Crotch Tiara: Keigwin Kabaret stuffs its strut on the down low under Symphony Space, NYC

By guest blogger Joey Lico

At 8:30 pm at the beginning of the weekend, a hush falls over the candle-lit Leonard Nimoy Thalia.  Over a microphone, a female flight attendant encourages passengers to order drinks: sex on the beach, rim jobs, panty rippers, buttery nipples. Blue papers rise from the audience to call the bartenders.
 
Enter the cast of Keigwin Kabaret, gliding around the stage with the angular fluidity that Larry Keigwin has perfected since his days dancing backup on Club MTV with Downtown Julie Brown. The performers, led by Ying-Ying Shiau, humorously pantomime airline safety instructions; buckling safety belts, pointing to exits and securing oxygen masks while the audience laughs with familiarity. The dancers’ depiction of flight attendants is the only subtlety of this sexed-out variety show.
 
What can you say about a performance that ends with a naked, voluptuous, blonde woman, who also happens to be a female-impersonator spread out on stage like a star fish? “The World Famous Bob” turns to show the audience her jewel-encrusted vagina and the theater explodes into thunderous applause. Keigwin Kabaret has kept its promise to entertain. 
With guest appearances by Ambrose Martos, the clown-haired, sex-centered Master of Ceremonies; Bradford Scobie-a lasso wrangling, chicken- violator and Scott Lyons a paraplegic cross dressing version of Disney’s Ariel; Keigwin Kabaret is a show with a distinct sense of humor.   Trying to make sense of it all ruins the spectacle. Between the sex, glitter and hip-hop aura that is characteristic of Keigwin’s choreography, these random acts segue between the dance pieces.



Keigwin Kabaret photo by Matthew Murphy

 
At one point Martos takes up an entire 2 minutes teasing the audience by taking off fourteen pairs of underwear. Is this a clever way to kill some stage time or a well-crafted comedic interlude of Keigwin’s design? Either way, this mélange works and we’re all fascinated eagerly awaiting the next carnal display.
 
Dancer Ashley Browne moves with such a smooth funk during a rendition of Unk’s chart topping, “Walk it Out” that it’s almost shocking when she unfolds and extends her leg next to her ear in the following piece, moving with utter grace and classical control. Nicole Wolcott shines throughout the entire show; her perfectly toned body dancing each movement with ferocity. She makes tongue wagging as captivating as Keigwin’s intricate footwork.

There are delicate moments as well.  Shiau brings an unrelenting tenderness as she is softly passed from the arms of one beau to another. She’s so endearing that you almost forget the scene has been set with her rise from among a circle of men, bathrobes open, as though she has just finished giving each of them a blowjob.
 
Only one moment seemed out of place. Liz Riga’s solo comes across as a downer among the slapstick pieces we have otherwise been presented with. Although she moves with command and obvious talent, her angularity and severity foil the fun. The woman who walked out in the middle of the brilliantly sung lyric “one mans omelet is another man’s son” might have appreciated Riga’s homage to the choreographer’s alter ego as the head of Keigwin + Company.
 
Perhaps the intent is to remind us that not everything is fun and games. But the audience isn’t prepared and people let out only singular stifled chuckles in support.
 
But grin and bear it all with laughter we do for the entire 2 hours. By seamlessly blending contemporary, hip-hop and comedy under the umbrella of sexual promiscuity, Keigwin manages to put together a well-crafted work. On balance, it feels like a great way to spend a Friday night.
 

"Vice (with Mary Kay)" at the Tank on 45th St, NYC: Cakeface eats out

A small pink plastic globe of a television monitor above an empty stage greets the audience as it makes its way into the theater space on the evening of May 8. Hanging from a chain above the corner of the playing space closest to the right side front row seats, it flickers silent black and white images of the vegetarian cartoon hero Popeye the sailor, and his carnivorous foil, the aptly named hamburger-mooching Wimpy.
 
Suddenly we find ourselves confronted by the performance trio Cakeface, standing shoulder to shoulder across the front of the stage and sporting bike shorts and black bras under sheer neon tunics (costumes by performer Elle Chyun). They each hold white sheets of paper from which they begin to read, with the self-conscious aplomb of third graders, a text that might have been written by second graders. The audience begins to giggle. Then the readers stuff their scripts into their mouths and begin to chew.
 
(l to r:) Amanda Szeglowski, Jeso O’Neill and Elle Chyun of Cakeface*
Thus begins Vice (with Mary Kate), a 28 minute opus that has been, according to a program note, “inspired by grating encounters with ‘preachy vegans,’ [which] probes that which makes us feel ‘badass.’” Wimpy, the note intimates, should receive script credit as a “motivational badass,” and the source of the piece’s “vocal samplings.” 
 
“The work delves into the behaviors we adopt despite knowledge of their negative implications, including but not limited to ruthless carnivorous indulgences.”  Hence, it would seem, the paper chewing.
 
The remainder of the behavior depicted onstage consists of passages of spoken text, cheeky interaction and fierce full out dancing in the tiny space. Intermittent recorded music by DJ Tony Conquerrah, Matmos, Figurine, and The Knife sets off or accompanies these episodes. The costumes change, adding brightly colored shrugs here, day-glow fanny packs there, from which emerge prayer shawls to be worn around the performers necks.

Of these elements, the dancing makes by far the strongest positive impression. In fact, the work's most cogent moments of manifestation come in the form of a rap recording calling out the hypocrisy of holier-than-thou vegetarians to which the trio adds its muscular hip hop and modern dance flavored movement.
 
Each of the character/performers (Jeso O’Neill and Amanda Szeglowski, alongside Chun) has her moments of strong presence, with the bemused-looking Chun the most consistently appealing. Cakeface, fond of written declamations, announces its mission in the program as “commercial abstract art.” Under the heading “vision,” the collective states that it “wants to push abstract art out of its incestuous circle and into the mainstream. Tactical collaborations, socially powered work and pop art are the ingredients of the cakeface brand.”

Except perhaps for the music, and maybe the fanny packs and Mary Kay reference, I find little of pop art in evidence in Vice beyond the Popeye animations. Were the work to be viewed as an extended sketch on Saturday Night Live it might easily be seen as of better than average quality. Certainly the intimate audience reacted to its absurdist humor as any reasonably excitable SNL crowd might have.
 
But if Cakeface wants to go the distance in realizing its larger ambitions it might do better to dig deeper into the culture it seeks to satirize or critique and wear a bit more of its heart on its gossamer sleeve.  For real human warmth and engagement, and a dialogue with popular culture it need look no further than its own post-performance champagne and cupcake theater lobby reception for a start.

*photos by Florence Baratay

Hip Obscurity's "Maybe, Tomorrow": polymorphous diversity @ Sonnet Theater of The Producer's Club, NYC

Having spent her college and first post grad years focused on directing, Andi Cohen set out to write her first drama as “the most direct-able play possible.”  She chose romantic love as her theme, and handed her opus Maybe, Tomorrow (an experiment in love and chance encounters) to three teams, each consisting of a director and two actors to have at it.

The resulting trilogy, as seen on May Day, makes for an interesting and engaging exploration in spite of some unevenness in the writing, and more in its direction and performances. Cohen manages to create a kind of music in her dialogue that has inspired each of her initial directors to musical choices of their own. And even when the text seems elliptical or awkward as human speech, it achieves in its spare repetition the kind of poetic potency that has the ring of emotional truth.
 
Besides the obvious variations in the characters’ sex: the first act features a hetero pair, the second two women; the third two men, Cohen has inserted a short divertissement in the script for each unique pair.  These provide modulations that spice each retelling with a specific flavor in mood and tenses.

Chris Hale and Sarah Kinlaw (above)

We encounter the fetching Sarah Kinlaw cradling and strumming a ukulele while perched on the park bench that serves as the major set element for all three versions of the play. Presenting the first of the three characters named Taylor, she soon finds herself joined by her Syd (Chris Hale). The first several of their episodic scenes revolve around his inability to deploy the love bomb, and end with one or another of the pair putting off the consummation with the line that gives play its title. After a sometimes melodramatic 15 minutes, which includes her rather unconvincing attempt at menace with a pistol, the act concludes with the flashback scene that will round off each pair’s journey in the moment of its inception.

Above: Debra Disbrow (left) and Janie Nutter

If Eric Hunt’s naturalistic direction of this first explication seems most solidly rooted when the appealingly present Kinlaw plays her instrument and sings, director Jeremy Williams stylized rejoinder literally never quite finds its feet. This has much to do with the demands his choreography places on Debra Disbrow’s Syd and Janie Nutter’s Taylor in their not-so-comfortable medium-heeled shoes and skirts over tights. The clarity and economy of the actors’ vocal performances and of the director’s set re-arrangements, blocking, and sometimes whimsical textural ideas crash repeatedly against a sense of physical unease. This adds an unwelcome level of discomfit to the relationship’s already intense underlying sense of lyrical negotiation, and seems to undermine strain his actors’ committed attempts at emotional honesty.

Brian Murray (left) and Amir Wachterman (below)
Morgan Gould’s direction of the gifted Amir Wachterman (Syd) and Brian Murray (Taylor) caps off the production with a queer and antic tragicomic bang. The actors’ ability to go from spraying each other with super soakers to moments of vulnerability and tenderness provides the audience with an intriguing glimpse of the kind of theatrical tour de force that Cohen may have locked up within her tight-lipped script.  One wonders, for instance what couples or directors of different ages or cultural or ethnic types might bring to a dip in this fondue, even within the gender differentials.
 
Gould and her cast have gone the farthest in pushing the envelope of both the play’s comic and dramatic possibilities. Watching Murray’s and Wachterman’s characters suggestively pump up their super soakers, cavort in various drag, sport with whipped cream and become emotionally naked and present with each other allows the pain and joy at the heart of the piece to fully emerge. Whether  each exegesis could sustain this level of invention in the hands of a single director remains a question for another day.



Brian Murray (left) and Amir Wachterman (right)

Talking to Myself: My inner critic and choreographer contend over Catherine Gasta’s " A Piece of Humanity"

Didacto:
Choreographer/director Catherine Gasta, in a program note, describes her A Piece of Humanity as “a sketch of the human existence, from birth to childhood into education and working and on and on.”  And if this  “first incarnation” of the piece comes across on the whole as, well, sketchy, it also has among its several saving graces that of going on and on only intermittently.
 
Empath:
How clever (and how damning-with faint-praise)! Now you’re going pick up on that metaphor?  It’s her first production in NYC for crying out loud. Doesn’t she get a break?

From left to right:
Mi Sun Choi, Morgan Miller, Amy Jones, Michael Freeman, Joseph Brown, Michelle Silvani, Ebru Yonak, Halley Cianfarini, Raven Pease in Catherine Gasta's "A Piece of Humanity" 

Didacto:
Beginning at the edges of the stage in a dispersed circle, the black clad cast moves towards an ovum of light on the floor like slow motion ninja spermatozoa. Here they mime repeated repulsions by an invisible kung fu until one breaks through.
 
The maculate conception that follows takes us through a sequence listed in the program as “Chromosones; Childhood to Working; Sedating; Electronic Devices; and War to Restart” over the course of the following 35 minutes.  Along the way, Gasta alternates and sometimes integrates sophisticated choreographic arrangements involving the entire group with more individualized mimic characterizations.
 
The “Sedating” sequence, for instance combines a compositional quality reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch with the kind of miming that one might expect in a game of charades, depicting tippling, pot smoking, and semi-erotic spanking.  “Electronic Devices” recalls the ovum bubble of the opening sequence by insulating individual characters from their fellows within force fields of mimed texting, computing and cell phone screaming. Despite their relatively brief duration, these scenes lacked dramatic or choreographic development beyond their introduction.
 
Empath:
Russel Burton’s commissioned score seems to be driving things during these sections, often continuing a theme beyond the choreographer’s need or desire to embellish.  I recognize this trap. When one runs out of time in a rehearsal process, imagination sometimes seems to vanish as one falls back on the supportive comfort of collaborators and the familiar.

Didacto:
Gasta revels in a strong instinct for shaping stage space through the use of collective movement. Her often exquisite designs for nine weave in and out of each other with a sense of seamless and continuous flow. She has also managed, in collaboration with her dancers, to create a glimmer of the kind of committed and disciplined ensemble technique necessary to the work’s ambitions.
 
Those ambitions, however, far outstrip her ability to deliver at this stage of the game. Gasta seeks to stretch and fuse her formidable and extensive training in dance, theater, specific mime and new pantomime to embrace a universal vision. She yearns to address human existence in all its wonder, complexity and contradiction from the microbiological and neurophysical to the technological and geopolitical.  But she seems to lack the time and space to attend to the detail of her embroidery.

If Gasta, as director, has come a long way in instilling a sense of cohesion within her dancers’ body movement, she seems to have focused far less on their facial characterizations. These ranged widely among a cast diverse in shape, size, ethnicity and performance background and often seemed more like mugging than formal masking, setting them at odds with her choreographic accomplishment. In the performance I attended, Joseph JB-Ezee Brown and Amy Jones seemed to provide the most effortless models for an assimilation of the competing demands of Gasta’s physical and presentational elements.
 
Empath:
I hope my friend Raven doesn’t end up disappointed that I didn’t also single her out here. Sometimes it feels awful to sit in this seat.
 
Didacto:
Gasta closes her long director’s note in the show’s program with a wish to develop the piece further.  “I hope to add more people and create an overwhelming presence of people onstage that move together and at random as humanity does.”   More attention to detail and development and a longer incubation period with a cast no larger than this might go farther toward realizing and refining a vision that, no matter how ambitious in its scope, already seems a bit overwhelmed.
 
Empath:
Now comes the formal talk back. A row of chairs appears across the stage. We stare at them and they stare at us, and I feel sorry for everyone. Do we all wonder about the point of such exercises?  They so often feel as stilted and awkwardly polite as a blind date. Finally its over, and the real give and take in spirited imbibing and exchange can begin.

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.

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