E-Mail This Article to a Friend Snapshots Snappy Dance does Edward Gorey BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
	Related Links Snappy Dance Theater's official Web site Iris Fanger reviews the Snappy Dance Theater version of Edward Gorey.

At the end of Edward Gorey’s Christmas tale The Haunted Tea-Cosy, a reclusive hero and an unidentified female are dancing a pas de trois with a pear-shaped, larger-than-human insect. This bug, perhaps the larval form of Jacob Marley, has shown the hero "affecting scenes" from his neighbors’ secret lives — disagreements, abductions, mysterious losses, in 30 impeccable drawings. Now the hero has invited them all to a party. As the trio perform their balletic acrobatics, Gorey’s accompanying caption hints of future delights at "the very edge of the unseemly."

Several of Gorey’s works inspired The Temperamental Wobble, which occupied the first half of Snappy Dance Theater’s program last weekend at Boston Center for the Arts’ Calderwood Pavilion. But the sensibilities of Edward Gorey and Snappy Dance are worlds apart. To Gorey, there was nothing weird or extraordinary about a bug hoisting a woman with two of its legs and clutching a man’s toppling torso with another two. He trusted that these bizarre creatures had a life, with adventures even more sinister, benign, or erotic than what he’d put on the page.

For Snappy Dance, the acrobatics are the main point.

In episode after episode of The Temperamental Wobble, we see the circumstantial Gorey idea but not its subtle premonitions. The piece opens with a spooky image: three dark shapes in the fog, tombstones maybe. Slowly, women in shredded garments emerge from behind the stones. They start climbing over the stones, which begin to bend and crumple under the shifting weight. After we’ve seen the women in a repertory of acrobatic positions, the stones move off and return as three men in dusty-gray leotards who support the raggedy women in slinky duets.

Edward Gorey’s æsthetic is the enemy of such concreteness. His books overflow with would-be pedophiles, demented nuns and nannies, genteel murderesses, secret embezzlers. But even when he shows us these persons in flagrante (usually he doesn’t), he implies that there’s an even more dastardly and excusable reason for their crimes.

Instead of provocative questions — what’s in that package? who are those two men in red and white stripes trundling along together like a wheelbarrow? — The Temperamental Wobble regales us with funny poses and slapstick jokes. Gorey-esque images get carefully re-created from time to time, only to congeal into Pilobolitic human smokestacks and pretzels.

One man mugs and pantomimes as an offstage voice reads a Gorey Alphabet. Music from Les Sylphides plays on a scratchy recording, prompting a buffoonish parody of a ballet pas de deux. People do gymnastics and tricks with teacups on their heads.

Heavily drenched in the macabre, Gorey’s wit is neither absurdist nor dadaist. It’s really an extension of the fairy-tale genre. For him, the unnatural could be construed in the terms of real life. I think that’s why he loved ballet. His drawing of a cat ensconced in a large vase playing the flute (Dancing Cats, 1980) is whimsical, but what strikes to your heart is the blissful look on the cat’s face.

After the intermission, when I was longing to go home and revisit my collection of Edward Gorey books, there were five short pieces in the same vein. Bonnie Duncan sat in a swing trapeze. She changed position, waited while the audience looked at the position, changed to a new position. Kyle Deschamps did a three-minute acrobatic solo with tours en l’air to a Celtic song. There was a little skit about a businessman and a littering lout. They challenged each other with slapping, tapping body rhythms, but this potential dance dissolved into another round of flips and somersaults.

The program ended with Lumen, which like the rest of the evening was directed by Snappy Dance artistic director Martha Mason. Seven dancers postured and contrived new lifts and carries. The succession of technicolor lighting effects that surrounded them didn’t make them look any more original or dancerly.