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Dancespeak
Boston Conservatory’s Murray Louis tribute
BY DEBRA CASH


Related Links

Boston Conservatory's official Web site

Most successful modern-dance companies focus on the work of a single choreographer — not because a megalomaniac is at the helm but because distinct choreographic styles make consistent technical demands. Dancers who master a style can speak it like a mother tongue, expressing their own individuality and personalities through its shaping. When Yasuko Tokunaga decided to create a tribute to American choreographer Murray Louis, she allowed the Boston Conservatory’s pre-professional students to focus their attentions more clearly than they can in mixed rep. It was more than time for a local organization to mount a Louis tribute: though he’s been ailing, he was on hand last Thursday night in a dapper moustache and graphic argyle sweater to accept a bouquet in appreciation of his half-century of dancing and dance making.

"Witty" is the word usually used to describe Louis’s works. He is at heart a jokester looking over his shoulder at classicism in all its guises and poking fun at its latent premises by exaggerating them under a kindly light. His wit was central to each of the Conservatory’s choices: Schubert (1977), Index ( . . . to a necessary neurosis) (1973), and Four Brubeck Pieces (1984).

In Schubert (the Trout Quintet, played live by student musicians), he hears the froth in the flood of running arpeggios and plays with the rush of notes by freezing them into crisp accents. Serious form and whimsy co-exist: the dancers in their popsicle-colored unitards look like athletes lifted from the side of Greek vases, bouncing along on springs.

Index ( . . . to a necessary neurosis), its unnecessary parenthesis intact, reflects the same oddball B-movie imagination as the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, where scientists are miniaturized and injected into a man’s bloodstream. With tendrils (or are they varicose veins?) on their costumes and bathing caps on their heads, the ensemble twitter and bend like a troupe of Gumby dolls to the plonking strings and woodwind growls of the Oregon Ensemble. They are creatures under a microscope (or perhaps in a spittoon, given the backdrop of smiling dentures). Who could guess that as they go about their enzyme-regimented business, being plasma could be fun?

Four Brubeck Pieces is the Louis work that’s aged the best because he’s speaking his natural syncopated language. Most of it, especially the "Three To Get Ready," edges into Lindy-hop land. "Take Five" gives each featured dancer a chance to show off.

Do the Conservatory dancers have what it takes? After all, they’re not members of the Murray Louis or Nikolais Dance Companies — they come to this repertoire because that’s what they’re being asked to master this semester. Carefully staged by Alberto del Saz, the dances have the right gloss and swagger. The challenge of Louis’s work is keeping his swift changes of shape clear and specific in the midst of a musical idea. Of the opening-night group (the show, which will go to the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York December 17-18, is double cast), Megan Krauszer was poised and gracious in Schubert, with an irrepressible giggle under her shoulder shimmy. In Schubert and the split leaps of Brubeck, Dean de Luna showed carefree punchiness. Tiffany Spearman, with impossibly long legs and an ability to convey delight no matter how hard she’s working, made invisible instruments materialize in her pantomiming hands during Brubeck. I liked the cameo by Matthew Uriniak that made him look like a rubber lizard and Victor Wisehart’s holding his knee and passionately bongoing his ribcage in Index. But though every dancer had mastered the words and some the sentences, only a few could convey the communicative choreographic paragraphs. It takes more to be a native speaker of Murray Louis’s language.


Issue Date: November 18 - 24, 2005
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