Hypergames

Susan Rose at Green Street

by Marcia B. Siegel

Susan Rose's brief but bracing concert Saturday night at Green Street Studios featured three dances and two videos. It lasted just under an hour. Each piece on the program seemed to be made of dozens of game structures, and all the pieces added up to one game -- maybe it was the game of finding choreography.

Rose was based in Boston during the '70s and '80s but now lives in Southern California. I don't have much information about her company or whether this is the kind of work she usually does, but the five dancers with her in Cambridge were smart, high-energy movers. The videos, by Cambridge videographer Bridget Murnane, captured the same dancers and the same witty spirit. What I liked especially about the program was that both Rose and Murnane were willing to forgo long-windedness. They didn't seem caught up in the need to make Big Statements or elaborate on what was already clear. This conciseness gave the work more impact, not less.

If I thought of the whole concert as one choreographic work, the first dance, Back Scratching (2000), could have been an introduction to Rose's movement style, and the last, Break Up (2000), an exposition of the style's possibilities. Kelli King, Eric Lorico, John Medina, and Jennifer Twilley, with Susan Goldberg in the last dance, were like a team of acrobats or construction workers on a bridge. They had that sense of fine coordination and assurance you see in people who take immense risks together.

Most of the time they worked in rapidly shifting partnerships with one or two others, but when not required for that, they'd take a break and move off on their own. They used a spliced-together movement vocabulary of balletic extensions and balances, jogging and easy athleticism, and isolated gestures of unusual body parts -- pelvis, wrist, ribcage. In twos and threes, they'd lift each other, push each other's limbs into contrary directions, lean or pull away. They could speed up to a sprint or suddenly slow down, but usually they went about the work in a brisk, nonstop tempo. Unexpectedly, they'd brake in momentary postures that suggested loaded dramatic situations or rest.

In Break Up, the longer piece, a raspy electric rock score by Ministry accompanied them, and its irregular rhythms made me aware that Rose was deliberately avoiding reliance on a musical meter. But in Detour (1996), a three-part comic piece, the moves imitated three different musical selections so slavishly at times that the obvious concurrence became absurdity.

In the first part of Detour, Susan Rose appeared with five orange plastic cones, the kind they use to mark highway detours. To Chopin's A-minor waltz, she spread them out in time to the rocking rhythm, forming an endless set of designs that never seemed to satisfy her. Of course it was the ongoing musical phrase that drove her to keep reconfiguring her composition. Later on in the piece there was a tango for people in strange costumes, and a line dance to a funky Swedish folk tune, where they were linked together with their arms plunged into the orange cones.

Bridget Murnane's two short videos, interpolated between the dances, proposed several ingenious games of their own, using a single, almost immobile camera and very little editing. "Rehearsal" began with a dark screen and just the sounds of dancers in a studio: their steps resounding on the floor, their breathing, and an occasional comment, muttered between moves. Then Murnane aimed close in at the dancers' upper bodies and let them fling past her, in and out of the frame, creating an intense sense of movement without ever revealing the dance itself.

"MG 303 Series" began with a similar effect. The camera hardly moved; Rose and King passed back and forth in front of it. Sometimes all you saw was an arm or a foot slashing through. For an instant you looked at King standing in a corner in a ballerina's tutu with an orange cone on her head, then a whole series of snapshots of her in different goofy positions, none lasting more than a second or two.

In one segment King seemed to be trying to embrace Rose, who kept wrenching out of her grasp. In another part, only a pair of feet were visible, moving across the floor but actually not moving enough for the distance they appeared to be covering. I realized the foot movement was mostly an illusion; the person with the feet must have been pushing a platform with the camera on it. A kind of moonwalk for camera.