College Edge: Lang College at the New School and Marymount Manhattan stuff their strut

I had to wait until I left college, after my sophomore year, before i saw my first live dance performance.  Not that I had any awareness of waiting. The primary stage for my physical expression until just about that time had been the hockey rink, where that year I had skated an erratic center for the Fordham junior varsity.  
 
Still undecided on an academic major, I decided to take a sabbatical.  I fell in love over the following summer with an RPI architecture undergrad who dragged me to see a traveling show featuring stars of the Bolshoi Ballet.  The next performance we attended included Alvin Ailey’s "The River"; music composed by Duke Ellington, and the die was cast.  Eventually, I lost the girl, but gained a world.

At right: Caitlin Conlon & Jacob Warren in Christopher d'Amboise's "Opus 81" at Marymount Manhattan


photo by Rosalie O'Connor


Dance in an academic setting became a staple of the next half-decade of my life.  I ultimately left Fordham, abandoning my quest for an Urban Studies degree, to begin serious study at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center.  At the end of another summer, I landed back in Providence, RI, where the lost romance had begun.  There I joined the RIC Dance Company, found myself awarded a series of dance scholarships, and eventually finished a self-designed degree in Dance and Dance Criticism, only the second dance degree (by five months) ever conferred by the College.
 
So, when I began this blog at the beginning of April, the cruelest month, it seemed appropriate to go back to school.  Four viewings of the NYU’s Second Avenue Dance Company’s “Retro” Spring show at Tisch School of the Arts made me curious as to what else might be out there.  I began my Dantean descent into college concert dance as presented in rings around the city of Dis, 2009, serving as my own Virgil.
 
But the subway ferried me uptown, and I arrived one May night at The Alvin Ailey  “Citigroup” Theater to see the Eugene Lang College of the New School’s Spring Dance Performance.  A few nights later, the steel snake carried me up the East Side to Marymount Manhattan to take in that school's Spring Repertoire concert.
 
In both cases I found houses full of receptive and supportive friends and family, faculty and staff with an allegiance to the dancers onstage.  Both concerts featured a few dancers whose artistry and charisma in performance made them stand out. Each program included a different piece by Takehiro Ueyama, as well as its own unique choreographic offering created by one other artist from among the group of dancemakers whose collaborations with the Tisch dancers I had seen weeks earlier. And each offered a vision of the place of concert dance, dance training and dance literacy distinctive from the conservatory model exemplified by schools such as Tisch.
 
The Lang showcase greeted its audience with one of the most interesting and beautifully produced program booklets I have ever seen.  An opening page juxtaposed a long paragraph about “Dance at the New School in the 1930’s” with one describing the approach to “Dance at Lang Today.”  The following five pages related to the William Forsythe “residency” which enabled Forsythe company alumni Jill Johnson and Mario Zambrano to create, in collaboration with the Lang dancers, “27 for 17,” the concert’s closing work.  The last two of these pages simply list Forsythe’s honors and awards from 1986 through 2008.  If you have to fork over a Lang tuition, I guess you had better be impressed.
 
The most intriguing and illuminating parts of the booklet, however, followed the formal program credits, and displayed excerpts from student journals and literary and graphic responses from them ignited by their participation in the preparation and production of the concert.  These highlighted and reinforced the Lang approach of fusing contemporary formal dance training with courses in history, theater and related arts in a holistic mind/body liberal arts modality.  In “27 by 17,” and in the greater part of Ueyama’s “Crowded Sky,” this approach produced exemplary results onstage.  In Eric Jackson Bradley’s “Love and Synesthesia,” Karla Wolfangle’s “In Motion,” and Rebecca Stenn’s  “Stride,” the latter two choreographed especially for dancers from the sophomore and freshman Lang academic classes respectively, the outcome seemed less convincing.
 
below: Lang dancers in Karla Wolfangle’s “In Motion,” ` ` ` photo by
Inspired in part by the movements of flocks of starlings over Rome, “Crowded Sky” sends flights of 11 women careering around the stage to music by Philip Glass.  Its designs gracefully evoke both the natural beauty of its inspiration and the pure joy in motion of its dancers.
 
That joy, tempered by fierce commitment, became even more palpable in “27 by 17.”  This performance compared favorably to Johnson’s similar Forsythe adaptation for the Tisch dancers.  Accompanied by a recording of Thom Willems’ music for Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced, the Lang dancers dig in and squeeze the sweet nectar out of everything they touch and taste.  In twisting, slashing, off-balance dancing shot through with runs, leaps, and turns they break off and feast upon spatial reality both within and beyond the limits of their skin.  Their passionate execution of this piece provides the best and most meaningful validation for Lang’s philosophy as it relates to its student dancers.
 
In the course of the evening, Yuki Fukui, Jesse Hart, John Malaya,
Above (bottom to top): Emma Hoette, Emily ` ` ` Emily Skillings, and Penelope
Skillings (in green sleeveless), Jillian Hervey` Wendtlandt tended to cut strong
(in lavender top, Nadia Mathys (2nd woman in` memorable figures in their dancing
green) & Jesse Hart (in red)in "27 by 17"` ` ` ` ` across many pieces. Skillings
photo by ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` stood out especially in “27 by 17.” But the evening seemed to belong to freshman Emma Hoette, whose extraordinary presence lit up the stage in each of the 3 pieces in which she appeared.  And all of these students also made fine contributions to the student writing include in the program booklet.
 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 
The Marymount Manhattan program seems to occupy a middle ground between the conservatory and Lang’s liberal arts approach.  In general, the technical level of the dancing and the assurance of the performances follows suit.
 
The Eastsiders opened with a suite of 3 duet excepts drawn from two Martha Graham masterpieces of the 1950’s.  The “Stars” and “Dancer’s World” duets from "Canticle for Innocent Comedians" followed the “Helen and Paris”  pas de deux from Clytemnestra.  In addition to showing off some fine dancers, and serving to introduce the audience to the remarkable Jacob Warren, the inclusion of the Graham works epitomized a reverence for dance tradition that the remainder of the dancing seemed also to embody.  The suite traced Graham’s classic period love moods from the dramatically passionate through the ecstatic to the lyrical.
 
Right (l to r): Kayla Shanahan, LuLu Soni, Sarah Haarman (in attitude) & Caitlin Conlon in Christopher d'Amboise's "Opus 81"
photo by Rosalie O'Connor

Christopher D’Amboise’s balletic 14 minute long "Opus ’81," set to a recording of the 2nd movement of Franz Schubert’s Trio in E-flat major, Opus 100, received its premier on this program.  Making use of the andante section of the piano trio, famously adapted for the downfall montage in Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, "Opus ’81" served as a transitional piece after the suite. It mixed movement recalling Graham’s heroic modern style with closing music from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings that served as the basis for George Balanchine’s timeless "Serenade". The dancing highlights the soulful lyricism of Sarah Haarman, Kelly McCormack and Kayla Shanahan among a cast of 8 in which the over six-foot-tall Warren also stands out.
 
Act I concluded with an excerpt from Takehiro Ueyama’s 2006 “One,” a two movement dance for eight that showed the choreographer’s muted lyricism as well adapted for college dancers on the East Side, as it had been on the West. 
 
Another excerpt, from The Most Dangerous Room in The House, Susan Marshall’s dark 1998 dance play evoking desire and domestic discomfort, opened the second half.  Here the action involves a section in which many of the 11 dancers find themselves repeatedly smashed against the onstage wall of the set designed by Doug Stein & Zhanna Gurvich.  An interesting challenge for the young cast, the excerpt does not adapt as satisfyingly as the same choreographer’s poignant “Name by Name,” presented in its entirety, had for the Tisch dancers.  Perhaps the context of the full work might have allowed this cast to flesh out the immediacy of the heart wrenching human dilemma the piece seeks to interrogate.  But the urgent relevance of the inquiry to a population of this age might paradoxically lie within easier reach of a more seasoned troupe.
 
At left (l to r): Jere Hunt, Kelly McCormack & Jacob Warren in Edgar Zendejas' "Azadi"



photo by Rosalie O'Connor

The program closer, created specifically for its undergraduate dancers, proved the piece de resistance at Marymount Manhattan just as the similarly commissioned Johson/Zambrano led work had at the Lang concert.  Edgar Zendejas’ "Azadi" sets 19 MMC dancers into a two-part invention against recorded music by the baroque Henry Purcell (part I) and the contemporary Michael Gordon. 
 
Zendejas has thrown down a gauntlet for his cast, daring them at the limit of their technical and performance level.  Mixing groupings of various sizes in a shifting array of spatial designs he creates a series of small personal dramas and relationships within a depiction of larger community.  Titling his opus with the Persian word for "freedom" or "liberty" that doubles as the post-revolutionary name of the tower marking the symbolic entrance to Tehran, he seems prescient in his tilting lunges, lifts, and polymorphous partnerships for these Manhattan dancers. Warren might as well be the Freedom Tower himself sharing his strength of presence and precision of technique with several fellow dancers in the course of "Azadi."  Among these, Adam Gold, Haarman, Rachel Hall, Jere Hunt, and McCormack merited special attention.
 
It stands to reason that dances created in direct collaboration with the dancers who will perform them seem to succeed artistically and theatrically with greater frequency than pre-existing repertory that requires adaptation for student dancers.  Fresh creation’s value as an educational vehicle in drawing the passion of the dancers into the work seems apparent. Yet the most compelling performance in the Tisch concert came in a Marshall piece originally constructed on Juilliard students. 

Intimate knowledge of the techniques and artistic concerns underpinning the work of great artists of the near and more distant past also has its place in rounding out an appreciation of an art form that seems to depend more on an informed and unintimidated audience. But in spite of the robust health of the college dance concert 2009, as evinced by those I attended, I see cause for concern in a cultural and economic climate of retrenchment.
 
Without specific statistical knowledge of the demographics of the student populations for each of my 3 schools, I found the number of participating non-Caucasian dancers, and of men of any ethnicity still distressingly low.  Can these college dance programs, given their size and considerable resources, be seen harbingers of the shape of the rising generation? And while choreographers who have both the inclination and ability to adapt or create work with great success for student dancers may not be common, I feared that I might have sensed in the preparation and presentation of these events the inadvertent curdle of the safe choice and the most recognized name. 
 
At every dance community conclave I attend these days, I hear people lament the depletion, fragmentation and aging of audience. College dance programs themselves may now face these challenges, after years of unprecedented expansion.  But crisis and opportunity often appear as alternate faces of the same coin.

Does Marymount Manhattan’s inclusion of dances from the decade before the upheaval and explosion of the sixties and seventies contribute to the preservation of a living legacy and provide a critical context for these young dancers and their audience? Given the institutional carapaces that have grown up around both, can Lang’s recollection of the New School’s 1930’s outreach to the fledgling field of modern dance inspire a correspondingly creative contemporary initiative? The way forward rarely seems clear but in harnessing the relative fearlessness and energy of youth, it sometimes can become determined.

Hero/Worship: Christopher Williams' Saints Kick the Habit and Come Dancin' In

An arch bishop dances in bemused little skips adorned by flicking wrists, a sword thrust through the mitre that crowns his head. A holy man, stark naked except for the wreath caressing his temples, turns around and spreads his cheeks to show the congregation his asshole. Three times. Then after repeated poses recalling Rafael’s David he hurls himself upon a griddle made out of the arms of six stout men only to be tossed, joyously, as if in a blanket, and go back to posing.
Above: Luke Miller as St. Laurence about to hurl himself on the griddle formed by the male chorus: Sydney Skybetter, Bryan Campbell, Arturo Vidich (left group);
Philip Montana, Brandin Steffensen, Clay Drinko (right group). Already enthroned in the background from l to r Chris Elam as St. Christopher, Rommel Salveron as St. Pancras, Glen Rumsey as St. George, Julian Barnett as St. Vincent of Saragossa. `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````Photo by Paula Court.

A woman screams before a man painted green and dragging a dragon’s matching tail, his head in a helmet crested with teeth. After a tussle with an armored saint, the dragon finds himself collared and led off by the woman on a leash. A group of black-veiled acolytes then rushes to wipe up the green body makeup on the white stage floor. A flock of puppet birds attends the wanderings of a friar and ends by stretching red ribbons with its beaks from anchorages at his stigmatic wounds.

I could go on (and on). On May 15, beginning with simultaneous formal processions down both aisles of the theater inside Dance Theater Workshop, I witnessed a 3-hour-long dream scape come to life in dance form. And if you want an absolutely stunning, remarkably comprehensive, concise and graceful explication of the goings on in Christopher Williams’ The Golden Legend, including the name and role of each of the 35 dancers, I recommend Deborah Jowitt’s review.

Glen Rumsey as St. George wrestles Dylan Crossman's dragon.
Photo by Paula Court

Let’s face it: saints, almost by definition, conjure the kind of obsession, fanaticism, obstinacy and foolhardiness that we tend to regard as insane. Giving themselves over to a power or ideal greater than themselves, they endure temptation, humiliation, torture, and embrace death and dismemberment, often in spite of social and political mores, in obeisance to a greater good. When we perceive that good, we lift up such people as heroes and martyrs and lionize their devotion. When we don’t, or they go off the moral rails, we recoil from their enormities as lunacy or terrorism. Either way, they make themselves hard to ignore and break through our complacent stupor.

Photo by Yi-Chun Wu
The Golden Legend, a meditation on the lives of 17 (or 23 depending on how you count) early Christian male saints, somehow put me much in mind of the day of 9/11 and those immediately following. As I circumambulated the shattered parts of my city, I kept running into the armed men and women standing sentinel at the edges of the “frozen zone” around ground zero. I eyed them and their guns warily, out of long habit, and wondered a bit resentfully just who or what they had been sent to protect and why. Yet along with most of my fellow citizens, I found myself newly appreciative of these gendarmes’ poise as potential heroes, and the sudden usefulness of their stance of moral certitude and physical fortitude in this battered landscape.

Many of the heroes and saints (if any) had already been crowned with tragic and brutal death. Others still labored behind those barricades, or would soon turn their attention to the cause of redeeming lost lives in testaments of moral introspection, social outreach, healing and political activism. Many artistic voices seemed momentarily stilled as we struggled to catch our breath and reconnect with some essential truths about our lives on this planet.
Julian Barnett hurtles earthward as St. Vincent of Saragossa
Photo by Paula Court.

Soon a whole decade will have passed. For the majority of that time Williams has been at work on his lives of the saints. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, produced in 2005, and in preparation for over a year previous to that, provided the distaff predecessor to and template for The Golden Legend. In a time of new crisis, in which many of the lessons of those days 8 years ago already seem in need of relearning, he arrives with a piece that challenges glib and conventional wisdom in so many significant ways.

Beginning with the full cast processional and closing with a similar formal recessional, everything about the work, save the choreography of the 17 individual dances that form its spine, has been produced on a scale rarely, if ever, seen these days in the “downtown” dance world. Williams seems to have that rare and precious ability to dare everyone and everything around him to dig more deeply and defy previous and accepted levels of expectation. This includes DTW, whose facilities and resources have been pushed to their limits, his audience, which must acclimate to the work’s deliberative pace across its 3 hour length and those, like myself, who may take weeks wrestling over a fitting response.

Holding their halos (above): David Parker as St. Thomas of Canterbury and Reid Bartelme as St. Giles advance with the other saints in the country dance style processional. ````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````Photo by Paula Court.

The talents of what constitutes an all-star team of male contemporary dancers stretches to meet Williams’ imagining of the selected saints. These have been sketched from the telling of Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa and author of the 13th century Legenda Aurea Sanctorum (Golden Legend of the Saints,) the book that launched the Williams’ opus. But the choreographer also has behind him a history of Western visual art that depicts these same stories, reaching back through iconography and medieval and renaissance painting and sculpture.

Like panels in Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass the planes of sainthood fracture in the course of the work and branch off in unexpected directions. ```````Photo by Yi-Chun Wu. Here we have a collared Rommel Salveron as St. Pancras, beheaded under the Emperor Diocletian in 304. He is attended by the blue-faced Keith Sabado and Nicky Paraiso, who flank Pancras and embody saints Mamertus and Gervasius, fellow “Icemen” in the liturgical and seasonal calendar. These seconds also recall mortals, perhaps not so intimately tickled by the finger of the divine. In the course of their scene, Sabado re-enacts the legend of the man who swore falsely on the martyr’s tomb. Now he literally can’t keep his hand off Salveron’s head. Paraiso finds himself forced to follow their tortuous interlocked dance about the stage singing as he goes.

Photo by Paula Court
Chris Elam, as St. Christopher, backs onto stage with Coco Karol on his shoulders so that under their shared costume they take on the form of a monstrous mythical giant. Slipping out of this beastly overcoat, the two, each costumed in lamb leotards complete with tails and pink-eared headpieces, execute a cruciform lift, a birth-like calving, and a series of oral explorations on their way to their crossing. Thus from an earlier pagan myth emerges that of the apocryphal Christian “bearer of Christ,” still the patron saint of cities and countries. What would it be like to taste the lamb of God?

Gus Solomons, Jr. appears as St. Saint Dionysius the Areopagite/St. Denis, with his head literally in his hands. Encased in another of the piece’s fantastic costumes, he dances under a banner “To the Unknown God” held aloft by Alberto Denis and Carlton Cyrus Ward. `````````````````````````Photo by Yi-Chun Wu.
These two evoke the saint’s fellow martyrs St. Eleutherius and St. Rusticus. The trio also hints that even a patron saint of France, one of the 14 “holy helpers,” must have needed, as we do, heroic helpers of his own. Their dancing leads us towards the liberating delirium of unity with the divine.

In each of the visually arresting episodes, the movement has been tailored to the imaginative possibilities of a story, a dancer or dancers, and a visual and/or musical touchstone. The latter range from those composed for the piece by Peter Kirn and Gregory Spears to the medieval hymns, antiphons, laude, motets, and conductus written in praise of each saint that make up the bulk of the sound accompaniment. Dating from as early as the 12th century, this music emanated in voice and on traditional and modern instruments from a consort of 11 tucked into a tiny front corner just offstage. It added immeasurably to the sense of suspended time and continuous present moment that attends the unfolding of the Legend.

The musical ensemble, which featured members of Anonymous 4 and Lionheart among other illustrious players and singers, contributed to the strength and precision of the piece as surely as did the extremely strong and versatile choruses of 6 male and 5 female dancers/puppeteers. So did Tom Lee’s exquisitely reserved set of 17 high-backed chancel chairs that face each other in single lines along both sides of the performance space as if across a Cathedral choir. Each chair’s red velvet upholstered seat will enthrone a principal saint at the conclusion of his turn on the stage. From this perch, he will join the audience as witness to the subsequent The puppeteers, including (l to r) Kate ` ` ` ` ` episodes until a formal bow and reces-
Brehm, Erin K. Orr, Lake Simons elevating ` sional parades this venerable dance
their demons. `````````` Photo by Paula Court. ` company through the congregation
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` again.

The metaphorical significance of this watchfulness cannot be overstated. Like
the saint he portrays, each of these dancers has achieved an individual renown born of unrelenting and solitary devotion to a way of life. This religious dedication has found him often at odds with the accepted modes of validation that predominate in American society, particularly as they relate to men’s work. Williams allows us to watch them watch each other create a collective testament that transforms and transcends the sum of its parts.

Beyond its utility and craft as a formal framing device, the choreographer’s stylization of this action subtly reminds us of our collective interdependence, and the human hunger for interconnection that we felt so strongly in the days after the terrorist attacks. He redeems and reinvigorates the role of live theatrical dance as a vital mode for acknowledging and even celebrating this existential fact; these needs and desires.

The creator’s fingerprints can be seen everywhere in a litany of collaboration. His co-credits extend to the beautifully realized costumes (designed and built with Carol Binion, Andy Jordan, Ciera Wells, and Michael Oberle) and the magical puppets (with Eric Wright and Lake Simons). And when did you ever see a performance that in addition to two early music researchers (Susan Hellauer and Williams) lists a medieval hagiography consultant (Thomas Head)? The scholarly contributions of these collaborators manifest in the music and text translations and choreographer’s notes that make up the majority of the 32-page program insert accompanying the piece. The notes represent Willams’ cogent gloss of relevant details taken from the lives of the saints as presented in his source text. It provides yet another point of entry for exploration and appreciation of The Golden Legend as an imaginative response to our Western moment.(l to r) Aaron Mattocks as St. James the More, Luke Miller as St. Laurence, Reid Bartelme as St. Giles, Stuart Singer as St. Eustace, and Chris M. Green as St. Jerome in the recessional. ```````````````````````````````````````````````Photo by Paula Court.

Only Joe Levasseur’s exquisitely nuanced lighting seems to belong to one designer alone. The collective nature of the entire theatrical enterprise, and its analogous relationship to the possibilities of cooperative action, became palpable and moved me in ways I haven’t felt onstage since the Broadway productions of Angels in America and Copenhagen. The multi-dimensionality, scale, scope and quality of the work recalls that of such artists as Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, William Forsythe, Pina Bausch and Bill T. Jones.

The Golden Legend stands as a fitting return gift to and redemption of the sacrifices of those who stand guard over our “homeland security.” By whatever means they serve, they insure the freedom that brings us saints as well as corporate Ponzi and steroid sinners. The challenge falls to us as to which merits our own sacrifices and devotion in attention, blood and treasure.

Like other contemporary American artists, and many U.S. families, Williams has gambled himself into the bondage of credit card usury. His thrall has come in pursuit of a singular dance theater vision. The fact that he has forged his chains in a field that offers virtually no chance for the gamble to pay off in a material, and therefore, by extension, a status sense for either him or his art form hardly makes him a saint. But if it were ever to come to a question of that, perhaps The Golden Legend might be cited as one of the requisite miracles.

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