E-Mail This Article to a Friend Complexities ‘Anniversadance/Danciversary’ BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
	Related Links Dance Complex's official Web site Marcia Siegel reviews Brian Crabtree at the Dance Complex. Marcia Siegel reviews ‘Dancesongs of the Birdozoic’ at the Dance Complex Marcia Siegel critiques Rebecca Rice's performance.

The Dance Complex applied alternate made-up names, "Anniversadance/Danciversary," to its 14th-birthday concerts last weekend at the studio in Central Square. The event too was a composite of ideas from several members of the Complex teaching roster. The six chamber-size works ranged in style from mini ballets to physical encounters, and in tone from the theatrical to the intimate, even private.

Rozann Kraus’s mysterious solo by any other name was accompanied by a program note: "for someone who needs so much more than we can give." Wearing a white lace confection I would situate someplace between a wedding dress and a Playboy bunny costume, Kraus made some twisting, agitated moves threaded with stiff-armed, incomplete port de bras. I thought she looked like a person who was trying to dance but couldn’t make her body do the right thing.

During a good part of the concert I was thinking about the ways dancers inhabit the movement they’re performing. It isn’t just a case of doing a job — they take on a whole attitude about the thing they’re showing to the audience, or become a different person from whoever they are off stage. We expect a certain grandeur from ballet dancers, for instance, but the three women in Rebecca Rice’s Stratas and the five in Margot Parsons’s Etude needed bravado or sheer nerve to bring off balletic turning, posing, and balancing with the audience sitting 10 feet away from them.

Both Rice and Parsons try to play down the showy aspects of ballet technique without losing its advantages. Rice frees up and extends ballet steps into space with Isadora Duncanish skipping on the balls of the feet, relaxed extensions, and tilted turns and balances. Parsons plays compositional tricks, adding and subtracting dancers from patterns you think are already established. Neither of them used pointe shoes.

The postmodern dancers drilled themselves into a sort of performing neutrality in order to combat the perceived aloofness or phoniness of ballet dancers. In Danny Swain’s Good Duck, Dead Duck, a trio of women dressed in white undershirts and ripped white pants engaged in mild acrobatics and grappled one another into knotty embraces on the floor. Between these moves they walked around with a slumped, "everyday" offhandedness that looked more artificial to me than their choreographed slides and spins.

The joint choreography of Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett is always highly theatrical without giving the impression it’s a display of technique. In The Queens’ Spectre, four women dance a territorial quadrille that could involve possession of four high ladderback chairs. At first each slithers and hangs on a chair of her own. Later they rush to exchange places and, growing more frenetic, fall into increasingly intricate games of acquisitiveness, competition, deception, capture. Eventually you realize it’s not the chairs they desire but one another.

Debra Bluth and Olivier Besson are very different physical types and performing personalities, but both are exhilarating to watch. They know they’re dancing, every minute; they know we know it. Bluth opens Here, You, Me with a series of squiggly moves, shapes you’ve never seen before, and sudden complete stops. She’s as fully energized in the stops as she is in the movements, and she looks astonished to be making them.

Besson arrives, an easy, uncomplicated mover, and lies down next to her. He does this rather slowly, bit by bit, adapting to her space. They begin a courtship that, in an ordinary couple, would end in harmony, accommodation. But theirs never does. Moving in close, he manipulates her delicately, turning her by the neck, lifting her by the shoulder blades. He lies across her lap; she angles around him in an ungainly embrace, holds him with her wrists. He slings her around his body; her moves veer past his shoulder.

The remarkable thing is how sexy their misalliance is, and how perfectly tuned in they are to each other’s otherness.