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Troubled sleep
Prometheus’s Dreams
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
Dreams
Presented by Prometheus Dance. Choreography by Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett. Sets by Jayne Murphy and Richard Lindley. Lighting and projections by Linda Taylor and Paul Marr. At Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, through February 1.


A group of women in black lamé bathing suits are lolling on the ground chattering. They could be vacationers on a beach. Except they’re all talking at once, and as they’re talking they’re rolling sideways, pulling up into a curled-over crouch, crawling forward, stretching out again, all together. Then they’re standing shoulder to shoulder and launching a chorus line in affectless slow motion.

Things start out with a grain of sense in Prometheus’s new extended work Dreams, then smoothly slide off into regions where logic doesn’t apply. The moves happen at the wrong speed or break off inconclusively, or detour into a different scenario altogether. Using the formal devices of choreography, Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett suggest the way a dreamer treads among his most dangerous fears and unsettling fantasies, steadied by the certainty he’ll return to ordinary life. In an epigraph to the program, the writer Jorge Luis Borges describes the way we extricate ourselves from imagined catastrophe: our dreams are projections, not our real selves.

The dance takes place in a white space — white floor and side flats, with a backdrop of 12 dissimilar white paneled doors. Projections and lighting effects can make the space seem to be burning, or whirling, or cracking open underfoot like a thawing ice field. John Kusiak’s eclectic music underlies each new atmosphere.

A man in a black suit (Ivan Andres Korn) comes out through the two center doors and runs toward the audience, then back up to the doors, over and over again, in a panic of indecisiveness. He’s joined by three women, who roll on the floor, competing for each other’s favor. They circle around the man protectively as three more women appear and try to engage him. Eventually one woman attaches herself to him, and they dance together briefly.

Sexual attraction and competition seemed to be the themes running through all of Dreams. The protagonist and the eight women and two other men pair up with each other in social dancing that escalates into rolling embraces and almost violent discord. The women form mock chorus lines and leggy water ballets; the men band together to "frame" them with mirrors. The games are not exactly playful but they stop short of bloodshed.

Things repeat compulsively. A woman in a black taffeta dress runs in circles and dives headlong at the three men, who stare straight ahead until the last minute. Without looking surprised, they catch her horizontally in their arms. They dump her out. She starts her circles and dives again. When she seems too exhausted to go on, another woman takes up the running-and-diving onslaught.

Woven among these encounters are bizarre and even sinister happenings. Bodies completely encased in an iridescent black material slither across the floor like leeches. A woman in a 19th-century dress (Andy Taylor-Blenis) walks through, trailing long ropes with skeins of golden hair tangled in them. Later she appears and sings "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair" in a breathy soprano.

The man in the black suit leads on a line of woman like a chorus of Greek maidens. They’re wearing black, rumpled bathing suits with heavy gold fringe draped around their hips. Later, with fur stoles over the women’s bathing suits, couples clamp together, chest-to-chest, in a foxtrot, and the stoles become sensuous body armor between them. Arvanites-Noya and Neblett designed the strange but evocative costumes.

In one long scene the dancers seem to be praying, clustered together in a tight group. All but two of them have their eyes closed, and their anxious fingers reach for heaven but discover each other’s faces instead. The music morphs from a gospel choir into a mambo and back again.

The singing woman stands quietly while a man crowns her with a World War I helmet. Another man, in a marine uniform, hands her a wooden rifle. The chorus applauds.

Korn, the protagonist, walks through the shifting dreamscape, observing, abetting, maybe even imagining everything that happens. After many more visions, the whole group dances a long swooping and turning dance phrase that seems to change but also to stay the same. Korn does the phrase in the background, but gradually the others begin marching in a circle around him. One by one they go out through the doors, and finally he exits too, closing the doors behind him.


Issue Date: January 30 - February 5, 2004
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