Renovations on a theme

Anna Myer's ballet, Danny Buraczeski's jazz

by Marcia B. Siegel

Two sets of performances last week showcased choreographers with their own ideas about established dance forms, choreographers who were determined to reinvent genres but not to abandon them entirely. Anna Myer's approach to ballet and Danny Buraczeski's to jazz made me think about how we recognize any dance form. It's not just to measure the choreographer's originality that we want to know the category on which he or she is making changes. A dance style -- like styles of music, painting, or architecture -- carries its own conventions, rules, and expectations of behavior. There's a satisfaction in seeing these conventions play themselves out, but my pleasure increases when the conventions go awry.

At Green Street Studios, Anna Myer and a fine ensemble of dancers did three works in an eccentric movement idiom that seemed to be thinking about ballet but didn't look like ballet at all. The first piece, Quintet to Brahms, looked, in fact, like a deliberately inverted form of ballet. The three women wore those stiff, tray-shaped tutus that cut ballerinas' bodies in half, and the two men wore undershirts and biker tights cut off just at the crotch. They were all barefoot. Introducing themselves by stepping backward toward the audience, one foot sickled behind the other in an exaggerated turn-in, they seemed determined to do the opposite of what one learns in a ballet class. They scooped their arms inward or curled them close around their bodies instead of opening out grandly. They rotated in from the shoulders, the hips, the elbows. They made little pivot turns or balanced in attitude, resting on their hands instead of their feet.

In spite of these distortions of the academic line, they looked quite beautiful. Partly, I think, this was because they maintained an inner focus, a serious, almost devotional attention to making these odd moves look as pure as any purist ideal. Early in the piece, Brian Perry, a tall blond who'd be cast as a prince in some traditional fairy tale, was facing off stage and slowly flapping his arms, as if expecting some swan comrades to arrive. Suppressing the possibility we might think this comic, he slowed down even more and finished with his hands and fingers floating exquisitely down.

Even before this, I was thinking of Matthew Bourne's cross-gendered Swan Lake, but there was nothing so literal as a story in Myer's dance. Each of the five sections, to Brahms chamber music, seemed to meditate on ballet situations, turning them this way and that, any way but the expected. Eric Lindemer and Mia Lushine danced a pas de deux in which they sometimes mirrored, sometimes echoed each other but never touched. Myer danced a solo that might have had tragic implications; Carol Somers inscribed the music with more than it needed, leading with her wrists and curling fingers. After a double duet, all the dancers used these movement possibilities as an ensemble finale.

It was clear that Myer finds these moves a workable lexicon, and without much expansion it served in the other two works to suggest individual personalities, and the comforts of religion. HeartChunks featured a weird but strangely connected melange of musical back-ups (Spanish ballads by Los Tres Ases, two Chopin Nocturnes, a rocking Afro-hillbilly tune, and Chris Isaak's sentimental "Two Hearts"). Again in perfect seriousness, the dancers unhinged some familiar tropes of sentimental love. A trio of women fainted and yearned, then inched toward the audience on one hip, coyly peering over one cocked shoulder. A man (Jull-Allan Weber) hunched and curled in on himself, seemingly getting in his own way and blocking his evident attempts to move forward. A woman made advances on a partner who resisted her, until she bent down and twirled him as he stood on his toes. Then he lifted her straight up a couple of times, but this seemed to bring them no intimacy. They ended their number peering at each other, shielding their eyes with cupped hands. The group, led by an exuberant Yukiko Sumiya and Allison Gonzalez, exploded into traveling jumps. Sharon Marroquin recapitulated some of the movements, with seven-year-old Maia Dunlap by her side, conscientiously copying her. Finally, the five adult dancers moved through the space, making kooky advances and rebuffs, taking it all calmly.

The newest dance, In Italian . . . , was set to assorted Vivaldi pieces and seemed even more formally structured than the other two works. Again Myer used the same movement lexicon, with some added ecclesiastical gestures of prayer and blessing. With only this minimal overlay of religiosity, a concluding section where one person would lower another to the floor, move off momentarily, then return to pull the person up began to seem like a cumulative hymn of resurrection.

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We're so used to choreography that's endlessly eclectic and inventive, we might not think to identify the stylistic baselines from which it takes off. But even a determinedly original dance will have some associations, call up some cultural responses. I hadn't seen Danny Buraczeski's Jazz Dance before, and I was wondering how, or whether, it would coincide with my own confused notions of what jazz dance is. After all, the word jazz calls up everything from Dixieland to Alvin Ailey, John Coltrane to Liza Minnelli. The work Buraczeski showed at the Emerson Majestic didn't partake of any of the above, really, but it didn't persuade me that there was a good reason not to. I mean that though Buraczeski studiously avoids imitating the look of "jazz," he's not idiosyncratic enough to create a patented alternative.

His basic vocabulary starts with the step -- not the stepping in place that diversifies into rhythm dance, but walking and other forms of forward motion. The dancers move on the meter of the music, varying it with double time, hesitations, little jumps, and turns. The upper body amplifies this with isolated torso moves, splayed-out arms, and other gestures. It looks very neat and assembled and is performed smoothly by the company of nine young dancers, many of them trained at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where the company is based.

After an opening piece for three women that introduced the movement style, the rest of the program employed it effectively to create different moods. Swing Concerto, to music by Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Brave Old World, took off from the clarinet riffs of the 1940s big bands that anticipated what we now call klezmer music. Buraczeski held forth in a solo with the stereotyped big bowing and stopped-semaphore gestures that have come to identify Chassidic peasants in Broadway shows. For all the objections we may have to this generic typing, there's a kind of drive or oomph or pizzazz in it that Buraczeski lacks. The other dancers go with his lead and, adding to it, segue into boogie-woogie and the lindy. It still looks smooth and objective. They catch the rhythm in the shapes they make but they don't throw their weight into it, so the accents and syncopations seem more visual than dynamic.

The big piece on the program was Ezekiel's Wheel, a dance about group solidarity and sadness, set to a text by James Baldwin and a score of modern jazz and wails written by Philip Hamilton, who led a live ensemble. The dance modulated from group and group-versus-individual patterns to lamenting and then a joyous reuniting of the group. I thought the intensity of the dancing didn't match that of the music.

The piece that interested me the most was the cryptic Scene Unseen, to selections by Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. This started with a shadow dance for Buraczeski and Les Johnson. Identically dressed in white tie and tail suits, they sat rather far apart on identical wooden chairs, matching each other move for move. These weren't really dance moves but nearly ordinary poses and actions. They might have been getting ready to go on a big date -- they fixed their ties, took their jackets off the backs of the chairs, put them on with identical stylish turns and spiffy self-assurance.

Then Buraczeski was somehow missing a mate to the handkerchief Johnson tucked in his breast pocket. Johnson pulled out another one and handed it to Buraczeski without missing a beat. This understated contretemps threw the rest of the dance into question. Four women appeared in gorgeous sequined, backless evening gowns with huge feathery fans, and Buraczeski partnered them while Johnson watched. Another woman, androgynous in a mauve lounge suit, hovered around the edges. Brad Garner appeared, not dressed for nightclubbing, and fell right into a move-for-move duet with Johnson that led to embraces hidden behind the mauve woman's spread-out fan.

Who were they all? At first I thought Buraczeski was being the old entertainer, coaching yet resenting the young man who would replace him someday. But then they all seemed ready for seduction, heterosexual and otherwise, and all of them regarded the others with speculation and mild arousal, and perfect equanimity should the intended dance reach an unintended climax.