Love & Dance: Nora Petroliunas / The Pharmacy Project present Bricks & Honey at 100 Grand, May 7 & 8

below: (from top to bottom): Hsaio-Jou Tang, Amber Morgan, Tess Igarta, Sarah Rose Bodley, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri. photo by Mistral Hay
The audience has just been moved. Literally. The handsome couple, who have perched so exquisitely atop the coffee table placed against the mirror at the west wall of 100 Grand, find themselves momentarily separated when the musical chairs-like redistribution of spectators-in-the-round calls for us to claim new seats. But across the gap now between them, he beckons her to an adjoining empty chair. Their union restored, an open seat now offers itself next to me. Soon, Bill Young, the loft’s proprietor sidles into it.

As the action onstage resumes, he leans over and whispers conspiratorially, “I just love her work.”

And I have to now admit that I do as well.

And what’s not to love? Nora Petroliunas has always, in the two years that I’ve been watching her art develop, been more than generous with her audience. She has already established a knack for serving up quirky and surprising sensual feasts that fully exploit the imaginative possibilities of the architecture, the furniture, and the dancers that she selects to frame her visions. With Bricks & Honey, her very first one-woman show, she has emerged as a first rate dance maker as well.

In this she owes a great deal to the performers with whom she has long been collaborating. In this case they include Sarah Rose Bodley, Tess Igarta, Amber Morgan, Meredith-Lyn Olivieri, Hsaio-Jou Tang. Only Morgan is new to me. I have never seen the others dance with such consummate ease, grace and unabashed sensual beauty. The quality of their five-fold collective realization of the creator’s compositional craft proves enough even to touch the heart of a dance curmudgeon such as me.Hsaio-Jou Tang attached to Amber Morgan
photo by Paula Lobo

The weight of touch; the gravity of desire play key roles in the troupe’s investigation of space. In repeated patterns of partnering, we see relationships rendered as leg irons as, one after another, individual dancers struggle to walk with a prone partner grasping one ankle. First Bodley and later Igarta execute electrifying and virtuosic solos, each of which includes an extended series of jumps taking off from and landing on the performer’s shins as her legs remain folded beneath her.

These two represent only the first among equals in distributing the simple gifts that Petroliunas flings around. Bodley has often featured in the choreographer’s canon, and her two solos here seem to build on and extend her role as muse-in-chief. (That’s mis-chief to you, buddy). Igarta, on the other hand, who also plays the loft’s piano to accompany Bodley’s first solo, breaks through as a master of the kind of weighted lyricism that has begun to emerge as a Petroliunas leitmotif.

left: Tess Igarta
photo by Paula Lobo

Olivieri, subsequently, charms and intrigues in an introspective passage in which she builds a ziggurat of furniture using as foundation one of the loft’s sturdy kitchen tables. Atop of this she sits to imbibe a wistful glass of wine that she pours from one of the 32 bottles that have been lined up like footlights along one edge of the space. Soon the other four perform a kind of barnacle ballet along the edges of the supporting table.

The wine bottles, almost all partially filled with water, along with several similarly ablutionary clear glass jars, have been handed out to arriving members of the audience and later collected by the dancers just before the big move. In case you might have misapprehended that Petroliunas would be leaving you alone to sit back in anonymous idiot peace during her show, greeter Sarah Oppenheim has also handed you a book of matches at the door with “the pharmacy project” scrawled in black ink across its white cover. Souvenirs, as usual, to be had, and used, at the spectacle.Meredith-Lyn Olivieri prepares her ziggurat
photo by Mistral Hay

The further deployment of these elements, as well as those of such inveterate Petroliunas creative touches as table lamps, other furniture, a galvanized washtub and water buckets, and musical compositions ranging from those of contemporary collaborators Ed Donohue (donny hue and the colors) and Saul Simon Macwilliams to recording artists Doris Troy (Just One Look) and Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts (Angel of the Morning) I’ll leave for later. I encourage the reader to see this piece, should it ever be revived, and wouldn’t want to give away the plot.

But I have a personal confession. I found myself somewhat reluctant to commit to attending this production, enamored as I have been of the creator’s past efforts. Like an infatuated lover, I felt afraid of the possibility of finding myself let down, and equally skittish of the idea of making anyone my “critic’s darling.”

I needn’t have worried. Here I sit on a soft and lovely Spring evening, gazing across Bill Young’s lovely, haphazardly cluttered, workaday loft through a veil of gorgeous dancing and a compelling lack of drama at other members of this audience and the choreographer herself, hard at work on the sound score controlled by the Macbook on her lap. And I find myself absorbed into her dream; taken by the possibilities the poet Auden proposes in his Lullaby:

Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

The microcosms Petroliunas shapes play their parts almost completely in poetic terms, many footed and raw. There exist “certain evenings when the heart relaxes.” Bricks & Honey provides plenty of suggestive space in which one can be persuaded to try again. When an artist can open her heart, and mine, to the possibilities of new life even in the face of inevitable loss, and do it in the wordless wonder of dance, I consider myself glad to have made the trip and lucky to be a witness.

Studies in Whimsy and Flesh: dear peter, love nora @ 100 Grand, August 28

The first hint of whimsy arrives in the form of the riot of old fashioned table lamps, complete with shades, hung upside down from the ceiling and replacing the normal lighting in the main dance space of the second floor loft at 100 Grand St. in Manhattan. Chairs for the audience have been ranged along the windowed wall overlooking the eponymous street, and at a ¾ angle in the loft’s southeastern corner. Facing this latter quadrant after the lights dim and then resume their warm glow Peter Chamberlin begins “19/20,” a 6 minute solo that sets the tone for an engaging evening of dance exploration.
 
Peter Chamberlin in "19/20"
photos by Hope Davis

Chamberlin’s work features the focused miniaturized quality of etudes. But these studies exhibit technical and compositional acumen of a budding master.  In “19/20” he appears to lay a repeating series of 19 patterns for the upper body: head, torso, shoulders, arms, hands , over 20 variations for the legs and particularly the feet. The shifting transitions from one combination to the next steadily increase in tempo to match that of the quickening staccato thump underpinning Sam Crawford’s chordal accompanying recorded score.
 
“Untitled” pairs the radiant and articulate Shayla-Vie Jenkins with the coolly articulate Hsiao–Jou Tang in patterns that go from head and shoulders to feet in poses and walks shot through with swift silent and limber side falls and rises. The dancers provide such a visual and kinetic feast in the robust suppleness of their realization of Chamberlin’s choreography that even the simple crisp change of a walking pattern from vertical to horizontal orientation across the stage registers with the force of revelation.  Like the dancemaker, these women make maximum use of their fabulous feet.
 
Having watched with interest Nora Petroliunas’ work as a principal in the artistic directorship of the collective pocket engine, I stood unsurprised at intermission as the audience received square pieces of scrap paper from her dancers along with instructions for rearranging itself.  Pocket engine’s piece(s) had included roles for the audience and innovative use of the space. 
 
Once the chairs had been replaced in a U-shaped, ¾ in the round configuration; the curved end facing 100 Grand’s mirrored wall, the question of a vantage point became an intriguing one.  I determined that a standing spot next to the full-sized litter basket at the bottom of the right hand arm of the U allowed an excellent view of the space including the entire audience with and without the use of the mirrors.  It also took in the full span of the windows above Grand St., one of which promised to figure in some way in what would come.
 
Almost directly in front of me, at the edge of the main performance area, stood a decorative cast iron coat and hat stand with a yellow cotton rain coat hanging from one its curved prongs. In the far right corner, similarly situated, a four foot tall artificial Christmas tree festooned with ½ pint lavender milk cartons awaited its cameo.  Three large cereal boxes occupied the opposite corner.  Origami cranes strung in spiral climbed the floor stand of an empty hanging bird cage by the one open window.
 
(l to r) Peter Chamberlin (obscured), Tess Igarta, Sarah Bodley, Hsiao–Jou Tang
The six dancers, 4 in white dresses or skirts, 2 in white pants and shirts stand in the space facing in several directions. First 3, and then 2 more fall into motion as Saul Simon MacWilliams' recorded score brings the opus “goose” to life. Throughout the first musical segment, Lesley Garrison stands her ground while Sarah Bodley, Tess Igarta, Tang, Julia Burrer, and Chamberlin fly through a series of backwards, forwards and side runs and falls, turns, and twists in patterns that remind me of choreographic palindromes.
 
The piece develops in trios, duets and solos in a poetry of earnest playfulness. Petroliunas proves as masterly in presenting each of her dancers as individual movers as she does in compositional craft.  She also displays a penchant for whimsical distraction and displacement.  After Burrer and Igarta have engaged in a solo-duet-solo sequence the rangy Burrer dons the rain coat and begins pulling a seemingly endless supply of stainless steel tea spoons out of various pockets.  These she hands to individual members of the audience.
 
We’ve come to a pause. Tang and Bodley ask us to take out our scrap paper and lead us in an attempt to create origami frogs. The others collect them in the cereal boxes.
 
Chamberlin and Tang dance a charming Fred and Ginger style duet, complete with soft shoe.  The milk cartons come off the Christmas tree to be distributed to the audience members lining the windows. Inside each, they find a note instructing them to go to the fire escape window and look down. Several climb out onto the balcony. One later informs me that she watched four dancers perform in sneakers on the opposite sidewalk of Grand Street.
 
The dancing progresses with a steady and formal attention to its compositional development.  Figures I recall from earlier work come and go in lines of dancers, designs for soloists, duets, trios, ensembles. Bodley, Burrer and Tang mount the fire escape and “release” the origami cranes from their string. Garrison pulls individual members of the audience out to shadow the dancers original positions onstage.  Each time she finds herself hurled aside and displaced by another dancer. When all the doppelgangers have taken their place, she can rest at last, secure in her own.  The "goose" comes home.

(l to r) Julia Burrer, Tess Igarta, Hsiao–Jou Tang, Lesley Garrison (in silhouette)
 
Petroliunas has achieved a remarkable balance between challenge and accessibility, formal rigor and serious play, and a sense of intimacy within an experience of community.  With “goose” she has also announced her arrival in Manhattan as a choreographer of daring and whimsical imaginative gifts.