Fall formal

Schulkind and more at Green Street

by Marcia B. Siegel

Two of the four choreographers on the early fall program called "East/West" last weekend at Green Street Studios seemed to be working with similar, formalist compositional schemes even though their expressive intentions differed. The notion of formalism has bad connotations in art. Supposedly lacking sensitivity to human problems and their remedies, a formalist concerns himself or herself with the raw materials of the trade: structure, design, technique, and the manipulation of themes and motifs. But form and content don't have to be mutually exclusive, and a strong sense of how to shape a work probably never hurt any choreographer.

Marcus Schulkind's three premieres seemed all of a piece except for the musical selections: Brahms waltzes (Trio for Susan), Randy Newman's "Miss You" (Solo), and a piano-violin-cello suite derived from Stravinsky's Pulcinella (Angels in the Shadows). Schulkind's dancers employ a lyrical, flexible movement style in the José Limón tradition, which isn't seen so much anymore.

In Trio, Jim Viera, Shawn Mahoney, and Sara Wiktorowicz developed a series of variations on a vocabulary of stretching, scooping, and pivoting through huge arcs of space. Big movers all of them, they folded in close to their bodies only to open out again. Conversational gestures seemed just a shorthand version of what they really meant to say. Sometimes playful, sometimes serious, never too intense, they were like close friends passing on a street corner and lingering for a chat.

Wiktorowicz might have been dancing a sequel to this episode in Solo, which was dedicated to the late great Boston Ballet dancer Anamarie Sarazin and to Schulkind's associates Rich Kessler and Paul Kafka-Gibbon. Lasting only as long as Randy Newman's song, the dance was like a sad memory that comes to you uninvited with a sharp and passing pain. Now it's mingled in my mind with regret, because the splendid Wiktorowicz is returning to her home in Amsterdam after these concerts.

Schulkind takes on the phrasing and dynamics of music with such restraint that sometimes the music takes over. Angels in the Shadows was an oddly assorted quintet to a chamber score Stravinsky arranged from his ballet Pulcinella. There was a stately solo woman (Erin Koh), a pair of loopy Amazons (Irene Lutts and Nicole Pierce), and a balletic duo (Dianna Daly Blackman and Jim Viera). Schulkind underplayed the allegro of the duet, the edginess of the women's duo, so that they were almost swallowed by the big, brassy changes Stravinsky made for his commedia dell'arte characters.

Carol Somers goes all out with movement, using a montage of different musical selections for their propulsiveness, their general emotive qualities, and for the narrative possibilities of song texts. I was impressed with her risky dynamism when I saw Night and Dreams and Red Rover before. She sets and resets and combines a limited number of very active movements: flailing turns, off-center pivots, antelope jumps, tightrope walks, slamming falls and fast logrolls along the floor. The dancers eventually grow exhausted and the action becomes metaphor. Already though, Somers's movement vocabulary is beginning to seem a bit standardized and programmable, even for a postminimalist.

Co-choreographers Terese Freedman and Jim Coleman work more improvisationally than does Somers or Schulkind, allowing the initial premises of a movement theme to modulate and transpose so that a kind of narrative can emerge. The choreographers then shape and enhance the expressive implications.

Their new duet, Dent, depicts a partnership, a marriage perhaps. They begin with separate statements of desperate isolation and then gradually approach each other. After tentative touchings and punches that carefully fail to connect, they grapple and embrace with all their might. In the aftermath of this almost angry intimacy, he stands on her back; he could be kneading her muscles. Then he lies back on top of her as she slowly gets to her hands and knees and crawls away. It seemed that these antagonists could answer each other's needs, even if their fury would never quite dissolve.

Freedman danced in Falling, along with eight other women in poufy '60s party dresses. This piece joked about adolescent anxieties, rivalries, and whimsy, as recalled by people who've made it into adulthood. Curiously, it was more convincing when it was danced last January in the "Boston Moves" concert by the choreographers' young students from the Five Colleges.