Thursday, April 23, 2009

At least it’s not Taxing: Jack Ferver’s "Death is Certain" @ Danspace Project, NYC, April 18, 2009

The setting of Danspace Project’s home at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery seemed markedly different from the moment one walked in to attend Jack Ferver’s Death is Certain on Saturday night. To accommodate an intimate audience, facing double rows of chairs had been arrayed on the wooden Sanctuary floor that we usually experience as a fully open performance space. The seating arrangement stretched along the length of both sides and gave the look and feel of a fashion runway, hemmed in at the far end by a grand piano, and, on stands, a microphone and an electric guitar.

Lively chatter suddenly quieted as Ferver, John McGrew, Liz Santoro, and Tony Orrico walked in pairs between the rows of onlookers. But the house lights did not fade for many minutes. And although familiar enough to anyone who has entered a room filled with voluble folks of a sociable evening, only to have them stop and stare, the self-consciousness of these four performers smacked of a heightened sense of play at once intriguing and slightly precious.

Mr. Ferver bears a strikingly impish resemblance to Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame, and has achieved a certain celebrity of his own both as a dance maker and as an actor in film and television. Having taken a seat next to McGrew on the bench at the piano, he puckishly handed sealed envelopes to Orrico and Santoro. These two, flanking the stand mic, opened his dispatches with all the pregnancy of award presenters. After exchanging slightly pained glances with the choreographer, they launched into a somewhat stilted reading of the dialogue which Ferver had ostensibly prepared just for this evening's show.

While the text has proved forgettable, the radiant performers have not. One of the many gifts Ferver has bestowed on his audience with this 50-minute dance one-act arrives in the exquisite way in which he allows us to get comfortable with and take in this talented tribe. The most telling moment in this sequence Saturday occurred when Orrico stepped on one of Santoro’s lines and the luminous Liz covered by simply repeating the phrase with wry and antic aplomb. All at once, she has overcome awkwardness with charm. Who says dancers can’t act?

Near the end of the dialogue, the script calls for Santoro to walk away from the mic toward the sanctuary entrance, stop and return. Not only does this, and its subsequent repetitions, reinforce the catwalk set up, but it also allows us to recall the group’s initial entrance. At the same time it introduces the evening’s major spatial design motif. With a minimum number of elements in movement, song, spoken word and light (as designed by Kathy Kauffman), the four performers achieve a maximum of impact through the precise deployment and development of Ferver’s themes of desire, subversion, control, chaos and social and sexual discomfit.

Below: Liz Santoro (ctr) kicks and flails away between Jack Ferver (l) and Tony Orrico

These excucursions take place in relation to a sense of gravity as a force of both physical and social attraction. Santoro kicks and flails down the runway 5 times surrounded by the ineffective ministrations of Ferver and Orrico who, at the conclusion of each pass, bundle her between them as if she were a trussed turkey and haul her back to the starting point. Orrico later drags the other two, who lie behind his feet and in tow, down this same path as he leans forward against their resistance in a hobbled and struggling walk. All three repeatedly pull their own mortal coils painfully along the floor from either a seated or prone position. Ferver’s work puts me in mind of fine architecture embellished with rude and raunchy gargoyles. The performers'intricate teamwork finds its compliment in the way each has been allowed to shine.

McGrew’s music, building from a simple five note repeated figure to related chords to hummable songs, often breaks out of its intermittent role as movement accompaniment to stand alone as the choreography stills. These oases of sound provide welcome respite amidst the angst-ridden sojourns I’ve described. Whether delivered solo in the composer’s sweet high tenor, or in harmony with Ferver’s mostly able baritone, they allow us to refresh and absorb.

Right: Tony Orrico, Jack Ferver (with mic), Liz Santoro, and John McGrew (guitar)

Ferver’s own American Idol moment, sung with the mic occupying the center of the playing space and separating Santoro from Orrico provides the single most cogent explication of Death’s themes in its lyrics and delivery. All the while it reasserts and underlines the writer/choreographer’s, well, centrality in the piece’s unfolding. This counterbalances the other two dancers’ primacy in the movement end of the evening’s proceedings.

The voluptuous Santoro, with her Bernadette Peters hair and her glorious skin shining from the scoop necked, short sleeved summer dress in which she begins the work, dances and acts vibrantly, if not always fearlessly, in her many moments as the piece’s sly kinetic catalyst. The lean and tattooed Orrico’s brilliantly off-center solo near the piece’s close matches some of the most original and profoundly humanistic choreography I have seen this year with some of the most virtuosic and soulful dancing. Combining some of the hung-from-above qualities of Petrushka with a feel for tilting invention reminiscent of Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A,” dance design and dancer meet in an unlikely apotheosis as Orrico pitches himself from side to side down the runway.

A slightly uncomfortable, somewhat sheepish adolescent quality extends to many moments in the evening and finds overemphasis in the five costume changes that the three dancers undertake; from various clothing through underwear to nakedness and back to underwear with shirts. It can also be seen in the winningly nerdy dancing that engages McGrew during a passage in which he echoes the trio's terpsichore to some of his own recorded music. Think of a masculine version of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s dancing as Elaine on Seinfeld.

Jack Ferver, Tony Orrico and Liz Santoro (l to r above) in the final moments of Death is Certain

Death is Certain plays out as a fun evening with cool and sexy friends whose hidden drives and agendas one warily and sometimes giddily perceives. But if the smell of teen spirit adheres to the work, it cannot undermine the weight and Walt Whitmanesque resistance to convention and to the dark side at its generous heart. Death may be certain, but the search for love and a place in the world can be anything but.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Second Avenue Dance Company Retro Concert April 1 – 6, 2009, New York, NY, (excerpted)











Catherine DeAngelis in the opening solo of Susan Marshall's "Name by Name" (left)*


In an odd bit of synchronicity, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts presented its major Spring Dance concerts coincidental with the culmination of “March Madness” – the men's and women's NCAA basketball championships. In an oft-repeated TV spot shown during the tournament a voiceover reminds us, “There are over 400,000 college athletes, and almost all of us will be going professional in something other than sports.”

The Tisch School stands among the elite in academic dance programs worldwide. Its concert “bracket” featured a two-program schedule. Each concert consisted of six works. Susan Marshall’s 2007  “Name by Name,” which led off each program, deployed 18 women to sound several intriguing themes and ideas that echoed through the rest of both programs.

The piece opens with the riveting Catherine DeAngelis lying at our feet, cut off from view from the waist down by the red stage curtain that falls across her hips. To a piano theme from composer David Lang's “Increase” she enacts a solo of hand, arm and torso gestures. She seems to enfold and reach through space as if half in dream, longing for a missing bed partner.

Slowly the curtain parts to reveal the remainder of the cast arrayed in formal corps de ballet poses across the front of the stage standing and kneeling in parallel lines. As Lang's music adds voices to become a driving Glass/Reich like engine, Marshall will revisit and develop all of these early theatrical and movement themes. The revelations and surprises she introduces and unravels weave a vibrant spatial tapestry. She shoots and shuttles fugue-like trios, duets, quartets, variations on the corps lines, circling and darting cross stage runs, falls, rolls, and balletic friezes and figures almost continuously through her warp and woof.

Marshall's impassioned yet stoic work, created at the height of the debacle in Iraq, put me much in mind of the human imperative to carry on in the face of incomprehensible and essentially unspeakable loss; the dancing eloquent in its matter-of-fact reserve. In program notes, she dedicates the piece to her mother and acknowledges the collaboration of its original Juilliard cast.

The assertion of, in this case female, fortitude elucidates a universal theme while evoking issues much more closely at hand. For the women of Tisch, along with their much less numerous male counterparts, have acquitted themselves splendidly across the several nights of this capstone to their college careers.

It seems apparent that almost all if not all of the men in the Second Ave Dance Company can and will work as paid professional dancers if they want to work. Some have already been offered and have accepted such jobs. In spite of talent and accomplishment at least as great as that of the men, the outlook in the women's bracket looks much more like that of the athletes in the NCAA. This rite of Spring,  therefore, may offer the last best hope for many of them as maturing artists, and Marshall’s work both acknowledges and celebrates a signal moment in these lives.

“Name by Name” fully redeems its title. Somewhere in my head, as the stage lights fade before the bow, that stalwart line of women, shoulder to shoulder, still advances.

* photo by Ella Bromblin copyright 2009

Sex and the City Dancer: Second Avenue Dance Company Retro Concert April 1 – 6, 2009 (full version)

In an odd bit of synchronicity, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts presented its major Spring Dance concerts coincidental with the culmination of “March Madness” – the men's and women's NCAA basketball championships. In an oft-repeated TV spot shown during the tournament a voiceover reminds us, “There are over 400,000 student athletes, and almost all of us will be going professional in something other than sports.”

The Tisch School stands among the elite in academic dance programs worldwide. Its concert “bracket” featured a two-program schedule. Each concert consisted of six works. Susan Marshall’s 2007  “Name by Name,” which led off each program, sounded several intriguing themes and ideas that echoed through the rest of both programs.


The piece opens with the riveting Catherine DeAngelis lying at our feet, cut off from view from the waist down by the red stage curtain that falls across her hips. To a piano theme from composer David Lang's “Increase” she enacts a solo of hand, arm and torso gestures. She seems to enfold and reach through space as if half in dream, longing for a missing bed partner. Suddenly she finds herself joined by the torsos of four other dancers who squirt simultaneously halfway under the curtain as if squeezed beyond its skin by some mounting somnolent pressure.

(above) Catherine DeAngelis in the opening solo of Susan Marshall’s “Name by Name" *

Slowly the curtain parts to reveal the remainder of the cast arrayed in formal corps de ballet poses across the front of the stage in standing and kneeling parallel lines. As Lang's music adds voices to become a driving Glass/Reich like engine, Marshall will revisit and develop all of these early theatrical and movement themes. The revelations and surprises she introduces find their most compelling expression in a series of solos that anchor the scene in a pool of light near the back left hand corner of the stage.

As the tableau clears, the corps lines pushed off by the dreamy floppers, DeAngelis has been left alone in the arms of Marlene Desiree Watts who, releasing her drooping partner out of their encircling light, commences the pattern that will continue almost to the end of the piece. In a repeating series of moves delineated by a sharp turn and one kneed drop to the floor, the fearless, eloquent and athletic Watts gives way to the fierce, muscular and powerful Dana Thomas and eventually to every other member of the cast who pass name by name through a vibrant spatial tapestry. Marshall weaves the remainder of the tapestry with fugue-like trios, duets, quartets, variations on the corps lines, circling and darting cross stage runs, falls, rolls, and balletic friezes and figures. These shoot and shuttle almost continuously through her warp and woof even as the front-buttoning cotton dresses that complete Fritz Masten's costuming move mysteriously from dancer to dancer.

(l to r above) Laurel Snyder, Marlene Desiree Watts, and Brittany Murchie in Susan Marshall’s “Name by Name" *

The piece reaches its climax and here come the bodies, rolling in two parallel lines toward the audience from under the black back curtain to bracket the final soloists in their lighted pool. This curtain now parts to reveal a cyclorama at the back of the stage the color of blue sky. The effect opens the stage as if the gates of heaven had swung back and carries the viewer forward into the piece’s resolution as relentlessly as Ravel's Bolero can carry the listener.

Marshall's impassioned yet stoic work, created at the height of the debacle in Iraq, put me much in mind of the human imperative to carry on in the face of incomprehensible and essentially unspeakable loss; the dancing eloquent in its matter-of-fact reserve. In program notes, she dedicates the piece to her mother and acknowledges the collaboration of its original Juilliard cast.

Intriguingly, not only does “Name by Name” set the tone for what will follow, it also introduces movement motifs that seem to recur in many of the other pieces. While a dead run across the stage space represents a common enough way of human locomotion and may be useful as a textural element, its almost compulsive repetition caused me to begin to wonder what attractive or urgent force or activities must exist in the wings. What could be the significance of a hand held up to the side of the face as if shielding a dancer more or less in profile from the audience's gaze, and why did 3 out of 8 choreographers repeat this motif?  Could there be something in the air these days that has choreographers designing partnering in which one dancer slides the back of his or her neck into the outstretched palm of another? Can quirky dance vocabulary go viral?

NYU alum Brook Notary's “Grid,” it's five parallel stage-width white ropes stretching at hip level to divide the stage horizontally like a musical graph, plays with the theatrical space and pushes the boundaries of the proscenium in its stylish exploration of what lies between and outside the lines. Lara deBruijn's altered black suit costumes for 7 men and 7 women and John Elliott Oyzon's moody mixed-media digitalized score, combine with the set and the lighting to suggest an urban environment struggling to contain hidden desires and agendas. Driven by its own effects, however, the piece ultimately seems to fall short of its striking setting and cool ambition. Christeen Stridsberg, Samuel Wentz and Hee Ra Yoo stood out among the strong cast in the physically challenging, often daring choreography.

(l to r above) Elliot Reiland, Jesse Beck, Lauren Etter, Lara Gemmiti, Saeed Siamak, Elizabeth Beres and Tracy B. Gilland in Brook Notary's "GRID" *

Jill Johnson's collaboration with the dancers on a piece “based on the original phrases and governing principals (sic) of William Forsythe's work Room as it Was (2002)” here titled “Room/Room” echoes Marshall's formal explorations and attention to detail but fails to achieve her impact. Performed by separate casts of nine on alternating nights the dancing unfolds in silence until the last 45 seconds, when a fragment of Thom Willems music scratches its way into the space occupied by an almost motionless standing soloist. If Forsythe's work can be fairly described as deconstructionist, “Room/Room” with its Forsythian mix of dancers in toe shoes or socks, bright rehearsal clothes-like costumes, and twisty formal patterns shot through with stillness might best be described as a deconstruction of a deconstruction.

The student choreographers, for their part, seemed slightly less susceptible, though by no means immune, to tropes. Jesse Beck's “Eurydice,” set against an original score by Mighty Five, seems to re-imagine the fate that launched a thousand myths from the female protagonist's point of view. Our heroine appears to be two faced, as embodied by the luminous duo of Elizebeth Randall and Megan Roup. In approaching her irretrievable loss, she appears to have had a mind of her own, coming and going seemingly at will, patiently enduring her troubadour's operatic grief and ultimately dragging him (Gary Schaufeld) from her collective hips in a Sisyphean ending that does not quite live up to the rest of the piece's originality.

Lauren Etter's relatively brief ”Eventuality” takes a tribe of slightly lost looking ragamuffins from the floor to the curtain accompanied by a recording of Alain LeMay's “Prayer.” Along the way, the choreographer delivers some arresting side partnered turns, and shows a sure hand in the compositional use of opposing groups in space. When Lara Gemmiti ends up pushed offstage center as the curtain closes on the group of ten that has left her behind, Marshall's opening returns recollected. This time, however, the full-bodied ostracism and sense of separation seem opaque.

Elizabeth Beres' and Elliot Reiland's “Pavlov” and Jaclyn K. Walsh's “The Last Ace Up our Sleeve,” each seems at risk of finding itself upstaged by the strength and wit of the recorded accompanying text on which it heavily relies. Both recordings also suffer from technical production challenges that mar their clarity.

Beres and Reiland make a winning, whimsical and witty dancing couple amidst a set of chairs. Interrupted by live bell ringing marking the end of each episode, the sound of their recorded voices deliver the lines of David Ives' “Sure Thing,” a one act play of pick-up courtship. They manage to escape the textual trap they've set for themselves through the variation of their spatial composition and the evident relish of their partnering. This exploits the relative size differences of their bodies and their strong appealing sense of presence to keep us engaged in their dancing.

Walsh's composition lives and dies on excerpts of the inveterate dance writer Joan Acocella delivering a public lecture that her recorded voice reveals should have been entitled “Ballet and the Crotch." While an edited recording of Gabriela Montero's “Spontaneous Composition based on J.S. Bach's Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring'” adds further accompaniment, Walsh sets five women in motion, tongue firmly in cheek, like music box dolls in burgundy knee length tulle tutus over kelly green men's briefs seamed by white piping.

(l to r above)Traci Klein, Tracy B. Gilland, Catherine DeAngelis, Elizebeth Randall, and Regina Sobel in Jaclyn K. Walsh's “The Last Ace Up our Sleeve”*

The text declares the subject matter to be timeless, and the choreography strives to match its authority with moment, cheek, poise and wit. But the piece often seems to fall into over-literal inventions that fail to live up to its choreographer's evident imagination and skill. In a world in which the female crotch can loom forty feet tall over Houston Street, Times Square or the Hollywood Freeway the sly and delicious irony at the core of Walsh's work remains more hinted at than enacted even in view of the strong performances delivered by her cast.

This brings us back to the pelvis we came in on. Hidden under the stage curtain in the opening solo of “Name by Name” it will finally be fully harnessed in Ronald K. Brown's 2001 “Serving Nia,” a high energy crowd pleaser that brought each program to a close. As it had across both programs, the dancing of E. Wheeler Hughes, Ramona Kelley, Traci Klein, Marissa Livanna Maislen, Laurel Snyder, and Nicholas Straffaccia, as well as that of Beres, Schaufeld, the quick footed and powerful Walsh and the incandescent Watts stood out here.

Gary Schaufeld in Ronald K. Brown's "Serving Nia" (right)*

Projected digitized photographs by Deborah Willis accompanied Brown's dance designs. These images often fell upon and transfigured the skin and yellow costumes (by Omotayo Olaiyo) of the dancers, whose shadows sometimes loomed large on the back cyclorama screen. The joyous dancing that the choreography elicited from members of the cast of 11 women and 4 men sometimes stood in uncomfortable contrast to long pregnant pauses in which a group might stand in dead stillness for a minute at a time without palpable connection to the full bodied dancing unfolding before them.

In such moments, my mind would cast back to Marshall’s piece; its inspired scope of craft so complete that it crescendos in a powerful full cast unison walk right at us from the back of the stage to within feet of the front row. The afterimage of continued purpose lingers even as the dancers seem to dissolve into air, fading from view as the stage lights come down. The assertion of, in this case female, fortitude elucidates a universal theme while evoking issues much more closely at hand. For the women of Tisch, along with their much less numerous male counterparts, have acquitted themselves splendidly across the several nights of this capstone to their college careers.

It seems apparent that almost all if not all of the men in the Second Ave Dance Company can and will work as paid professional dancers if they want to work. Some have already been offered and have accepted such jobs. With no less talent and accomplishment on offer, the outlook in the women's bracket looks much more like that of the athletes in the NCAA. This rite of Spring, therefore, may offer the last best hope for many of them as maturing artists, and Marshall’s work both acknowledges and celebrates a signal moment in these lives.

“Name by Name” fully redeems its title. Somewhere in my head, as the stage lights dim before the bow, that stalwart line of women, shoulder to shoulder, still advances.

* all photos by Ella Bromblin copyright 2009

“She Rises!” Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography for the musical 9 to 5. Call me Ishmael.

Before his choreography for In the Heights won the 2008 Tony, as well as the Lortel, Calloway, Outer Critics, and Drama Desk awards; before he choreographed the Broadway revival of The Apple Tree, the West End production of Desperately Seeking Susan, and the world premieres of Andrew Lippa’s A Little Princess and Frank Wildhorn’s Waiting for the Moon, Andy Blankenbuehler, currently a contributing choreographer for Dancing with the Stars, worked as both a Disney and a Broadway gypsy. In the latter capacity, he appeared in the original cast of Fosse beginning in 1998. The experience seems to have left a lasting impression, for the shadow of several Bob Fosse compositional structures falls heavily across Blankenbuehler’s designs for the musicalization of the 1980 “feminist” revenge film comedy 9 to 5.

The shape of such memorable set pieces as “The Rich Man’s Frug” and “The Rhythm of Life” from Sweet Charity and “I Believe in You/Gotta Stop that Man” and “A Secretary is not a Toy,” from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying can be glimpsed on the horizon in Blankenbuehler’s work here. But he mostly fails to echo any of the idiosyncratic dance vocabulary, social satire or cynical wit that gave those earlier dances their tang and bite.

The choreography for 9 to 5, seen in its ninth preview Monday night at the Marquis Theater, seems to function essentially as transitional window dressing to cover set changes, link numbers or flesh out scenes. As such it constitutes only the merest tissue, albeit stylishly turned, in connecting or embodying dramatic elements while providing minimal muscle in advancing the action or developing character.

To be fair, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to advance or develop. With Dolly Parton as composer/lyricist and a book by the film’s original screenwriter Patricia Resnick, 9 to 5 sets sail on Broadway with a raft of accomplished hands. Director Joe Mantello, scenic designer Scott Pask, costume designer William Ivey Long, lighting designer Kenneth Posner and lighting/imaging designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, have among them accounted for a total of no less than 30 Tony awards out of 47 nominations, only one having won less than twice. But along with the rest, Blankenbuehler finds himself a castaway, lost in the wake of this two-hour tour of the film’s script set off by Parton’s tuneful but not memorable songs.

I find it hard to figure out who has taken on the role of Ahab in pursuit of this white whale of a show. The surprise-hit film relied heavily on the chemistry of its principal cast to produce box office magic. The revenge fantasy idea at its core seemed far less seaworthy with each of two subsequent refittings as a television sitcom. Even after an extended shakedown cruise at the Ahmanson Theater in L.A. featuring the same principal cast, this freighter ties up in New York as a derelict rust bucket decked out as a Carnaval liner.

The two-dimensionality of the characters on this love boat give it all the depth of a travel poster juxtaposing Allison Janney, Megan Hilty, Stephanie J. Block and Charlie Pollock as stand ins for the film’s original stars against a close-as-we-can-make-it stage cut out of the movie’s plot, dialogue and settings. The show seeks to sail past the shoals of its dated “feminist” parable without rocking the boat of the audience’s expectations for a pleasant cruise around a tried and true filmic formula.

Ms. Janney’s acting prowess has largely been tossed overboard, though she exceeds expectations fronting an all male chorus in Blankenbuehler’s most successful and elegant number. The fact that the number celebrates her ability to operate as “One of the Boys,” underscores just how glibly the show lip services its feminist stance. Hilty and Block, both veterans of the Wicked empire, get less dancing to do but predictably belt out the blonde-and-brunette style set piece ballads that made that musical re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz’s witches the box office darling of tween girls throughout the land.

Mantello appears to have repeated some of the same type of casting choices that made his direction of the Roundabout’s revival of Pal Joey, which I caught near the end of its limited run, so compelling and timeless. But choosing a strong actor (Janney) not known as a singer to portray the central female character and surrounding her with strong voiced but lighter dancing interlocutors cannot ground such a frothy book and score, and the choreography lacks the heart to help. The director may have found himself constrained in this regard by the production’s need to find reasonable body doubles for the Jane Fonda (Block) and Parton (Hinty) roles. With no depths to plumb the characters find themselves at sea, save for the scene in which Janney’s Violet finally faces up to her pining colleague and courtier Joe as played by Andy Karl. The show ultimately founders on its own effects.

No one should be surprised that the ark the producers of 9 to 5 have fashioned seeks to lift its passengers clear of the rising tide of economic deluge two by two; allowing both those who first floated along with the film’s foamy buoyancy to sit warm and dry alongside their daughters or granddaughters newly swimming in the world of work. I found myself a bit queasy in the face of the windy enthusiasm buffeting many of the youthful half of the audience, given what I see every day of the continuing challenges that younger women face in a social and economic order that has learned to say all the right things while charting and navigating ever more insidious and ruthless courses of commercial exploitation.

Would this be the kind of show Melia and Sasha might be likely to take in with their parents? Oh, that’s right, they already have a water dog. Then again, have you ever seriously pondered the success of Lobster Fest?