It moves, but does it dance?

Dance Umbrella's 'Boston Moves'

by Marcia B. Siegel

China silk, stilt walking, and tortured relationships pre-empted two-thirds of Dance Umbrella's annual "Boston Moves" event last weekend at the Emerson Majestic. If you went there to see dancing, you had to wait out the circus effects and theatrics until the end of the program, when Brian Crabtree and the Ramón de los Reyes Spanish Dance Theater showed us people digging into the art itself. The presenters and adjudicators of this year's show must think we're insufficiently interested in dancing and need extraneous titillation to be entertained. Or maybe the choreographers themselves found props and psychology more interesting as a point of departure.

The program opened with a gorgeous visual display, Life at the Extremities, by Chu Ling. A large, strangely vegetative three-dimensional orb hung above the empty space in a changing light. The performers, Chu Ling, six members of the Hua Xia Chinese Dance Group, and six other dancers, moved in slow sculptural shapes through this landscape, which often seemed divided horizontally between brightness and shadow. Dark silhouettes would loom like rocks against a milky backcloth while other forms stretched and rolled in an icy moonlit foreground. Later on, figures would move across a distant noontime while those nearest to us inched through the gloom.

After the first, mysterious vision, they all emerged as humans, dancers in white unitards with white scarves wrapped around their heads. One by one they let loose the long white streamers they held compressed in their hands, flinging them in big arcs. From then on the work featured the spectacular skills of Chinese ribbon dancing. The performer manipulates a long strip of silk so that moving air currents lift it into circles, squiggles, breaking-wave effects around her turning, leaping, or bending body. The dancers are orchestrated in massed groups, lines, and circular floor patterns.

Ribbon dancing and the related art of sleeve dancing usually make their appearance in Chinese opera or folk-dance programs, done by squadrons of skittering girls in pretty pajamas, with heads tilting coyly and everlasting smiles. I always imagine them home in the kitchen, speaking in high lilting voices -- only when spoken to, of course. Chu Ling is working to counter this prefeminist stereotype by giving her ribbon wielders earthbound modern-dance movements and a more poetic role. You En Li's beautiful scenography and John Puterbaugh's atmospheric score for shakuhachi (Japanese flute) and Chinese percussion helped give a meditative nuance to the visual patterns. But aside from a brief duet and a sort of butterfly-emerging-from-the-chrysalis tableau, the work didn't go much beyond picture making.

Karen Krolak sent up another female stereotype, the siren, in What's Next. We saw her first with her back to the audience, draped seductively over a big white exercise ball. As she smirked over her shoulder and smokily rearranged her limbs, we saw that one leg was twice as long as the other. Eventually the full wacky regalia appeared: a red garden glove on one hand, a tiny silver-black bra with another glove clamped over one cup, and on her head a two-foot length of silver Slinky that jounced up and down when she moved.

This was promising.

Her twin (Yvonne York) entered and they began a sly flirtation. After this, they experimented for a very long time with how to move on one regular leg and one stilt. They could do extravagant lunges. They could get all the way up on the stilt and do a sort of Suzy-Q up there. They could clutch each other for support and stand high together. They pretended to fight. None of this lived up to the bizarre suggestiveness of the first moments. An original score by David Pavkovic featured many minutes of loud vacuum cleaner and a pop song that went, "I wanna be like you."

Sara Sweet Rabidoux staged a nasty family portrait in A Minor Form of Despair. A woman began with a solo of contradictions, flinging herself from one taut pose to another. Her alternation between almost reckless energy and tense distortion seemed to symbolize a double bind that engulfed all four characters. When one person would pull away from a tight grouping, another would put out a hand to restrain her. Someone would reach for an embrace, then pitch into a fall and be caught at the last minute. The father figure (Joseph Shepard) danced to a country lovesick blues with floppy/kinky moves that looked like a derailed softshoe dance. The mother and siblings were Elizabeth Anna Hall, Shoshanna Hoffert, and Kristen Tovson.

These gestural episodes brought up issues of propriety versus obscenity, twitchy desperation versus passivity, and control masqerading as solicitude. The dance afforded the characters no insight on their predicament, just the necessity to keep enacting it.

Christine Bennett's Bound offered striking effects, relationships, a chamber score by John Latartara performed live, and stilt walking. Five figures in flowing, 10-foot-long peach-colored skirts hovered inside cylindrical niches of gauze hung from the very top of the space. (Again the scenography was a major asset: costumes by Liza Hope, set by Beth Galston, lighting by Steve Hall and Lynda O'Brien.)

After a period of tentative reaching and turning, four of the figures left, one careful step at a time, and returned minus their stilts. The remaining giant, Boris Koski, became a watcher, a leader, maybe a father to the four struggling women (Bennett and Alissa Cardone, Ingrid Schatz, and DeAnna Pellecchia). These women crawled and contorted their bodies into complicated shapes. Sometimes they seemed to be aspiring toward an unseen goal in the down-right corner of the stage, and the man seemed to be helping them on the journey. They hung onto his hands, sometimes climbed up his leg as if it were a cliff. Whatever it was out there they were trying to reach, it was only momentarily riveting; for no apparent reason they'd sometimes turn back and retreat along the same diagonal. Toward the end, two of the women came back on stilts, and they looked immense. Even though we'd seen them before, the scale had subtly changed.

Early Riser, by Brian Crabtree, offered nothing more than good dancers (Crabtree, Daniel McCusker, Amy Zell Ellsworth, Leslie Shaver-Koval, and Jody Weber) performing in a pleasurable, maybe even mellow mood. Lou Harrison's Asian-influenced rhythms and soft sonorities provided a steady ground for a slow gathering entree, then a faster, polyrhythmic section of runs, small skips, and jumps, and at the end a processional ensemble finale. The dance had no particular messages or moral, unless you think, as I do, that the privilege of watching five dancers lightly take command of an ordered space will make your life better.

The program rocketed to a close with Flamenco Esencia, two solos choreographed by Clara Ramona for members of Boston's dancing de los Reyes family. This was flamenco at its most basic. Two guitarists (Kai Narezo and Juanito Pascual) and a singer (Fernando de Málaga) sat at the back of a bare stage on plain chairs with the two dancers, one seated, one standing. They were all simply there when the curtain went up, waiting till the moment to start would be silently agreed on between them. They wore almost ordinary clothes, just a touch of individual style here and there. And there were no women, hence, no flouncy costumes or fiery duets. Somehow all this made the dances seem grittier, more urgent. It's one thing to dance in the glamor of fancy surroundings, but you dance in a back alley because you really need to dance.

Nino de los Reyes, just into his teens, began with a bulerias, Hay Futuro. A wiry kid with long black hair in a ponytail that undid itself before the end of his solo, he produced ripples and volleys of fantastic heel beats, keeping his energy close in, not giving away anything that he could drive into those downward rhythms. He had an aggressiveness, not sexy but tough, a street kid. Suddenly he would lash out a karate-like flat of the hand, or toss a bit of hip-hop, and just as suddenly he'd throw his arms down and quit the whole thing for a second.

His older brother Isaac de los Reyes started the seguiriryas Compos Duros just rubbing his hands together, the way Spanish musicians do when they're preparing for a clapping dance. He didn't clap, though, but put his hands and wrists into elaborate action, spiraling around in the air. A big guy with long wavy hair and a white shirt hanging out of his pants, he seemed to dance more with his upper body and arms than with his feet.

Both solos had the audience cheering, and after a while the brothers danced a short encore in unison. This revealed even more clearly the differences between them: Nino intense, contained, fast; Isaac flamboyant, powerful but almost casual. Nino stopped respectfully two bars before the end and let his brother have the last step.