| |
|
|
Dance Collective’s 30th, H&H’s Vespro
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
|
|
|
|
|
|
The highlight of Boston Dance Collective’s 30th-anniversary program last weekend at the Tsai Performance Center was Micki Taylor-Pinney’s new Seeing the Forest Through the Trees. This is a good sign for the future. Taylor-Pinney and the other Collective members can choreograph, but they seemed unsure that that was the way to go. The performance never settled down to be reunion, retrospective, joky celebration, or showcase for new work. In Seeing the Forest through the Trees, Harvey Nosowitz’s slides of tree trunks, projected onto four high panels, created the illusion of a dense, vertical woodland. Taylor-Pinney darted out from behind the trees in a unitard spashed with muted grays that almost camouflaged her into the background. Like some wary forest dweller, she remained in the protection of the trees, sniffing and probing with quick direction changes. She hugged the ground, suddenly stretched out and suddenly shrank into a ball, ran in and out. Shadows flitted across the trees, and I thought of the Wilis haunting Giselle’s grave in the forest. Taylor-Pinney began making odd gestures of flicking into the treetops, scraping something off the ground, casting a spell. She seemed more like a troll or a pixie than an animal. When two more creatures emerged from the woods (Irma Leissring and Liz Roncka), she banished them with more conjuring. The rest of the evening seemed long and unfocused. I’ve followed the Dance Collective only in recent years, so I can’t tell whether the program was representative of its history. Three video segments gave us bits of interviews, flashes of (uncredited) dances from the repertory, and reportage by local TV on the Collective’s outdoor performances and summer teaching sessions for teenagers. I guess the idea was to document what’s obviously been a huge amount of work, but the effect was like whizzing through a museum on a nonstop jet. Although it wasn’t overtly stated, my colleague Thea Singer saw the whole evening as a tribute to Dawn Kramer, who is retiring as a director and perhaps as an active contributor to Dance Collective as well. Kramer has been a solid creative force there since its founding. Walk in Progress is her successful 2001 collaboration with Sean Curran in absentia. The premise is charming: Curran is now in New York with a company of his own, so the team video’d a duet that begins with playful walking and soft-shoe that was accompanied on stage by bassist John Clark. Then Kramer steps out of the video and duets with the taped Curran. When her video image joins them, they make a trio. This dance starts you thinking about the logistics of fine dancemaking and the possibilities of dancing on into your mature decades. Kramer continued this theme in her new solo De/Reconstruction, which was in essence a meditation on bowing. The simple nod of the head, the sweeping, grandiose response to an ovation, the affected modesty that brings out even more applause, the stopped-action moments as the performer clings to her glory, the real or imaginary collapse when the lights go out. CHEN SHI-ZHENG’S STAGING of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine for the Handel and Haydn Society comes out of what’s by now a considerable postmodern tradition: attaching stylistically unrelated, even clashing visual elements to the great choral and orchestral works. His bizarre visual concept, and the dances for six women and a man, using techniques of martial arts and traditional Balinese and Javanese dance, actually did resonate with the gorgeous Catholic devotional music. The rows of tacky plastic Madonnas in different sizes lined up in front of the on-stage musicians reminded me of the ranks of puppet characters lined up waiting for their entrance in Wayang Kulit, the Javanese shadow play. These characters, from Buddhist and Hindu texts, enact the highest moral lessons — and pervade Java’s vernacular culture too, including T-shirts, placemats, and every kind of touristic junk. When the dancers first appeared, lugging life-size Madonnas, I thought of Hispanic festivals where huge statues of the Virgin Mary are carried through the streets. It was awkward for the women to handle them; one even seemed to stagger on her way out, and this made the ritual somehow very human. The dancing itself — drawn from the sacred Bedoyo and Srimpi of the ancient Javanese courts and the more down-to-earth but still spiritually powerful Balinese Legong — did convey a calmness, a suspension between Heaven and Earth, that didn’t need specific symbolism to connect it to the high Italian Renaissance.
|
