Plain songs

Caitlin Corbett's collage choreography

by Marcia B. Siegel

Caitlin Corbett's two new dances, shown last weekend at Green Street Studios, both started with isolated gestural moves and gradually coalesced into continuous statements. The moves could have been notes plunked out at random on a piano, or words chosen blindfolded from the dictionary, but through the workings of each dance, they produced something lucid, even satisfying. Collage became choreography, right before our eyes.

In NIAGARA, the almost aseptic movement clashed with the six women's costumes: black gym suits emblazoned with numbers and cryptic words, and the kind of frilly white organdy petticoats meant to go under 1950s party dresses. At first the women faced the audience and gestured independently with both arms jutting across their bodies or kinked around their heads. They dropped into twisted lunges and made other odd, stopped moves. They shared the same vocabulary, but they could choose when to perform each unit of it.

Quietly, at irregular intervals, they began reciting numbers from one to 20, but not necessarily in order. Maybe they were counting, maybe the numbers referred to the moves they were doing. The moves could logically be done in tandem, in counterpoint, and even in unison. They could be strung together in a sequence instead of held with pauses in between. By the end of the dance, the sequence incorporated walking steps, specific group pathways, and even encounters between women.

Corbett & Marjorie Morgan's Duet Without Word could have been the precocious sibling of the first piece. Gestures that looked familiar resurfaced, but they were transformed -- the women's bodies arched and stretched to the extremes, twisted into grotesque angles, and pressed in on themselves almost melodramatically. From time to time they jogged backward with their arms around one another's waists, circling the room, bursting suddenly into jumps, turns, and falls into one another's arms. The movement developed an elastic rhythm, a rise and fall of intensity, that might have grown out of the romantic vocalise of the Heitor Villa-Lobos Bachiana Brasileira #5, which accompanied it. The dance finally became more than a choreographic structure; it veered toward love.

Joycie's Pie (1992), revived for this program, followed a similar pattern, with movement sequences for three separate sets of personnel, an avoidance of literal connections either between movement and meaning or among the groups, and an almost inadvertent evolution toward a sensibility that could encompass them all.

Mia Keinänen, Carol Schneider-Sereda, and Darla Villani began with an assortment of offhand-looking moves. They were joined by 12 supporting players, the "Joycie's Pie skippers," who at first lined up behind them like a minimalist chorus line and did a few simple gestures These men and women, as identified in the program, seemed to be mostly nondancers or former performers, but though they were written up as very different individuals, the dance didn't bring out their distinctiveness. Working always as a unit, they entered and left the space, never doing anything very strenuous. But for their big number they wove an intricate skipping reel to a recorded folk tune called, I think, the "Swing and Turn Jubilee."

The cast's third component was Dennis Downey, "talking guy," an unprepossessing man who wandered into the space from time to time and, in a conversational voice, told long, digressive stories, like one about how the Jesuits learned Chinese. During one of his monologues he balanced a china cup and saucer on his bald head.

At the end, the man with the cup and saucer was still patrolling, the trio were falling and getting up, and the chorus line was standing at the back whistling the "Jubilee" song. I have no idea how these things related to each other or to the story that supposedly inspired the dance, about a woman who threw a pie in a man's face when he asked for a second helping.

Caitlin Corbett's work is deceptively noncommittal. You get carried along watching this odd but unexcitable movement. The performers are reticent, with a polite determination not to outdo one another. Without warning, they spring into the air or wrap a tender arm around a partner. It gets to have a certain coherence, maybe even more persuasive than a scheme totally spelled out. It grows on you.