Zombie love

The `creations' of Prometheus

by Marcia B. Siegel

Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett say their dances are "created," not choreographed. Which is odd, because both of them are accomplished choreographers, as shown in the three works given by their Prometheus Dance last weekend at Boston Conservatory. In the sense of highly crafted dancemaking, and in the global metaphors they want to project, their dance seems a throwback to the high-minded modern dance of the '50s and '60s.

Not that the huge implications of the Prometheus dances are offered to the audience in any way. We're left to fish them if we can from the formally structured but plotless and characterless events on the stage. But information furnished to the press speaks of "the genetic, social and political inheritance that each successive generation is innocently born into," and "encounters [that] depict an unconscious and unrelenting desire to move forward and achieve fulfillment . . . " What I saw on the stage was more like alienated people in an unending, impersonal, and futile struggle with one another.

Noya's Herencia (1996) and Noya/Neblett's Hell Bent (1999) could have been two parts of the same piece. Six dancers of Prometheus, joined by guest artist Shawn Mahoney, moved blankly at first in Herencia. Inching forward with their heads bent to one side, they looked like hanged corpses. Without warning, one person would attack another from behind, hurling him or her out of the way and taking over the vacated position. This pointless competition escalated gradually into frantic and desolate pairings, while the accompanying music -- tolling bells, obsessive finger exercises on a piano, an orchestra with voices in foreign languages -- by Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, and Nicholas Lens got louder and bigger until it made the dancers' struggles seem even less noteworthy.

In Hell Bent the same six dancers trudged back and forth in a tight line-up. One person would unpredictably break out in a tantrum of twitches and shakes, then rejoin the line of march. They all wore black clothes that didn't fit well; they all had unruly hair and insomniac make-up. They ran across the stage and dove chest-first along the floor. They clumped together in front of a floor light that threw big, expressionistic shadows on the cyc as they unenthusiastically groped one another. They grappled with partners. They made ugly faces and crooked body shapes.

I thought these two group pieces might have had some reference to punk-rock fashion, but they had even more to do with the anomie and physical realism of the great Anna Sokolow, whose bleak dances crystalized the type of the individual adrift in the pre-'60s lonely crowd. Prometheus ups the ante on violence without giving us any reason, as Sokolow did, to find its characters sympathetic.

Neblett's duet Glory Land was structured as a series of variations on a theme. Dressed as if they belonged in a Dorothea Lange photo of the Dust Bowl, he and Noya stepped in a comradely side-by-side pattern that slid naturally into lifts and embraces. In about nine permutations of the phrase, accompanied by an astutely chosen group of country gospel, folk, and work songs, their amicable partnership evolved into manipulations, embracings, a curiously dispassionate seduction or rape, and a passionate remorse. To the Doxology played on oboe and cello, they faced each other, maybe for the only time, and made a pledge to each other. I thought it might be a marriage, or a renewal of a wounded marriage. Then they celebrated with a hoedown.

This well-made piece left me with questions. I don't know Neblett's background, but it made me a little uncomfortable to see these skillful urban performers revisit an America of chain gangs, barnyard sex, and born-again faith. Performed with contemporary neutrality, even a deliberate avoidance of charm, the dance seemed cliché'd and simplistic. It jolted my mind back even further than the '50s, to the archetypal Americana of Roosevelt's New Deal. I just couldn't see what Neblett had to add to that story.

The visiting Itinerrances company from Marseilles, which has participated in teaching, choreographing, and performing exchanges, changed the title of its piece from Argument to Chatting. Director Christine Fricker's goofy dance for a quartet of mime-actors provided some comic relief from the gloom of the rest of the program. There are these two men and two women on holiday. They lug their suitcases around, greet one another enthusiastically, preen on the beach, flirt, swim, pair up, and finally head home. The dancing seemed to alternate between Graham-influenced jazz and bouncing.