Anna Myer

The Boston Phoenix
November 20 - 27, 1997

[Dance Reviews]

Still life

The cloud clusters of Anna Myer

by Marcia B. Siegel
Dancers have a word for parts of the body that aren't active but aren't stiff or stuck, either. The word is quiet. A lot of Anna Myer's dance is quiet in that way. The works she showed last weekend at Green Street studio floated around the space, changing their outer shapes but keeping a quiet center. They seemed inconsequential, benign, like puffy summer clouds.
You'd think a dance that has Bach, Verdi, and the Penguin Café Orchestra as accompaniment would produce some thunder and lightning, but the five dancers in Wine & Roses (1995) were placid while going through their initial moves and kept their equanimity in subsequent variations. With their torsos as anchor, they stuck their arms or legs out into angular shapes, changing on the beats of the music. Sometimes they torqued their whole bodies into zigzags or hook-shaped tumbles, redesigning on a beat, holding still, changing again.
Heather Waldon connected these moves into a dancelike line, but the others (Mia Lushine, Scott Martin, Brian Perry and Carol Somers) interpreted them more like signals that needed to be held in place long enough so the audience could read them before another signal could be offered. None of the signals, however, read as literal gestures.
The two untitled parts of a work to be premiered in New York next June assembled this move-by-move lexicon into a slightly more recognizable discourse. Romantic selections from Brahms were played live by violinist Lucy Stoltzman and pianist David Polan. Both women (Carol Somers in a solo and Mia Lushine in a duet with Sabu Bedward) wore the most extreme kind of classical ballet tutu, a fabric ruffle that extends straight out to arm's length from the woman's hips. This plate-like object cuts the dancer's body in half and, as someone remarked that night, prevents her from seeing her legs.
Perhaps a lacquered diva, clad in the complete regalia -- toe shoes, tiara, jeweled bodice -- can wear a tutu without feeling the slightest bit silly, but Somers seemed a ballerina in distress. Lit throughout her solo in red, with feet bare, she turned and stretched, bourréed in circles, took a few soaring leaps. Her upper body skewed away from the alignments and framing arm motions that would have been the proper ballet complement. Her gestures would start to project out but stop short. Her shoulders would pull up and her upper arms would hug her ribs, cramping in the graciousness we expect from a ballet dancer. She would swipe both arms across the body diagonally, pulling her torso into a corkscrew. She ended in an awkward folded-over parody of a grand bow.
Lushine and Bedward also parodied ballet pretensions, with the extended postures of their bodies spoiled by clawing hands or wrists pointed in the wrong angles. I didn't think these dances were as funny as they sound now, probably because the dancers performed them with calm and serious devotion, giving no sign that they recognized their own misbehavior.
And in a new work, Bluebird No. 173, Myer managed to keep seven small children under control and give the same serious look to a piece made of bizarre images. The children, who appeared about four or five years old, came out in a line and posed oddly in the background as seven adult dancers went through stop-and-go sequences, one of which looked like a half-erased Mexican waltz.
Each child came forward and paired up with an adult dancer. They sat together on the floor spoon fashion, the child leaning back between the grown-up's knees. Surprisingly, Myer didn't indulge the audience with the cute things children do. I can't remember them skipping or twirling, tippy-toeing or showing us their pretty ballet arms. More affectingly, one after another, the children ran across the space and jumped up into the arms of their partners, who were just standing waiting for them.
The children were troupers; you could tell that holding still so much in the poses was as hard for them as trying to execute a dance routine might have been. The older dancers watched over them courteously. I once saw some Japanese mothers and their toddlers playing partner games in a park in Tokyo. They had the same kind of grave concentration.