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Togetherness
Kelly Donovan; Bridgman/Packer
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Kelley Donovan’s work is rooted in abstraction the old modern-dance way. You don’t come right out and dance your feelings or your personality because that would be egotistical. And if you dance about something else, you can’t be literal or pantomimic. The solution, for Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and the founders of the only serious alternative to ballet in the 20th century, was abstraction. The dancer extrapolates out physically from a real gesture or discharge of emotions so that the movement engages the whole body, but the original action is there only as a phantom, an inkling, a metaphor. Think Picasso’s guitars.

So Donovan’s dances about " transformation, healing, and women’s history " at Green Street Studios last weekend asked for a certain imagination on the part of the viewer. We can easily interpret unison dancing as expressive of a community, but Donovan’s movement analogs didn’t get much deeper or more specific than that. In all the group pieces on the program, women banded together, they differed, they paired up and lifted each other, individuals arrived, individuals left, individuals did their own thing while the group danced together.

One piece, Plunge, was a comedy. Arranged in formal floor patterns and doing balletic steps and leaps, the six women carried little plumber’s helpers, at first like soldiers on parade. Then, accompanied by a Johann Strauss waltz, they riffed through several melodramatic encounters using the plungers as trumpets, daggers, fly swatters, cell phones, and other, more esoteric props.

In the other group pieces, individuals behaved almost randomly but collected into formal patterns without evident reason. The quartet in Chasing a Thicker Skin began a canon in which one woman followed another’s movement sequence, but each one entered at a different interval. They transgressed the rules of strict canon form more and more as they went on, without entirely losing the idea of imitation.

Conversation out of Silence began with eight women slowly revolving to the sounds of rain, breaking glass, voices. (The score was by Gregg Bendian.) Then a guitar, bass, and bells set up a persuasive rhythm, but after the dancers let it draw them into a circle, their dance pattern seemed to invoke its own development. Pretty much independent of the music, the women passed from one ritual phase to another. As three of them were drawn close into the center, the others circled around them. They all could have taken turns in the center but I wasn’t sure. The outer circle seemed to be a dance they all shared; one after another they exploded out of it, then returned.

Later they all sat on the floor in a diagonal line, looking at the audience while slowly revolving, continuing their collective progress across the space while one after another burst out of the pattern and eased back in. They ended the dance as individuals, meeting up with each other to do supported cartwheels and upside-down lifts.

In Changing Skin, the first of two solos, Kelley Donovan, a rotund woman, possibly pregnant, did big scooping, spiraling, turning movements with unexpected little jumps and drops to the ground. She could have been describing herself for all I knew. Strange Attractor was similar, but instead of emphasizing the circular directions, Donovan favored straight lines and seemed to move more solidly along the ground.

Donovan’s movement was interesting to me; that of the 18 other women grew familiar too quickly. Or maybe I mean the individual women didn’t grow familiar enough. Together the whole six dances took an hour and 15 minutes, and each one featured a different cast, with four people returning in the octet. There didn’t seem to be time enough in any of these dances to read their movement or their intentions.

Then again, the length of a dance may not be the only gauge of its depth. The visiting duo Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer showed five short dances and excerpts Thursday night in the Jackson Dance Lab at Tufts University. Each piece had an idea that got worked on or an image disclosed.

In Kata, Davy Bridgman-Packer, a 12-year-old black belt in karate, demonstrated some tough moves. His parents’ subsequent duet became a confrontation as it absorbed the strong attack, the vibrating build-ups, and staccato slashings of martial arts. In Lava Falls, Bridgman and Packer stood on two platforms and talked their way very matter-of-factly through a dance. " I touch your face. I drop my hand . . .  " When they started to do what they’d just described, the dance turned out to be far more elaborate and even mysterious than the words foretold.

Issue Date: October 24 - 31, 2002
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