Old woes

Pessimistic Prometheus

by Marcia B. Siegel

Every dance on Prometheus's concert Saturday night at the Tsai Performance Center ended in an inconclusive pose, or else it spooled back to the beginning, so that if the curtain didn't fall, the participants would clearly have to go through their trials all over again. All five pieces had dramatic implications and a gloomy outlook on human behavior. Even the closing dance (La Giornata Omicida -- "The Deadly Day"), which choreographer Tommy Neblett described in the program as a sort of feminist celebration, seemed little more than a chorus line with pugilistic overtones.

The Prometheus performance was this year's dance entry in the BankBoston Celebrity Series's "Emerging Artist" category. Now, unlike the musical offerings on this year's roster, Prometheus Dance is no shy debutante that needs a career start-up. It was founded by Diane Arvanites-Noya 14 years ago and has developed a big repertory and a solid portfolio of local and touring appearances. Since there are several interesting, lesser-known choreographers in the Boston area, I can't fathom the tokenism evident in the Celebrity Series's choice. Who makes these decisions, and what are they looking at?

Prometheus's program certainly didn't present any cutting-edge challenges to the audience. Halfway into the first piece I felt I was regressing a few decades, back to the post-war days of American dance, when life was awful but we were condemned to live it, with metaphysics our only consolation. Arvanites-Noya and co-director Neblett have modern-dance backgrounds, but they've incorporated some trendier elements -- gymnastics, physical theater, and game playing -- that tone down the dance values and increase the accessibility for their investigations into love and/or sexuality.

Noya's duet As I was . . . As You Were (1997) brought together a man and a woman in everyday clothes. They eyed each other speculatively, toyed with a suggestive umbrella, then fell to increasingly passionate embracing that turned into a struggle, and then depletion. Between Blood and Bone (1999), which Noya choreographed with Neblett, could have been a continuation of the former duet, but here the lovemaking was interrupted by sirens and the sound of hovering helicopters. The couple tried to flee from an invisible menace but were stopped by a wall they couldn't climb, and eventually they sagged to the ground, dead or exhausted.

Prometheus's movement style follows a modern-dance tradition that goes back to Anna Sokolow's alienated urbanites and, even earlier, to the kinetic pantomimes of Charles Weidman. Instead of starting with codified dance movements, you start with an everyday gesture or action, and by enlarging it, displacing it to another part of the body, repeating or rhythmicizing it, you nudge it from its everyday look into something that's dancelike but not too esoteric. The work thereby acquires palpable humanistic overtones.

Neblett and Arvanites-Noya have developed a sizable lexicon of embrace derivations where one partner heaves his or her weight onto the other, to be cradled or fondled or carried like a burden in some extreme position. The effort of these contacts and the continual seesaw between attraction and repulsion create a metaphor for a difficult relationship. Reaching out with clutching hands and contracted lower body signifies desire or derision.

In Noya's Triangle (1990), two women yearn after a large man in a white suit. He doesn't seem emotionally involved one way or the other, though he handles them with predatory thoroughness. In The Game (1989), six characters compete quite violently for the right to sit on six folding chairs. One by one they and their chairs are shoved away, until the last woman seems to realize she has no one left to play with. She throws herself and her chair to the floor, and the game can begin again.

All the items on this program came with literary epigraphs and/or notes that, I guess, were meant to give some moral authority to the anguished situations of the dances. For Triangle, the notion of a three-person triangle was explained; for The Game, the notion of a game as a metaphor was explained. Where the program asked for more sophistication from the audience was in its musical accompaniments -- eclectic and strange collages for each dance, often with mysterious singing.

I thought the odd sounds in Nicolas Lens's music for As I was . . . were particularly intriguing. The score featured first a loud waltz with a baritone singing in Latin -- a disconcerting mixture of the sacred and the secular. In another section there was a combination of operatic voices, gong-like percussion, and high, nasal singing that could have come from some South Asian vocal tradition. Sometimes there seemed to be more going on in this music than in the dance.