this world come to life.
Neumann's Completely Attached to Delusion is equally unexpected. The Beat poet John Giorno, comrade of Ginsberg and Burroughs, recites four of his poems (plus a piece by Mark Twain). At 63, with a New York twang, Giorno's a wonderful unschooled dancer. He rhythms words with his body, strikes statue poses, and inserts a little skip into his walk. As he sings out tough lines on family values ("Never fast-forward a cum shot") or the Chernobyl disaster, Neumann is his silent partner, evenuncannilyhis William Burroughs, capturing Giorno's joyful eccentricities in his own body. In "Demon in the Details," Neumann, Driscoll, and Epstein try to get their bodies in sync with his, while he hymns his old boozing, drugging, poetry-spewing buddies, "It ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones."
Eliot Feld has pretty well explored one aspect of his Ballet Tech's name: He's given us tech, as in the effects the Joyce's theater technology can muster (like the handheld lights of nodrog doggo) and the schoolkids-at-play look of works like Simon Says. Coup de Couperin acknowledges and challenges his company's grasp of the ballet part of the title. After all, the dancers who've come up through his school are ballet trained; time to show their chops.
On this level, Coup de Couperin is one smart work. It's also delightful. To a sampler of short pieces by 18th-century composers François Couperin and Marin Marais, Feld choreographs images of elegant decorum tousled slightly by exuberance and flirtatiousness. Willa Kim's delicious costumes pick up on this hint of undress. The men wear fancy long vests, but their tricorn hats have no crowns and their knee breeches are cut-off unitards. The women wear pale blue (horsehair?) panniers over their low-cut fuchsia unitards, with a flower atop each head giving them the verve of flamenco dancers.
There is no partnering. In the beginning, the men and the women occupy opposite corners, engaging in contrapuntal displays of courtly manners. Otherwise the men mostly flash past in showy leaps that cut through the women's lines, or circle them like mating birds showing off plumage. During Marin's Tempêteaided by drum thunder and flashes of Allen Lee Hughes's lightsthey look like winds disturbing the whirling, veiled women.
Feld's inventive choreography reveals his dancers' acute grasp of dynamics and phrasing (Nickemil Concepcion is a particularly musical performer). As Feld exploits the men's elevation, he revels in the women's limber backs and fluid arms. The surprise is the tricky pointework and steps that challenge those feet: the attitude on pointe with a flourish, the entrechat that twists in the air, the rapid games Ha-Chi Yu plays with turn-in/turn-out. Yu, Patricia Tuthill, Jacquelyn Scafidi, and Jeannine Lowery shine in charming little solos. In Coup de Couperin, Feld gives his company a more sophisticated way to define playfulness and a piece to grow in.
Ze'eva Cohen dedicated her Danspace program, "Female Mythologies," to Anna Sokolow. She resembles her mentor only in her concern for the human condition and the clear way she defines gestures, so that the eye and heart remember them. Sokolow gave us bleak, abstracted visions of imperiled societies. Cohen's view is more intimate, more tribal. Her dance style is tinged with her Yemenite heritagethe fluent hand motions, the hearty footwork, the occasional fierceness.