Emergence

Marcus Schulkind finally stands in the limelight

by Marcia B. Siegel

BankBoston's Emerging Artists Series features local talent without having to claim it's in the same class as the big guys. BB's Celebrity Series this season includes Twyla Tharp and Alvin Ailey, for instance. I don't know about the "emerging" musical artists, but Marcus Schulkind is hardly a newcomer. Saturday's program at the Tsai Center incorporated a dance of his (Job) from 1977, and Schulkind has maintained a steady presence in Boston and New York for at least those 20 years. Schulkind is "emerging" like every artist who questions and pushes the boundaries he's established for himself. So is Robert Rauschenberg, as you could plainly see in the monumental retrospective the Guggenheim Museum gave him this fall. So is Twyla Tharp, for that matter.

Or maybe the sponsors want to make these worthy artists "emerge" into a wider visibility. I wish the audience weren't being encouraged to think of an artist's career as a series of ascending plateaus measured by the size of production budgets and the number of ticket buyers who can be lured into the theater.

Marcus Schulkind seems to be trying to solve the creative impasse caused by postmodernism. I think he has things he wants to say, but style decrees the dancer must either remain impassive and objective or else emote to the point of parody. The choreographer wants to show off the dancers' wide range of styles and skills, but he also whittles down that infinite variety into his own stylistic profile. If he uses music to put across emotional or narrative ideas, the dance mustn't follow the music too closely.

Schulkind's choreography gets as far as renouncing objectivity, but it hasn't surmounted some of the other problems. Both new pieces, New Piece and Chaos Inside, featured a group of women (Erin Koh, Irene Lutts, and Sharon Marroquin, with Lorraine Chapman in Chaos Inside), in, respectively, the playful and the suggestive aspects of a covertly sexual relationship. In New Piece, the trio softly bounced to one of Bobby McFerrin's many-layered Afropop vocals. They seemed to dance at times for one another, or for themselves, or just for the audience, using ballet steps deliberately not turned out, sweeping modern dance gestures, and skips and hip wiggles from vernacular dance floors.

Sometimes they would touch one another lightly, but any implied invitation would immediately be agreed to; there was never any tension, any resistance, any sense of choosing between alternatives. In Chaos Inside, the women interspersed vignettes of conflict with harmonious group patterns. One would grab the shoulders of another, who wasn't trying to get away. One would clutch another's ankle but then for no reason let her go easily. Two would be wrapped in a close embrace, then casually move apart.

The only drama was provided by the suspenseful dissonances of the G—recki String Quartet No. 2. Near the end of the dance, one couple gestured in unison while another woman neither more nor less passionately kissed her partner on the mouth. One violin was playing an attenuated "Silent Night" against a sustained discord. This attitude of accommodation among the dancers, even when the situation seemed to depict struggle, persisted throughout the entire evening. A men's duet, Cain and Abel (David Leventhal and Jim Viera), began with a game of pat-a-cake that quickly turned into aggression, but the signifying slaps and punches then evolved into slow tumbling and acrobatic posings that required complete cooperation and trust between the partners.

Schulkind's solo dances -- there were several short ones on the program -- reminded me of the character portraits of a much earlier period of modern dance. A woman imagining herself dancing a waltz, alone in a ballroom (Cradle Song). A woman in overalls and suspenders "laboring" and "defying the odds" while an overwrought man sings "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" (Babel).

In the 1995 quartet Of Bliss Submerged Beneath Appearance, Jim Viera stepped into a gesture that evoked José Limón's famous 1949 Othello quartet The Moor's Pavane. All of a sudden I thought, maybe all along Schulkind had been trying to keep the sincerity and humanity of the modern dance classics while avoiding what would now be considered their sentimentality. I'm not sure his combination of abstraction and commitment makes sense yet.