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A Breath of Spare Air

Program Three
Summerfest/Dance presents
West Wave Dance Festival 2004
Cowell Theater
San Francisco, California
July 30, 2004

By Ann Murphy
copyright © 2004 by Ann Murphy
published August 2, 2004

Shared concerts have been the mainstay of Bay Area summer performance ever since the inception more than 20 years ago of the now defunct Bay Area Dance Festival held at Laney College in Oakland for almost a decade. After a few hiccups, a San Francisco-based festival of the same sort sprang into being in1991, this one called Summerfest, now housed in the intimate but hard to reach Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Center. Program 3, which ran Friday and Friday night only, showcased five choreographers in an evening that placed the fluid, release-style postmodernism of Heidi Schweiker, Stephanie Gilliand, and Janice Garrett against Nancy Karp's minimalist "La Traversa" and an excerpt of sci-fi queen Jodi Lomask's new work about the earth.

After nearly an hour of very beautiful, sensual movement from Schweiker, Gilliand and Garrett, Karp's pared down work stood out the way a spare, formal photograph does set beside a Polaroid. The inspiration for "La Traversa" was a Sicilian funeral procession and the Italian island's culture in general, including the ubiquitous open-air markets that fill the morning hours of most Italian towns with the sound of sellers hawking goods. Sorrow and the banal are juxtaposed at the outset with Alvin Curran's score as we hear a seller yelling out "tredici mille, tredici mille," then three dour notes played repeatedly on an accordion, accompanied by a detached and solitary dance solo. To further set the tone, Karp dressed her women in shirtwaisted black dresses, the kind one still sees on widowed women in the Italian and Greek countryside, and the men in plain suits. The dancers appeared again and again in isolation or small, haunting tableaux set to the lonely, remorseless sounds of Curran's deconstructed Italian funeral band music.

Anti-virtuosic, anti-literal, anti-narrative, Karp's post-Cunningham dance style concerns itself with dance as line, whether it's the body's line or the linear action of a figure traversing space, and it's choreography that gives off more whiffs of the Bauhaus than of Judson Church. While most of the other choreographers Friday sent their dancers caroming into Capoeira style lunges or slithering off one another's bodies, Karp stuck to her reticent minimalist ways, exploring ideas about Sicilian society using an array of uninflected steps and gestures that included turns and lifts as austere as the women's dresses. Her vocabulary was essentially the same vocabulary she has always used. In it the legs drive the whole while the upper body remains neutral or follows the legs with a dip or a bow or a gesture. It proved an eerily apt language to capture the culture of a dry land supporting a people who can be as silent as stone and isolated from the mainland by the infamous Straits of Messina.

Anna-Lise Reusswig, who is a strong dancer with a mysteriously impassive face that draws the eye to her, began the dancing in a spot stage right, her leg slicing the air in soliloquy. Karp veteran Jason Torres Hancock filled a second spot stage left with a restrained series of bends and extensions. A third spot came up, filled by a couple. Zenobia Moore dancing downstage made the slicing steps and simple turns rife with urgency, injecting into Karp's simple declamatory style an impassioned diction. Diane McKallip, her hair now a wonderful silver, took the stage in a solo full of ronds de jambes and turns performed against a blood-red cyclorama.

While Karp could have pushed her dance further into an Antonioni-style poetics of the banal without resorting to narrative, and she could have developed the trajectory of the dance which, for me, lost its arc toward the end, her work nevertheless was a touchstone that underscored how beautiful but unrealized the work that came before it was.

Heidi Schweiker is one of the most stunning young choreographers on the scene. Having studied and danced with Robert Moses at Stanford, it's no surprise that Moses' sensual postmodern aesthetic is evident in the fluid patterns and molten relationships of Schweiker's style. The influence of Margaret Jenkins, with whom she has also danced, is plain as well. But as I watched "Of Checkered Breezes" with music by Paul Scriver, with beautiful agglomerations of bodies rising and falling, merging and pulling apart, I wanted to know: why start with the all-too familiar line of bodies ranging downstage center? Why this clasp of an ankle and not of something else? Why not stop the dance here and not there? What does it mean that the dancers meet but inevitably peel away from one another? In Moses' work, his dancers' exchanges read like the physicalization of the unspoken. With Jenkins, comings and goings are fraught with yearning, brief communion and ultimate loneliness or frustration. Schweiker has yet to uncover the necessity in her movement choices or to hone her use of dynamics to truly communicate her own stance about relationships or space and time.

Stephanie Gilliland's "Men's Trio" was a luscious study of male physicality that at times superficially looked like the work of Ohad Naharin. Here, too, the dancers luxuriated in the sensual, resembling (thanks to wonderful lighting by Kristie Roldan) studies of the sculpturally beautiful human body in Baroque painting. Men's Trio was an excerpt of Tertium Quidi (music by Thomas Newman), which Gilliland is reformulating and will showcase later in the month. Maybe in the full piece it will be evident but Friday it was unclear why the three men had their feet locked in shirtsleeves, what propelled them to free themselves and tie their shirts around their waists, or why they eventually donned jackets. The vocabulary of molten movement they used has also become an all too familiar one, but Jay Bartley, Bradley Michaud and Bryan Wallk performed with such lovely conviction that that was almost enough.

By the time Janice Garrett's high-octane premiere "Quaternion" appeared, the works started to bleed into one another. Garrett has a keen sense of form, organizing her material with a craftswoman's care, but she frequently runs the risk of her skill overtaking her and extinguishing the spark necessary to art.

A quaternion has a number of definitions, from a group of four, which was the number of dancers, two folded sheets in a book, or an aspect of noncommutative algebra. While the dance had potent images of archers and enormous speed that challenged the technical limits of the four dancers, the movement had none of the mystery of Peter Sculthorpe's score and, like the preceding two works, lacked any feeling of inevitability.

Had the Summerfest producers curated the evening with an eye toward contrasting the work rather than bundling similarly styled dances together, each of these three pieces would have stood up better. Placing "La Traversa" after intermission made the opening half of the night seem even fuzzier in retrospect, as though Karp's clarity cast the others into opaque light. But what was truly weird was the producers' choice to end such a dancerly program with Lomask's underchoreographed, club-minded "Mantle and Breaking Out." Part of a larger work in progress called "Digging in the Dark," Lomask, whose company is called Capacitor, is at her most creative in her application of special effects, whether it's the use of black light and projected images or of fire. There were both in Mantle, along with a finale of Brazilian-style dance steps performed with the dancers holding kerosene torches. There aren't a lot of actual dance phrases in Lomask's work, however, and what phrases there are are very basic as opposed to essentialized, as Karp's are, with the work's earnest rawness the source of much of its appeal. This made the juxtaposition of "Mantle" with "La Traversa" one of the odder curatorial choices I can remember.

A moment from "La Traversa," photogrpahed by Marty Sohl.

Capacitator. Photo: Edgar Lee.

Originally published:
www.danceviewtimes.com
Volume 2, No. 29
August 2, 2004

revised August 5, 2004
Copyright ©2004 by Ann Murphy

 

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