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Dance Umbrella brings out its best "Boston Moves"

by Marcia B. Siegel

Dance is a competitive game. There's never enough money to go around; dancers and audiences sometimes seem preoccupied with the survival of individual talents, to the exclusion of everyone else. The "Boston Moves" programs at the Emerson Majestic last weekend brought together more than a dozen choreographers and their dancers, all eager to show their own work and check out the wares of the others. But the atmosphere was convivial rather than contentious. The unusual sense of community among the clans may have been a greater achievement, even if temporary, than any of the individual works underwritten by the "Boston Moves" sponsoring agencies.

Perhaps unavoidably, the programs were long and somewhat hard to track. Program A premiered nine new works commissioned by Dance Umbrella; Program B presented two works by each of three recipients of the Massachusetts Cultural Council 1998 Choreography fellowships. In a way, the mini-festival constituted a survey of late-century choreographic strategies.

Choreography is not the most rigorously practiced artform these days, and all six pieces on Program B looked underchoreographed, as if the choreographic awardees were deliberately demonstrating different ways to evade the appearance of premeditation or profundity. This, of course, brings up the question what is choreography anyway, and I admit to the belief that the act of choreography has to be somehow more than arranging dancers effectively on a stage. The "more" is always being redefined; we can't anticipate that, but the alternatives to traditional choreographic forms and devices can seem one-dimensional unless they're wielded by extraordinary talents. Adrienne Hawkins's Duke Suite and Past the Point were showpieces for jazz-dance technique, the first to Ellington selections and the second to Afro-fusion music. Duke Suite was framed in the familiar idiom of dancehall flirtations, taking place back in some indeterminate period when men were on the make and women played hard to get. The leers and shrugs, grabs and come-ons, curiously didn't lead to much pairing up between the three men and the four women. Most of the time they simply became an audience-oriented ensemble. Jazz melded with robotry, ballet, and acrobatics in Past the Point, but again the dancers mostly worked in unison, facing the audience, doing their moves in place. The piece always looked like a show routine or a dance class to me.

In both Hawkins entries, the dancers looked underpowered, without punch. Familiar tropes of jazz dance -- hip grindings and struts, bits of Lindy, Charleston, and shimmy -- seemed casual, even reticent, as if the dancers found them slightly unfamiliar. Instead of looking for a chance to show off, they seemed to find comfort in the anonymity of Hawkins's choreographic unison.

Eccentricity can explain another non-choreographic approach, the dadaistic collage, which was the specialty of Darla Villani. The first of her two solos, Pilot of Eva, lasted three minutes, just enough time for the audience to take in her red, flower-covered pants and pink, sequined, bare-midriff top. Untitled had lurid lighting, assorted synthesized noises, and Villani gesturing, walking, changing direction, lying down, getting up, gesturing. If anything, the piece signified a deep uneasiness about having to fill up an extended time with a dance.

Improvisation was the route followed by Terese Freedman and Jim Coleman. Falling and is this desire weren't made up on the spot, though. In the studio, dancers using this type of improvisation will explore movement tasks, like the ways two persons can support and release each other. Although the tasks are common ones and the movement isn't formal or virtuosic, the accumulated material is structured, rehearsed, and subjected to choreographic devices like timing, duplication, and placement in the space. In performance it retains its spontaneity because you can't fall or run through a crowd exactly the same way twice.

So even though the Freedman/Coleman dances shared a vocabulary of movement and interactions, they gave off different atmospheres. Falling, with nine young women in flouncy party dresses and sentimental songs by Roy Orbison, seemed to be a spoof of adolescent mood swings, girls who long to be in love. They scootched up to each other one minute, shoved each other away the next. One girl would wrap herself around another's midsection, then gradually lose her grip and thud to the floor. At the end, the group was massed together holding aloft one girl, who strained toward another girl just out of reach.

Unlike Villani's gestures, which chained on and on in an ineffectual stream of invention, the moves in Falling and the darker is this desire gained a certain existential power as they repeated, each time slightly different but with increasing logic, like the mistakes people keep making in their lives. The dancers -- I assume they were students of Coleman and Freedman at the Five College Dance Department -- looked totally engrossed and energized, which made the movement seem not only inevitable but meaningful.

Improvisation as inspiration of the moment is at the core of tap dance, and Dianne Walker and Jimmy Slyde offered the casual virtuosics of two old companions playing off each other's best moves. The Walker/Slyde partnership includes not only dancing in unison and counterpoint but conversation, singing, and generous mutual admiration. It was great to see a 70ish gent and a big, classy woman blasting forth full-out among the more conventional concert dancers on the program.

Three of the other eight pieces on Program A were typical '90s dances -- structured movement with an overall atmosphere but no particular narrative throughline. Hell Bent, by Diane Arvanites- Noya and Tommy Neblett, took place in an expressionistic, shadowy space, with seven dancers running, sliding, falling, hurling themselves against one another, and making grotesque faces at the audience. Daniel McCusker, incorporating choreographic contributions from the dancers, presented a tribe or a family of seven women in Now and Again. All shapes and sizes and ages, the women partnered one another, overlapping and recombining, accommodating to one another easily, as if their differences didn't matter at all.

In Carol Somers's Red Rover, six women isolated from one another strode and pitched off balance and whirled into gradual unison, singing snatches of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." The music, later heard in a Clancy Brothers version, cast the ironies of patriotism and war over the movement, which seemed to become more effortful as the women fell and struggled to get up, then slowly went to the ground with odd, self-directed gestures. Finally they were singing and separate again, to the somber organ drone of Arvo Pärt's Intervallo. Somers continues to be one of the most impressive young choreographers on the Boston scene.

Ruth Benson Levin's novel and generous approach to the "Boston Moves" opportunity was to solicit one movement phrase from each of 10 local choreographers. Then she, Anna Myer, and Marjorie Morgan made short dances that had to incorporate all 10 movements. Levin came up with the best result, Diva, where three fluttery women in tights and black velvet smocks formed an inept back-up group for a temperamental soloist. The music was Vivaldi. I've retained nothing from Anna Myer's trio Take Five, but considering the profusion of the program, I'm surprised only one piece escaped me. Morgan's The Race had three women in white pumps and mini-dresses applying cold cream and prettying themselves up while another women in pink warm-ups stretched and got ready to sprint. A commercial announcer told us we must do everything we can to win Women's Race Against Time.

Celeste Miller slides comic, almost rueful reflection into talking-dance stories about the experience of family. In Grandmother's Peas she twisted two threads together: dancing to Beethoven's Seventh when she was in college, and visiting her seemingly cold and exacting grandmother. Punching out a Beethovenian movement theme at appropriate points in the music, Miller somehow lets us know that mother-daughter animosities will transfer themselves, like musical motifs, to the next generation. Her mom sends a breezy postcard, remarking that grandmother has died. Miller hardly cares. "I thought it would be easier to dream to Beethoven," she concludes, barely covering her regret.

Fast jazz rounded out the long program, with members of Mary V. Mazzulli's Rainbow Tribe doing Stay (Wasting Time). The piece was fast, unpretentious, and so well-rehearsed that the assorted body types and backgrounds of the dancers merged as one pleasing ensemble.