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A little wobbly
Snappy Dance Theater’s Edward Gorey commission
BY IRIS FANGER
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At the Majestic Theatre last weekend, the Snappy Dance Theater version of Edward Gorey began when a large man walked on stage, a voyeur-like stand-in for the author, who would both create and place himself in the world of his pen. Snappy’s stand-in wore a dark coat and a bowler hat and sneakers on his feet, and he carried an umbrella in anticipation of the rainstorm that was sure to come. To the tinkly strains of a music box, he began to draw the tiny, cross-hatched lines of a black-and-white backdrop, using the umbrella as his pen. Different figures were perceived through the dim light only to disappear, like a Hell-gate showing of revelations to come. The howl of a wolf was heard as the man walked off and the figures receded into the gloom. Welcome to the world premiere of The Temperamental Wobble, as Snappy called its FleetBoston Celebrity Series commission based on Gorey’s small stories about mysterious characters who live and die in quick gasps. Snappy brought its appealing mélange of movement drawn from every corner of human endeavor — modern dance, ballet, circus, the street, gymnastics, and the odd turn of a fantastic nature — to bear on the Gorey menagerie. The intertwining of two male bodies made up one fey creature who came to comfort the Innocent Child (Bonnie Duncan), who walked on her knees to convey her age as if she were José Ferrer playing Toulouse-Lautrec in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. Three women climbed slowly from behind tombstones, balancing up and over them, as if they were ghosts coming out to play. A grieving widow visiting a graveyard was followed by a dark shadow of herself, a prophet of impending doom. Sure enough, she hung herself, swinging silently from a hook at stage right while three brightly smiling acrobats showed off their tricks without noticing the body. A covey of umbrella-headed creatures, ultimately rising onto matchstick legs, scurried around the stage. Michael Rodach’s Snappy-commissioned score matched the various moods well in its combination of ominous soundings, minor-key melodies, and startling grunts, groans, and snippets. Violence and sudden death lurked behind nearly all the vignettes that made up the hour and a quarter of The Temperamental Wobble. Joseph Levendusky’s dim lighting scheme matched the shadowy projections of brambly gardens, lonesome graveyards, and dark-walled chambers that served as backdrops. Sometimes the sketches unfolded from beginning to end; sometimes a figure would appear and then vanish. The costumes, credited to Kambriel and Jill Thibault, turned the Gorey characters into properly mournful shapes and outlines. Although Snappy had the tone right — particularly for the forlorn couple performing The Lavender Leotard and for the narrative of the Innocent Child — it lacked a point of view to make the parade of small works add up to more than a visual treat. Also lost was the sardonic gleam in Gorey’s eye and his economy of line and word. Snappy member Martha Mason is credited with the choreography and the direction (aided by the seven other dancers of the company, though only six besides Mason appeared in the work), but she needs to step back, take a hard look, and then mine the gold from the seemingly endless pile-on of disparate images. The first part of the evening, which comprised five compact works from the Snappy repertory, was totally satisfying, veering from Jim Banta and Bess Whitesel in a tango punctuated by whiffs of each other’s armpits to the balancing act of Cathy Bosch and Mason as two halves of a seesaw in the slowly sensual Mirabile Dictu. Snappy needs to shape The Temperamental Wobble to fit its signature pattern of choreography, which is brief, to the point, and perfect for displaying the company’s considerable strengths.
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