Groupings

Carol Somers's keeper

by Marcia B. Siegel

Concerts with the works of five different choreographers can be disorienting, but Choreographers Group last weekend at Green Street Studios fell rather neatly into two modes of looking at ensembles. Carol Somers and Daniel McCusker took the "pure-dance" approach, and Catherine Musinsky and Lorraine Chapman explored a more theatrical primitivism, with Group artistic director Perla Joy Furr's Soar, a small, stretchy solo of awakening, as a bridging interlude.

Somers's Finders Keepers opened the program with a dynamism that made me sit up straight in my seat. To foreboding and spare music from Arvo Pärt's Fratres, five women (Somers and Amy Gerson, Susan Gray, Erin Koh, and Janet Slifka) in black pants, white shirts, and hightops drove through unfolding movement combinations. In unison at first, then shearing off into individual and smaller units, they danced with an unappeased fury, a hunger for space.

Swaying slightly in place, they began a wide stepping from foot to foot, then flung themselves into spins and leaps. They dove to the floor and sprang up to run short diagonal laps. In another section they gestured close to their chests, then suddenly spun into huge hitch-steps. Later they leaned and stretched out while balanced on one sturdy leg. They thudded into the ground with two-footed jumps. Toward the end, they lined up behind one another, swaying together, then falling sideways out of line.

All of the moves were precisely designed and coordinated in a rhythm studiously at odds with the music's even sonorities. Nothing looked particularly "expressive." Yet the dance was riveting, even emotional. At the end, one woman was picking her way among her fallen partners, but if the lights hadn't gone out, they probably all would have scrambled up and ripped right into something else.

Daniel McCusker's Side Trip also explored formal movement patterns with no ulterior plots. McCusker's sensibility is cooler, his movement more detailed and varied, and his dance seemed to spread out and enjoy the same space that might have represented an adversary to Somers. With no musical accompaniment, the movement phrases created rhythmic patterns as the dancers entered, met partners, worked together briefly, recombined.

With similar initiations and a shared vocabulary, people developed seemingly endless phrase variations. The phrases were sometimes short, sometimes more extended, but once a movement impulse ran its course, another phrase began. This dance seemed companionable -- a constantly varying neighborhood where everyone got along beautifully. Maybe because of the unexcitable feeling and the agreeable partnerships, maybe because the dancers usually worked in everyday parallel position and walked casually, heels down first.

Lorraine Chapman's eccentric Good Fortune began as a formal dance too, an invented quadrille with seductive references to flamenco, and some Middle Eastern music setting the rhythm. After a time the dancers left and reappeared wearing grotesque masks, like the skulls of horses, over the tops of their heads. Minus mask, each woman (Chapman, Koh, Sharon Marroquin, and Nicole Pierce) danced a solo. In the dim light and wearing similar red gauze dresses, the women looked alike to me, and I thought they were enacting a kind of regression to the animal state, their movements deconstructing from upright, picky step dances and feminine body displays to grotesque shapes, gallops, and mimed munching of grass.

In a sci-fi coda, the women vanished and two pre-pubescent girls in ashen leotards walked androidally forward, as a faint voice advised people to stay indoors because an unknown object was approaching earth.

Back-to-nature imagery was more conventional in Catherine Musinsky's FAEGRETWAENL. (I don't know whether this is a real word, but the title as announced a month ago was JUNGNAWANGRA, which is equally obscure to me.) Three women in red fluffy dresses were first seen running through the trees in a faded movie. Then they entered the space and rolled around as if trying to discover who or what they were. They seemed to fall asleep after a while, and a woodsy creature or goddess (Debra Bluth) materialized from behind a scrim. She inspected the three women, nuzzled them, then dumped a big bundle of pink and red ribbons by each one.

The women woke up and picked doubtfully at the ribbons. On the film, perhaps a memory or a prophecy, they burned their clothes. The goddess came back and danced with the ribbons, but the three women didn't get it, and they still had their costumes on at the end.