Boston's Alternative Source!
 
Feedback

[Dance reviews]

Stretching?
Danny McCusker’s Wide

BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Community dance is all around us. In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen an ensemble of mixed ages in Anna Myer’s Angle of Repose, a chorus of teenagers and their teachers at the National Tap Dance Day celebration, and two historic postmodern people dances, Steve Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover and David Gordon’s The Matter in White Oak Dance Project’s PASTForward. Big community events coming up this summer at Jacob’s Pillow include Twyla Tharp’s 1969 spectacle The One Hundreds and the traveling live documentary about the dance community, From the Horse’s Mouth.

Directors of community works have developed different ways to solve the problem of putting everyday citizens and performers with dissimilar skills into a professional performance. The civilians can be staged en masse so that none will stand out or showcased so that all will have their moment as individuals within a disparate group. They can be given special variants of choreography they share with dancers — beginner and intermediate technique in the case of a school recital, or newly devised movement to suit their abilities if they’re untrained. The staging of the ordinary was a major political statement of the ’60s, and it still is.

Daniel McCusker’s Wide, which was given twice last weekend at the Dance Complex, in Central Square, addressed the community-dance problem with a more ambitious agenda. Using seven dancers and a large ensemble of singers and musicians directed by Chris Eastburn, McCusker made an hour-long series of variations on a handful of musical and choreographic motifs. The participants shifted in and out of the 20 segments, with the dancers sometimes singing, the singers moving, to make a space that seemed to shrink and expand from the smallest solo and duet work to a floor and balcony full of 31 performers.

Both McCusker and Eastburn use formal techniques to structure their material: breaking a song or a movement phrase into smaller elements and rearranging their order, doing the phrase backwards or in retrograde, laying it out for different combinations of performers, and so forth. The movement could be done in unison or counterpoint; so could the songs. The look and the sound could be changed by the way the performers were gathered in the space, the way they were facing, even the way they entered or left.

McCusker’s movement for the seven women was soft and almost passive, made of turns and folds, lunges, rolls, circlings of the hands, arms, the whole body. In pairs or teams, they linked up with gentle touches, rested a head against another’s shoulder, offered gestures to be reciprocated or copied. At one point, four of them appeared in a slow, self-conscious procession, leading with the pelvis or shoulder, looking, I thought, like maidens on a Greek vase. Later on, three of them posed like the Three Graces. But nothing came of these references that I could tell. McCusker danced a solo made of the same phrase parts, but his movement was a little sharper, faster. He and Alison Ball did two duets that combined moving and singing.

Eastburn’s basic material was the folk song “The Water Is Wide,” reinterpreted a dozen different ways, plus a couple other American tunes. A young boy, Adrian Rigopulos, sang “Jacob’s Ladder” while Santi Dewa Ayu did a sort of bare-bones version of the dance phrase. Later on, Ella Buzzotta sang the same song in a throaty contralto. A tiny girl sang one verse of “Sweet and Low” and a woman standing beside her followed with another verse.

I thought the choral material worked the best. A big, massed group in one corner sang “Hard Times Come Again No More” in open, shape-note harmony while two rows of dancers moved out front. In a big movement piece, everyone did a series of arm gestures together with a partner, and then they all sang “The Water Is Wide” backwards.

For all the compositional manipulation and diversity of personnel, I thought the piece was curiously neutral. It was admirable sometimes but not stirring. There were specific song styles (gospel, folk, Baroque) and verbal references (to time, history, home, family, intimacy), but they didn’t induce significant changes in energy or emotionality. The voices, even the mature ones, didn’t project; the musicians (who played guitar, piano, cello, clarinet, and body rhythm) stayed in the background even when they had a chance to let loose. The dancers, with one affectionate attitude, seemed sleepy and uninvested in whatever the text might imply. As much as anything else, the work seemed to be about all of them getting together for mutual admiration but agreeing not to take unnecessary risks.

Issue Date: June 14-21, 2001