E-Mail This Article to a Friend The beat goes on The New Danish Dance Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow; Donna Uchizono at Concord Summer Stages BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Both pieces shown by the New Danish Dance Theater July 8 through 11, in its American debut at Jacob’s Pillow, relied on verbal and jazz scores from the Beat Generation of the 1950s and pre-postmodern ’60s. When you listen for a couple of hours to the long-gone voices of that era intoning their notion of liberated lit, you realize what a huge change the intervening half-century has wrought in our culture. It was one thing to celebrate sex, drugs, and culture bashing during what was called the Silent Generation. Today, anything that isn’t legal is probably toxic. Singing from the Beats’ hymnal in 2004 doesn’t imply defiance or saintliness, it’s more apt to be a confession and a plea for social rehab. Maybe that’s why the performance felt vaguely out of joint to me.

I usually take verbal accompaniments lightly in a dance performance. Words can set up thematic road maps for a dance, but, verbally dependent as we are, it’s easy to get detoured into the text and lose track of the dancing. So I did tune out on the wordy specifics of Shadowland and Graffiti after I got the idea. Anyway, it seemed to me that choreographer Tim Rushton was as interested in the sound of the words and their rhythmic shape as he was in the poetics.

In both works, Rushton was at his best when working in that old, post-Beat idiom, mixed media. What I remember vividly about the performance are the scenes where words, music, movement, light, and scenic effects meshed together. In Graffiti, dancers move through a blue space with a white laser beam trolling slowly back and forth across them. Life-size films of dancers appear to levitate on the backdrop; you see that they’re the same dancers as the four men and a woman who one by one have lain down on the floor and are slowly changing position there. It takes a minute or two to realize that the films were taken from directly overhead and that the filmed dancers are duplicating the movements of the live dancers. It’s disorienting and satisfying at the same time to come upon a double image that must have been engineered with such detachment. This is all taking place while two other dancers are moving through the space with another theme. The laser beam is still scanning, and one by one it erases the filmed dancers; their counterparts get up from the floor and leave.

Graffiti seemed to be examining how individuals imprint their identity on others and the extent to which anyone needs that created Other for survival. The dilemma unfolds in a recurring duet between Stina Mårtensson and Edhem Jesenkovic that acquires new information as it gets inserted among stretches of group choreography. He stands in one place while she sizes him up. She moves in with a pot of red paint. At first she draws red traces along the veins in his arms, across his shoulders, down his back. He shrinks away while she does this. Each new position gives her another surface to paint on. The five other dancers echo his movements.

As she paints and he submits, you wonder more and more about their relationship. Is this simple sado-masochistic play? Is he a slave, a prisoner? A dog in training? He shudders and cringes, lashes out and yanks himself off center by the elbows, but he lets her do her work. Does she have some plan for curing him from an unknown complaint? At some point, she mimes giving herself a drug injection.

The other dancers provide a sort of movement refrain to this ongoing drama. In the background drones the sodden, wearily defiant voice of William Burroughs reading from his stories. In between painting sessions, Jesenkovic goes out and comes back clean. Mårtensson paints him again.

The last time they enact their ritual, she scrubs him with red paint all over, as if she’d like to take his skin off. The word LIEBE appears on the backdrop. Burroughs rasps the Marlene Dietrich song "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" ("Falling in Love Again") in drawling, drunken German. Jesenkovic is alone, fixed in place, flailing and twitching in a fading spotlight on a red floor. Burroughs’s scatology peters out into mumbling growls of contempt.

DONNA UCHIZONO’S WORK is even darker and less fathomable than Rushton’s, but it seems more modern to me. Modern as in warm under the cool, intent on holding out prospects rather than announcing itself. Uchizono’s "The Salon Project," Thursday night’s Summer Stages Dance performance at Concord Academy, started with three preliminary gambits before settling into the long, luxurious dance Low.

Barefoot and wearing a floor-length black sheath with a simulated strapless top attached to a black velvet choker, Uchizono first explained Low’s distant connections to the tango. She had too much respect for the tango to make one of her own, she said, so she choreographed mainly for the legs, displacing the tension she sees between the torsos of traditional tango dancers.

This got a little clearer when she invited the audience to come up and learn a phrase. Company members Levi Gonzalez, Andrew Clark, and Carla Rudiger demonstrated and coached the six pairs of volunteers in a duet that had a lot of tango elements to it — the close-together facings of the partners, the elaborate circling leg gestures, the assertive move that touches off the partner’s counter-move. Unlike tango, Uchizono’s phrase didn’t seem to have any rhythmic definition to it.

After a brief feedback session with the volunteers, Uchizono told us more about the background of Low, explaining how she’d worked with groups of indigenous Argentinians and learned to slow down her natural preference for speed. The resulting dance worked its way through a series of strange encounters and passages over 50 minutes or so, gradually accumulating significance and intensity. I didn’t recognize the original tango phrase until near the end, but later I thought that all the movements had grown from pieces of it.

As the lights came up to a glow, the three dancers were on the floor, facing away from the audience, with Rudiger tilted stiffly against Gonzalez’s prone body and Clark lying off to one side. The men flexed their feet, swung their legs out, then began rotating and tacking across the floor by pushing with their toes, legs, and shoulders, still lying down. When they began to rise, Rudiger got hefted upright without changing her position, and somehow shifted from Gonzalez’s back to Clark’s. Those two walked away, leaving Gonzalez on the floor again.

Lying on his back, before starting a long sequence of backward lunging steps with his head dropped to one side, Gonzalez slowly plucked a white thing off his knee with the toes of his other foot. A feather? Where did that come from? Gonzalez took no notice of the object, but as he circled the space, you saw other pieces of white stuff on the floor. I dismissed them as masking-tape markers that dancers sometimes use, or fluff someone had forgotten to sweep away. But a few minutes later, Clark entered with Rudiger curled face down across his shoulders, and as he strode across the back, she dribbled white feathers from her hands, leaving a thick trail behind.

What makes Donna Uchizono so intriguing is that she can produce these images of extreme oddness out of what seem to be the most ordinary, predictable, even tedious physical actions. You’re watching the men do a duet, with some of the foot maneuvers from the tango phrase. Their dialogue begins to imply a competition. They hook feet and balance together until Clark falls. Rudiger blows in like a sudden squall and spills an armful of iridescent black feathers over him.

The dance treads on, through solos and duets, a trio, always putting together and extending the basic movement material in different ways. Then Gonzalez and Rudiger are doing the tango phrase, which blossoms from linear sliding, circling steps and hooking contacts into embraces and big arched turnings that escalate to an orgiastic release, their upper bodies flinging almost out of control. Guy Yarden’s music for unnamable instruments and electronics goes its own way, so I think the dancers must have to be totally in synch as they create their own rhythms and intricate changes of phrasing.

Gonzalez and Rudiger looked as if they were in entirely different states during this last duet. He seemed dazed, a sleepwalker, with his eyes closed except for moments when he stared at her. She let her focus rest on him, then swing out to take in the space. She seemed alert enough to be initiating their moves, but then at times he would lead her, with subtle signals only an intimate collaborator could have sensed.

Clark returned and Gonzalez draped an arm around his shoulder, hinting at a new seduction as they watched Rudiger walk out. When I tried to imagine this piece done by two women and a man or some other combination of genders and roles, I realized how fraught it was with sexual tension. Like the tango, only not like it at all.