A
Lush and Lucid Dance-in-progress
Wild
Life a movement refuge
Choreographed by Wendy Rogers
UC Berkeley Extension DanceAbout Studio
August 15. 2003
reviewed
by Ann Murphy
Choreographer
Wendy Rogers is a modern naturalist. For the last 20
years, both with her own company and as a soloist, she
has brought the public a small cache of quietly etched
movement studies that allude to natural life, like water
or air. These dances that she calls "personal geography"
describe the natural world not as an end in itself as
much as a means to uncover a shadowy, often poignant
realm of hidden or overlooked passions. She shares with
Trisha Brown a ruminative dance style full of seemingly
casual steps and gestures that sometimes have the look
of remembered actions, while other times seem to reflect
a river of rambling, present-tense consciousness.
The
post-Judson Theater components of her dance—the
unstylized runs, the easy dips and the semaphore pattern
of arms—are allusive and willfully shaped. They
also bubble with a lovely, tautly nuanced musicality
that cinches their look of refined simplicity. Rogers
may begin with the ordinary, but her steps and gestures
effortlessly push beyond into an airy state of odd and
unaffected beauty.
Two
weeks ago her work achieved new scope with an evening-length
dance in progress called Wild Life, a movement refuge
shown at the DanceAbout Studio on the San Francisco
campus of UC Berkeley Extension. Wild Life
will be premiered at New York’s Danspace October 2-5.
This
latest dance from the Berkeley, California native, now
a professor of dance at UC Riverside, was performed
before a small audience of friends and fellow choreographers.
The DanceAbout space, appropriately, is vast and cave-like,
although sound ricochets and gobbles up both music and
the human voice. (Rumor has it that UC will close the
space in the near future.)
Although
the Wild Life title is a play on wildlife,
it wasn’t only a world of jungle dwelling animals or
captive zoo creatures that Rogers was interested in
capturing. We humans were as much her subject, as were
the patterns nature duplicates, from aggregating rocks
and people in crowds, to the elegant symmetries in mineral
arches, trees, flying buttresses and the human body.
At times the dance took on a beautiful, incantatory
plainness, reflecting nature while itself of nature,
and making nature’s implicit patterns explicit.
Wild
Life was also lush, moody, roiling and lucid. I
loved that we could feel the movement swelling and receding
as in a tidal flow, or watch as steps and configurations
collapsed and reconstituted, at times materializing
and dematerializing at such breakneck speed that, rather
than bodies, apparitions seemed to be speeding by.
Performed
by a group of six, plus Rogers, the group, mostly professional
dancers, moved in often-unexpected alternation between
formations of the group (dyads, quartets, sextets) and
then of six disparate individuals separated in space.
Monica Bill Barnes, a small, wiry dancer with dark hair
decked out casually in red sweats, was the stand-out
as she catapaulted herself across the floor, rotated
around her center of gravity like a cyclone, recklessly
isolated appendages, and mimicked human and animal life
with an air of inspired invention. A number of times
she moved with her eyes closed, creating a startling
tactile intensity as she pawed her way through space.
Dancing blind seemed to link her to an utterly reliable
center of gravity, a sure stream of animality and a
core of polished ease.
But
each dancer (Allyson Green, Michael Miller, Zenobia
Moore, Jennifer Twilley and Christopher Williams) was
wonderfully distinct from the others. Rogers seemed
to make a point of and revel in it–whether it was Moore’s
leggy freedom, Twilley’s fierce athleticism or Green’s
classical cool. And even though the more technically
refined and expressive women overshadowed the men, the
men’s rough-hewn energy, bordering at times on the reckless,
also added a puppyish animality to Wild Life.
Although
Rogers opened the evening by describing the dance as
unfinished (the music certainly was) there was nothing
about its movement construction that seemed incomplete
or unplanned. The dancers repeatedly grouped themselves
in circles, lines, classical patterns then would break
loose like wild life and dance with preternatural synchronicity.
At times we felt an absence among the group—an
electrically charged gap could appear that seemed to
propel the movement invisibly and mysteriously. We observed
displacements that not only changed an arrangement in
space, as when a dancer budged into the middle of a
tight line of bodies, but caused change over time, as
when the line no longer accomodated the budger but morphed
completely. Rogers told us later she had adopted the
scientific phenomenon of relict morphology—the
continued influence of a no longer extant force—by
inserting a body, building a phrase around it, then
removing visible evidence of it while holding onto its
influence. These are the kinds of choreographic and
intellectual tools that fuel Rogers’ dancemaking.
As
the work evolved (which is what it seemed to do), it
acquired a dreamy density, reminding me of life observed
in a pond with its overlaying and sometimes interpenetrating
strata of activity and drama." Then Wild Life
took a decided, and, I think, unintended turn. It came
with the recitation of a portion of "A vanishing
land," a memoir written by Hildegarde Flanner,
a suburban gardener in Alta Dena, California, born in
1899. Flanner chronicles the alteration of her landscape
by pollution and urban encroachment, and foresees profound
changes in the character of time and history as the
ruination of the earth seems to be waiting for us on
the horizon.
While
Rogers may find a way to solve the problem of text literalizing
dance, Flanner’s specfic concern with the degradation
and transformation of nature hijacked Wild Life,
and took the wind out of movement that had moments
earlier sailed. A dance that had the power to offer
a view into the interpenetration of life’s layers became,
like the essay, unwittingly didactic and linear, if
charming.
But
given Rogers’ canny sense of craft and ability to skirt
literalism, she may, by the time they reach Danspace,
have figured out a way to overcome the problem that
afflicts choreographers when they illustrate their dance
with text. Maybe she’ll return to relic morphology.
She could remove Flanner from earshot but retain Flanner’s
passionate concern for urban interface with the country,
the human with the natural, and history with the present
moment.
copyright
Ann Murphy 2003
amended September 30, 2003
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