Carol Somers and Lisa Hicks, who shared a program last weekend at Green Street Studios, are colleagues and post–Merce Cunningham choreographers, but you wouldn’t recognize the similarities in their work right off. As if to underline the differences, they both showed solos they’d choreographed to the same set of instructions from Daniel McCusker. When Hicks’s New Solo began, she was stepping backward out of the dark into a circle of light. Calmly, as if it were nothing special, she went through a series of moves and walks. There’d be actions like rotate shoulder back, other shoulder, head back, lift torso, fold forward. Then repeat the same idea with small subtractions and variations.
Hicks’s solo, and her two other dances on the program, seemed dedicated to the early-postmodern dance assumption that anything a dancer or a person does is worth looking at. As an incentive for an entire dancing life, this might not have much longevity, and many choreographers have developed their favorite challenges and concerns into recognizable and far from neutral styles.
Using McCusker’s instructions — we’re not told whether these were physical or structural, images or mental puzzles — Somers also began just outside the spotlight in Wallflower. But her solo immediately took on the flavor of a character portrait. I don’t know whether I would have seen her so clearly as a woman yearning for a partner if she hadn’t had the title, or the Chopin music (a mazurka in F-sharp minor), or the little hopeful lavender net tutu and spangled tanktop. But I would have recognized the desperation in her inviting mazurka steps and everywhichway turns and rocking, nearly somersaulting backward falls.
Somers loads her dances with intensity, and with movement pushed to the extreme. When she works with a group, as in the 1998 quintet Finders Keepers, their collective power seems to rip the room apart. There seems to be no stopping their unison big jumps and runs, their giant steps that are stretched even farther by being anchored on one flexed foot, their falling and scrambling right up again — and there’s no comfort either. After a long time, the driven pace slows down, and they approach one another with incomplete embraces. The lights dim and they line up facing away from the audience. One by one, they topple over to the side, and as the lights go down one woman can be seen stepping carefully over the others’ fallen bodies.
Odd Man Out, Somers’s new dance, seems to continue the theme of alienation — the evenly spaced unison with which the seven dancers fling themselves into big running, jumping circles keeps them from colliding but also keeps them from getting intimate. There’s usually one person who sticks to her or his own movement theme when the group get into accord. Even when the unison breaks up into separate themes, they keep a safe distance apart. There’s a certain mystery about these people’s identities, too. They often dance facing away from the audience, and one whole section takes place in a gloomy greenish light.
The music for Odd Man Out is a group of Dust Bowl songs by Woody Guthrie, sentimental guitar pieces by Leo Kottke, and Bob Dylan’s long poem in tribute to Woody. I thought Somers’s movement matched the score in determination, but her work comes over as angry and despairing against Guthrie’s gritty cheerfulness.
Lisa Hicks also showed two group pieces on the program. Love Songs seemed to draw on the same collection of movements as did her solo, but she gave herself and her partners, Fritz Grobe and Maria Tzianabos, six-inch yellow balls to contend with. As they moved smoothly through their movement sequences, they had the added task of securing the balls against their bodies in as many ways as possible without using the palms of their hands. It wasn’t particularly virtuosic, and they didn’t play up the suggestive possibilities at all, so it wasn’t funny. The dance kept almost looking like juggling or a game of catch, but except for a tease in the last few minutes, it never did deliver on these suggestions. The piece was accompanied by some gorgeous Cecilia Bartoli recordings of Italian love songs.
In Stop and Go, Hicks, with Grobe, Tzianabos, and Harold Philbrook, worked with a limited amount of phrase material in different combinations. I was interested in how much more physically invested in his phrases Philbrook looked than the other three. Moving bigger, with his whole body, even when there was only a small thing to do, he seemed to throw the material’s unshakable objectivity into question.
