A
Dancer's Dancer
"Repair"
Vicky Shick, Elise Kermani, and Barbara Kilpatrick
Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
New York, New York
March 18, 2005
by
Nancy Dalva
copyright
©2005 by Nancy Dalva
The
latest installment of the decade-long collaboration of the choreographer
Vicky Shick and the visual artist Barbara Kilpatrick, recently joined
by composer Elise Kermani, transpires as several chapters, or short stories,
in their ongoing saga. If you can call it that. Theirs is work that is
the opposite of epic: self-effacing, pellucid, gorgeously economical,
subsuming and alluding, given to modest epiphanies.
If their previous work, "Undoing" (2003) was erased, hidden,
like a narrative with most of the words whited out, this new work is just
the opposite, but equally spare and delicate. Not something rubbed out,
but something suggested. Not dance as fragment, but dance as clue. Kermani's
shimmering sound score (including the eerie notes elicited from wine glasses
filled with water) functions like a film score, a sonic backdrop, providing
emotional weather, transitions, tone. Kilpatrick's constructions involve,
as in their past piece, garments and curtains, but not to hide within
or behind. Instead, two crumpled white fiberglass panels serve as a pillars,
at once suggesting window glass and the draperies that shade them. To
one side is a fragile sculpture of a dress, crackly and creamy, decorated
with clear lights. It might stand for a wedding dress, or a prom dress,
or a ballet costume, or none of these. A dress, after all, might just
be a dress. Something to try on, to fit into, to dream of wearing, to
remember having worn.
Both performers in the piece, Shick and Jodi Melnick, are what you might
call dancers's dancers. (Indeed, the audience was filled with such performers,
there to see one of their own kind.) Shick was a member of the Trisha
Brown Dance Company for six years, is a noted teacher, and has worked
with many other choreographers, among them Yoshiko Chuma, Irène
Hultman, Risa Jaroslow, Daniel Lepkoff, Barhara Mahler, Wendy Perron,
Stephen Petronio, Susan Rethorst, and Sara Rudner. Melnick danced with
Twyla Tharp and Hultman, and performs with Rudner and Rethorst as well
as Shick, and has appeared with Chuma, Dennis O'Conner, Yves Musard, and
Donna Uchizono. Since 2002, she has worked with Trisha Brown, first as
assistant director on "Winterriese," and then re-staging the
work. Each is an exceptional performer-actress, in what might be considered
the dance equivalent of method-acting, though in this new piece there
is an alluring break-out moment when Shick turns her back and yields the
floor to Melnick, the music kicks in, and all of a sudden we're given
Giselle's mad scene, complete with tumbling hair, and the tumble to the
floor.
Not that Shick's yielding to Melnick is unique to that moment, for Shick
is the ultimate yielder, and the most reluctant occupier of a spotlight
I have ever observed, and yet there she is, nonetheless, with her clear,
shimmering physicality, like silver organza, like a beautiful pale giraffe,
completely elegant, not at all chic. She is modest in the extreme, and
lovely in the extreme, and her work to me has the quality of a Barbara
Pym novel, or an Alice Munro short story. That is, no matter what the
details of what appears to be some sort of narration, it is the tone that
speaks to me, and to which I respond. I don't have a certain idea of what
the dancers are doing, but I feel certain I know what they are thinking,
or feeling.
I see Shick partner Melnick, and I think about the desire of women, particularly
the mothers of sons and the sisters of brothers, for female companionship.
Shick might be Melnick's mother, for she helps her with her shoes—black
shoes, on bare vulnerable feet, offsetting her pretty legs—and with
a skirt that is a lighted sculpture (later matched with a lighted bolero
for Shick, not especially successful, but neither intrusive). She might
be her sister, or her aunt. Or she might be her choreographer, her teacher,
or, in fact, her novelist. Or Melnick might be her younger self. She might
be all of these things, or none, but their connection was real, is real.
I see Shick dance alone, her long torso wrapped in a black tunic, her
legs hidden in cropped black trousers, trapped in Carol Mullin's uncompromising
light, and I see the way I feel in the middle of the night, sitting up
in bed and thinking—restless, confined, distracted, dreamless, unsettled.
I see Melnick dance alone, at the close of the piece, in still less light,
touching her mouth, rubbing her lower face. I am not sure what she is
doing–but I know how it feels. I've felt like that, I feel like
that. I recognize myself in this work, time and again. The feminine condition,
sparely eludicated, complete yet incomplete. Another chapter, gleaned
from notes—not written, but danced.
Volume 3,
No. 12
March 21, 2005
copyright
©2005
Nancy Dalva
www.danceviewtimes.com
|
|
Writers |
Mindy
Aloff
Dale Brauner
Mary Cargill
Christopher Correa
Clare Croft
Nancy Dalva
Rita Felciano
Marc Haegeman
George Jackson
Gia Kourlas
Alan M. Kriegsman
Sali Ann Kriegsman
Sandi Kurtz
Alexander Meinertz
Tehreema Mitha
Gay Morris
Ann Murphy
Paul Parish
John Percival
Tom Phillips
Susan Reiter
Jane Simpson
Alexandra Tomalonis (Editor)
Lisa Traiger
Meital Waibsnaider
Kathrine Sorley Walker
Leigh Witchel
|
|
DanceView |
The Autumn Issue
of DanceView is OUT! (Our subscription link
is working again, so it's easy to subscribe on line!)
Robert
Greskovic reviews two new DVDs of Fonteyn dancing "Sleeping
Beauty" and "Cinderella"
Mary
Cargill on last summer's Ashton Celebration
Profile
of Gillian Murphy, reviews of the ABT Spring season, springtime
in Paris, reports from London and San Francisco
DanceView
is available by subscription ONLY. Don't miss it. It's a good
read. Black and white, 48 pages, no ads. Subscribe
today!
DanceView
is published quarterly (January, April, July and October)
in Washington, D.C. Address all correspondence to:
DanceView
P.O. Box 34435
Washington, D.C. 20043
|
|
|