Dance: BodyVox cuts to the Hollywood chase

Movie madness: Jonathan Krebs (above) hounds Jamey Hampton. Photo: BodyVox

What in modern life is more deeply and thrillingly superficial than the movies, which seem so realistic and profound yet are merely light and shadow dancing on a flat surface? They transfix us, transport us, edify and irritate us with their virtual nothingness. Movies are dream-extensions of our imaginations, realer than reality yet always also something less: playthings of our lizard nerves and Paleolithic minds. A movie is a seducer, an illogical charmer, and we slip into and out of its embrace with easy abandon: love us again, like you did before.

The Cutting Room, the newest evening-length dance performance from BodyVox, is a charming reminder that at the movies, story and reason take a back seat to ritual and emotion. Most of what’s important in a movie is subterranean, felt and understood almost without thinking. As much as we might complain that a plot is predictable or a motivation doesn’t make sense, plot and motivation aren’t really all that important to a movie’s success: movement and the ability to mesmerize are. Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali only made explicit the surrealism that Hollywood journeymen casually practice every day.

BodyVox is an ideal dance company to dive into the dreamworld of the movies. It’s always used a lot of filmwork in its shows, mostly short sly films by the witty Mitchell Rose but also some by cofounder Jamey Hampton, who happens, with his long loose limbs and rubbery face, to be an excellent comic film performer. And BodyVox shares the sort of idealistic ebullience that the movies thrive on, even if Hollywood sprinkles most of its award-season glitter on earnestly serious projects. Deep down, BodyVox and the movies share a belief that the importance of being earnest is vastly overstated. Even Oscar Wilde undercut the notion in his own play, which is, if anything, earnestly devoted to the cleansing comic value of the deeply superficial. The adage “Dying’s easy, comedy’s hard” could be a BodyVox calling-card, and the difficulty springs not just from technique but also from the labor of achieving a transcendent lightness of being against the cosmic odds.

Space Odyssey scenario. Photo: David Krebs

What The Cutting Room achieves is to distill the essence of movie storytelling without weighting it down with any actual story. And it has fun doing it. It’s a situational comedy, a comedy of mood and ritual trappings. “Stella!” a voice cries; or, “I’ll have what she’s having”; or “I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen”; and we all know what the scene is and where, in Hollywood dreamland, we are. It’s as comfortable and comforting as reciting The Lord’s Prayer. Hampton and his cofounding partner Ashley Roland have snipped out the plots and left the feeling of film in a well-chosen variety pack of genres, from documentary and romantic comedy to Bollywood and sci-fi. Each has its conventions and tropes, and The Cutting Room brings those background elements to the forefront, eliminating the mere facts of the matter as inconsequential.

When it comes to plotting, The Cutting Room cuts to the chase: Jonathan Krebs as a heavy in an exercise suit, chasing a suit-and-tied Hampton through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, up the down staircase and every which way but loose. A chase scene is the ultimate thrill gizmo in modern moviemaking, and at one point The Cutting Room actually cuts to a chase within a chase, Krebs dogging Hampton through an entire scene about movie chases. How meta!

We don’t know why this chase is going on – it has something to do with a botched handoff of a film canister – only that it is. It’s quintessential existential, like Steve McQueen careering down the twisting streets of San Francisco: that’s all we really need to know. And the chase, with its occasional catchings-up and scuffles, races across both film and stage, protagonist and antagonist breaking through the screen along a transgressional path that Woody Allen and others have prepared.

Thanks in part to some cleverly mobile walls (technical director is James Mapes) it’s like one reality opening to another, then slipping back again. On screen, Rose and Hampton and cameraman Nick Magaurn use all sorts of editing tricks, averting moments of disaster by simply making one of the combatants disappear, as the clichéd yet in this case extremely accurate phrase has it, “into thin air.” On stage, as Krebs and Hampton slip and stumble around the very real bodies of the other 10 performers, the visual fluidity becomes grounded in physical reality.

I like the blend of age and youth in the current iteration of the BodyVox company, which ranges from veterans such as Roland, Hampton, Eric Skinner and Daniel Kirk to younger dancers such as Anna Marra and Holly Shaw. The 12-person ensemble for this show also includes Krebs, Jeff George, Zachary Carroll, Heather Jackson, Josh Murry and Katie Staszkow. True to the BodyVox approach, the performers aren’t just adept at dance technique: they’re also excellent mimics and more than passable actors. In the opening section lampooning classical story ballet, the intention is clearly comic and the technique is close enough to make it work. It’s not in drag, but the Trocks, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, come to mind.

Zachary Carroll, Anna Marra. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

The ensemble, aided a good deal by Roland’s witty costumes and Gene Dent’s lighting design, carries responsibility for establishing the flavor of each genre, and carries it off well, from the ballroom verve of romantic comedy to the bright smiles and supple hand gestures of Bollywood and the high-kicking Broadway-cum-Hee Haw hijinks of the concluding “Americana” section. In each case story is nothing, texture is all. Watching the scenes unreel, we begin to realize how much of what we know about any given movie is less about its screenplay than about the stylistic traditions of its genre. As Gene Kelly might say, That’s Entertainment.

For a century now, movies and dance have been having a grand affair. We rarely see it as explicitly stated as this (although in their own ways choreographers as stylistically varied as Twyla Tharp, George Balanchine and Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s Christopher Stowell, with his Cole Porter-themed Eyes on You, have played similar territory with stage and screen), but the tie that BodyVox makes between dance and the movies is much more than mere whimsy. Like film, dance can have a narrative component but it’s essentially a nonliterary art form, relying on distillation and suggestion rather than explication. Even in the classical dances we call “story ballets” the essence isn’t in the story but in the visual texture. Like music, dance is in the moment. And dance and music are as closely linked as film and music. The Dying Swan isn’t The Dying Swan without Saint-Saëns’ cello solo from The Carnival of the Animals. In the same way, the expertly chosen recorded music for The Cutting Room (it ranges from Mozart and Puccini to Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Thomas Newman and Ralph Stanley) both defines and drives the thrill of the chase.

Like the movies, it’s kind of a dream. The seduction continues through May 19 at BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 Southwest 17th Avenue.

Dance: OBT feels the rhythm on a smaller scale

From left: Alison Roper, Kate Oderkirk and Makino Hayashi in the world premiere of Matjash Mrozewski's "The Lost Dance." Photo: James McGrew

After a season in the yawning expanses of the 3,000-seat Keller Auditorium (a hall that both Portland Opera and Oregon Ballet Theatre have learned to work with very well despite its eccentricities) it’s nice to see OBT finishing its regular season in the more congenial folds of the Newmark Theatre. The Edwardian-style Newmark strikes a fine balance between formalism and comfort, connecting audiences and performers in a warm oval embrace. It’s a lovely hall for dance, enveloping and intimate yet also, with 880 seats and three tiers, big enough to handle a decent-sized crowd. Its main drawback may be its small orchestra pit, but that just means you choose your repertory to fit the space.

For the most part OBT’s Chromatic Quartet, which opened Thursday, does that exceptionally well. The lone piece with live accompaniment, Christopher Wheeldon’s Liturgy (danced beautifully at Thursday’s opening-night performance by Haiyan Wu and Brian Simcoe), needs just two performers to fill the hall with Arvo Part’s haunting and broken music: pianist Carol Rich and violinist Margaret Bichteler. Val Caniparoli’s familiar Lambarena uses a recorded blend of Bach and traditional African music, and Matjash Mrozewski’s The Lost Dance, in its world premiere, is performed to a recorded contemporary score by Owen Belton that’s meant for electronics. It would have been good to hear Stravinsky’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major performed live for the program opener, Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto, especially since the rhythmic meeting of the music and the dancers is so essential to the piece. But a good recording, if not ideal, was at least second-best.

Dance critic Martha Ullman West reviewed the opening-night performance perceptively, as always, for Oregon Live, and I have little to add. I recommend you click the link to see what she has to say, which in part is this: “(T)he dancers (put) heart, soul and technical skill into the performance of four wildly different ballets.”

One thing that struck me quite happily was the rhythmic connection, whether purposeful or by happenstance, between Balanchine’s 1972 choreography for Stravinsky Violin Concerto and Mrozewski’s for the brand-new Lost Dance. It’s not that  the movements themselves are all that similar (as Martha notes, Lost Dance’s lightly nostalgic mix of pop, classic and modern influences is closer to Tharp than Balanchine). It’s that both play very tricky, off-kilter rhythmic games that require the dancers to understand what’s going on off the beat as well as on it.

Stravinsky’s music is from 1931 and feels historic yet also intensely, compulsively modern in its drive and energy, and Balanchine, who was at once a nostalgist and a brilliant innovator, responded naturally to it. The result is a ballet that creates its beauty from a nervous complexity of angular shapes, and must be devilishly hard for dancers to perform without giving the impression that they’re anxiously counting out the beats inside their heads. Martha noted, correctly, that the performance on Thursday was sometimes a little too cautious, but not always: Alison Roper, Yang Zhou, the fast-rising Grace Shibley and others swept beyond the counting and deep into the heart of the music. I have a feeling that the company will only improve as it moves past its initial uncertainties and gets this marvelous choreography deep inside its bones.

Owen Belton’s dance floor-infused electronic score for The Lost Dance could hardly be more different from Stravinsky’s music, except that both are demanding rhythmically. It’s the kind of music that a lot of choreographers noodle around in, trying out different movements without feeling any urgent need to shape them. Yet the shapes that Mrozewski discovers are clear, complex and riveting, and the dancers respond with precision and enthusiasm. Company and choreographer seem to click. Now that they’ve been introduced, it’d be good if they kept the relationship going.

I’m a little more open to the pleasures of Lambarena than Martha, who refers to it as a “gimmicky fusion of the baroque and the tribal.” Maybe its gimmicky, but it’s also gorgeously designed, and uplifting without any of the icky connotations of the word, and I find the blending of Bach and traditional African music quite affecting. The dance isn’t “authentic,” and I don’t think it pretends to be. It’s simply an appreciative nod by an artist of one culture to artists he admires in another. I’ve seen it performed several times, by different companies, and when it’s danced well, as it was here, it works. In one sense it’s like Carmen or Carmina Burana: a person can walk off the street with little knowledge of the discipline and respond immediately to what she sees and hears. That’s not a bad thing at all. Watching it Thursday, and especially watching Kathi Martuza’s full-throttle return from maternity leave, I thought, “Ah. Here you are again, Lambarena. Nice to see you. You’re looking good, Live long and prosper.”

 A final note: With 28 company dancers and seven apprentices, OBT has reached the size and talent level to be able to do multiple castings of its programs. Different dancers in major roles can bring remarkably different nuances to the ballets, which means that if you’re really interested in a piece you might want to see it performed more than once, by different casts. You can check OBT’s Web site for casting information here. The production continues through April 28.

Sister dance cities? Goteborg meets Portland

Goteborg (or Gothenburg), Sweden, in case you don’t know the town, could be a sister city to Portland. With close to a million people in its metropolitan area and about 31 inches of precipitation a year, it’s only slightly smaller and dryer. True, it’s a little colder than Portland – a balmy 68 degrees on an average August day – and it was founded in 1621, when the place that would become Portland more than 200 years later was pretty much a couple of rivers and a whole lot of forest. But both cities love good food, are transportation hubs, and boast, among other cultural attractions, highly regarded ballet companies.

OreloB, by Kenneth Kvarnsrom

Those ballet companies, though, are yin and yang. “James Canfield,” dance writer Martha Ullman West whispered succinctly at one point during Goteborg Ballet’s premiere performance in Portland Thursday night at the Newmark Theatre.

She was talking about the founding artistic director of Oregon Ballet Theatre, who came to town from the Joffrey Ballet and set out to establish a contemporary, pop culture-infused company that reveled in loud music and big effects. When Christopher Stowell came from San Francisco and replaced Canfield, he reset the course toward heavily Balanchine-influenced neoclassical territory, where OBT has prospered.

Goteborg felt, in a funny way, like a return to the Canfield years, although a little more intellectual and a little less rock’n’roll. The Swedish company’s gone the other way from Portland’s, traveling in the past 10 years from traditional ballet to very contemporary European work. It, too, has prospered. With 39 dancers from 16 countries, it’s become the biggest contemporary dance company in the Nordic countries. Fourteen of those dancers made the trip to Portland for three concerts in the White Bird dance series (final shows are at 7:30 p.m. tonight and Saturday), and there wasn’t a slipper or a pointe among them. If the three pieces the company performed are representative, the journey from traditional to contemporary is complete.

First things first: the dancers are very good. This is almost always the case with the companies White Bird brings to town, and is a big key to the series’ resounding success. It makes it easy, if you want to, to just sit back and revel in the technique and athleticism of the performers, no matter what the choreography happens to be doing. It also means the choreography is getting a more than fair shake: you can be pretty sure at most White Bird shows that the dancers are doing what the choreographers want them to do, and doing it well. In a way, there’s no place for the choreography to hide.

And there’s where things get interesting. Much of the European dance scene has broken sharply from its balletic roots, discarding the shaping influences that both story and specific music can supply, preferring a kind of open-ended atmosphere not really bound by oceans of loosely structured sound.

You can argue that the approach is better suited to a 21^st century world that embraces the idea that the universe is the product of chance, not design. The program notes for Johan Inger’s Falter, an “explorative journey from chaos to order,” are telling: the dance depicts “a world where nothing is constant. Our struggle to adjust to external and internal changes is ongoing; all we can do is to start anew.”

In such a place ballet training is useful and used, but contemporary dancers tend to employ their bodies in different ways. There are technical differences, and a lot of exceptions and qualifications. But to make a grossly oversweeping comparison, traditional ballet is about staying balanced under pressure; contemporary is about seeing how far out of balance you can get without losing control.

Goteborg’s opening piece in Portland, choreographer Orjan Andersson’s Beethoven’s 32 Variations, is the closest to a traditional ballet, and also the one that makes the most overt point of rejecting tradition. It’s danced to a live piano performance by Joakim Kallhed, and begins with an implicit nod to old-fashioned court dance: a glimpse of the past before it moves on. I liked the way that Kallhed attacked the familiar phrases of the Pathetique, emphasizing the rhythm and thrusting the music’s pulse forward slightly, so that when the more languid sections came it seemed as if the dance was emerging onto a different plane. (Andersson explains that he had in mind the increasingly open silences that came to define Beethoven’s slip toward deafness.) Andersson is a talented phrasemaker – the dance has moments of genuine beauty – but the breaks seem abrupt and less organic than for effect, as if they were saying, we can do ballet, but we don’t want to. In the end I found myself concentrating more on the music than the dance.

Kenneth Kvarnstrom’s OreloB (that’s Bolero backwards) was an almost immediate pick-me-up, a piece in which the music and dance were completely intertwined, feeding inventively off of each other and creating an almost narcotic transformation, a dervish sensory swirl, in the audience. “The driving force behind Kvarnstrom’s choreographic work is the wish to find and work with the inherent musicality of movement,” his program bio reads, and with OreloB he succeeds in spades: It’s the only one of the program’s three works that genuinely and consistently engaged me.

At the core of OreloB is Jukka Rintamaki’s electronic score, based on the sinuous repetitions of Ravel’s Bolero but scratching them up so they sound ragged and removing the overly familiar undulations while retaining the hypnotic effect. Helena Horstedt’s costumes, with little shoulder-and-back ruffles that seemed like sea-creature gills, lent the piece a slightly sinister science-fiction feel (the designs reminded me a little of the stuff the late lamented Portland theater artist Ric Young used to do). And the dancing was vigorous and unstoppable, inventive and relentless. The energy doesn’t let up: when the dancers walk, they walk with purpose. It’s rhythmic, sexy, trancelike – maybe something like Ravel’s music was when it was fresh, before it became commonplace. I’ll be listening to Beethoven’s Pathetique for the rest of my life, and chances are I’ll never listen to Rintamaki’s music for OreloB again. Yet as a dance, Kvarnstrom’s OreloB is considerably more memorable than Andersson’s 32 Variations.

The closer, Inger’s Falter, is the most theatrical and Canfieldesque, a piece that revels in blasts of sound and vivid stage effects. The set, which Inger designed, is dominated by a jungle’s worth of hanging ropes (64 of them) that gave the impression that aerial work would soon be commencing. Except for a couple of desultory half-attempts it didn’t: the ropes really were set pieces, suggesting the jungle, or prison bars, or whatever sort of obscurant you wanted to make of them. Blinding lights flashed in the dancers’ faces; their heads shook violently as if gripped by seizures; their bodies jolted. Why? I’m not sure, but then, a dance doesn’t need a precise reason.

It does need a shape, though, and like a lot of dances performed to more-or-less ambient music, the shape of Falter is difficult to detect. “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said, and Falter, despite Inger’s suggestion that it moves from chaos to order, seems to follow that dictum. Certainly the piece didn’t seem to end at the end. Those ropes, eventually, came tumbling down, plopping on the stage and raising little puffs of dust like stage fog, until finally the last one coiled on the floor. But the music and the dancing continued, puzzlingly, anticlimactically, shapelessly. When it stopped I wasn’t sure why or why then, but I was glad: It had overstayed its time.

Still, I was glad to see Goteborg Ballet in town. The dancers are obviously deeply skilled, the company has high technical values, and like almost everything that White Bird imports, it represents a vivid snapshot of what’s going on in the world of contemporary dance. If Goteborg Ballet is the balletic yang to Oregon Ballet Theatre’s yin, White Bird is OBT’s yang in terms of local presentation: OBT provides a lively and satisfying continuing tradition, White Bird brings in messengers from the rest of the world. Goteborg and Portland could be sister cities. White Bird and OBT are sister dance presenters, the twin poles of the city’s fertile dance scene – and together, they create a satisfying whole.

On Wednesday we danced: White Bird, OBT, 10 Tiny Dances, etc.

Camille A. Brown & Dancers/Christopher Dougan

Yasmeen Godder’s “Love Fire” created so much enjoyable puzzlement in one particular brainpan that I completely forgot to pass along some news. White Bird announced the lineup for next season’s Uncaged series (WB co-founders Paul King and Walter Jaffe will announce the  mainstage season later this month.) And then once that became clear, why not do an entire dance post? Why not indeed!

First, here’s that season I forgot to tell you about:

Trisha Brown Dance Company, Oct. 11-13: The Uncaged series is generally for companies and choreographers who are emerging or whose work is either too strange or too astringent to fill the Schnitz. Trisha Brown, a post-modern dance legend whose career goes back to the re-invention of modern dance by the Judson Dance Theatre in the 1960s, could qualify in the “astringency” category maybe, though personally, I find her dance accessible and deeply satisfying, flowy and informal, and she “deserves” to dance in the Schnitz, maybe, but since I prefer the cozier confines of Lincoln Hall the Newmark Theatre, what the heck… Below, find her positively balletic “Pygmalion.”

Camille A. Brown & Dancers, Dec. 6-8: Brown is young and rising fast, so she’s a perfect fit for Uncaged. The reviews and YouTube clips I saw were impressive — she’s got a gift that she’s working out in high-energy, high-impact dances right now.

Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2013: Now, Chouinard, a Montreal-based choreographer, qualifies as “strange,” as in “disquieting and bizarre.” Her previous work has explored sexuality and gender themes, often in a nightmarish way, violent and extreme, and I can’t imagine what her “Rite of Spring” will look like!

Contemporary Ballet of Algiers/Abou Lagraa, March 21-23, 2013: White Bird has tapped into the worldwide hip-hop-inspired dance movement, with special attention to Brazil, and this time they’re bringing a North African unit, which promises to have just as much acrobatic punch as anyone.

More dance!

Ten Tiny Dances is doing one of its famous dance-on-a-boxtop performances at the Kennedy School tonight (7 pm, April 4) as a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Learning Center. The performers will include high school students as well as dance pros: Mike Barber, Tahni Holt, Luciana Proaño, Bridgette Walsh and Liz Hayden. Tickets are $20.

Oregon Ballet Theatre’s line-up for its Chromatic Quartet at the Newmark Theatre, a great place to see dance, includes a Christopher Wheeldon ballet, Liturgy, to music by Arvo Pärt, Val Caniparoli’s crowd-pleasing Lambarena, a world premiere of a collaboration between fashion designer Adam Arnold and choreographer Matjash Mrozewski, and the company’s first performance of Balanchine’s choreography for Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. April 19-28. Use the promo code: QUARTET to get $5 off your tickets.

Old friends — choreographer Luciana Proaño and South African composer/peace activist Eugene Skeef — join forces for “Ancestral Beads,” a “confluence of dance, music and poetry,” at 7 pm April 20-21, Conduit, 918 SW Yamhill. Tickets are $5-$25.

The New York Times has the biggest collection of dance critics in captivity — well, among daily newspapers in North America, and they are hardly in captivity, so… — and they gathered online to talk about critics’ stuff, meaning they argued. First, chief critic Alastair Macaulay argued that we’d reached the end of the line in modern dance. Only the old masters, Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown (see above),had what it takes to move a critic these days. And then Claudia La Rocco, last seen here doing a beat-down on the TBA Festival, rose to respond (or at least I imagined her rising from her seat to declaim):

“I do find myself frequently moved, delighted, provoked and deeply satisfied by what I see — by Jodi Melnick and Tanowitz and Wilson, also by numerous other choreographers, including Trajal Harrell, Yasuko Yokoshi, Miguel Gutierrez, Keely Garfield, Tere O’Connor — it’s a long list, though it isn’t one that includes the recent work of Tharp or Morris or Brown. What I love about the messy engagement between maker and observer is how changeable and subjective the whole situation is; how much it encapsulates the day-to-day in-the-mudness of being alive.”

Actually, the debate was civilized, but it revealed that the Times harbors a range of opinion among its dance critics. Now, if it would only give them some space to operate!

Finding our way: Betty Feves, Adrienne Rich, Yasmeen Godder

So, in the past 24 hours I saw a dancer digging fake viscera out of a stuffed animal of unknown species (I’m thinking it was goat-like, though).  Before that I saw a beautiful exhibition of work by the late Betty Feves, and it made me want to start a bonfire. And then just moments ago, I appeared on OPB’s Think Out Loud and spent so much time talking about the unequal distribution of the goods of the society that I didn’t have time to distribute one of those goods — a poem by the late Adrienne Rich. Stick with me and I’ll rectify that for you, lucky readers,  though I’ll always feel bad for all those people in radio land who will go without!

Do these things have anything to do with one another? Well, maybe the work of Feves and Rich, but just glancingly. Feves was one of those dynamos who built a successful life for herself in Pendleton, Oregon, adventurous in its exploration of the arts and in its commitment to building and serving a community.  Perhaps because of her gender and her geography, her life and art reached fewer people than Rich, who was so important to so many woman (and men) seeking to understand the conditions that limited the reach of Feves, successful as she was. I don’t know, but that’s how I’m thinking about it right now.

The viscera? They came from the comic imagination of Israeli choreographer Yasmeen Godder, whose “Love Fire” is a work of comic genius of a sort, almost burlesque, and almost completely unthinkable in the world (1918-1985) that Feves inhabited.

Betty Feves, Three Figures No. 4, 1955; Stoneware;
18x12x6 inches; Oregon Ceramic Studio Purchase, 1998.55.02.
/Photo: Dan Kvitka

I’ll start with Feves, because anyone who seeks to understand this specific ground we walk upon and the culture we operate within should consider seeing “Generations: Betty Feves” at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Bob Hicks has already written eloquently about the show for ArtsWatch, but allow me to second some of his points and his motion that it’s well worth the trip.

I don’t know what I admire most about Feves. Her persistent energy, experimentation and creative mind, all applied to the people and landscapes of Eastern Oregon, so that to gaze at one of her gritty, striated tower constructions is like visiting that rocky, spare country?  The deft touch of her drawings? The scientific bent that led her to test so many different materials, glazes and firing techniques for her ceramic art? (This is where the bonfire comes in, actually in a film in the exhibition.) The number of people she touched and served in and around Pendleton, specifically, but the state, too?  The excitement this show creates in a visitor, such as myself? Maybe it’s just her capacity to be and do ALL of these things.

The show itself, carefully researched and curated by Namita Gupta Wiggers, the museum’s curator, is clear and open and beautiful, like the country that Feves loved, with natural light pouring into the space, even on a rainy day.  Enough explanation is available to help us understand Feves’s story (especially if you read Bob’s post!), and the show balances Feves’s big sculptural work and her smaller more delicate objects, giving the former room to stretch out and providing near neighbors to the latter. I especially loved the collection of bonfire-fired pots from 1981, which give us a sense of the breadth of her explorations within this single form.

This isn’t a pot show, though. There are those towers, lots of figures and other sculptural pieces, for example. Feves was involved very early with the fusion of Modernist-inspired art and a craft medium, and the work from the 1940s and 1950s took me back to those interesting times in Oregon art, maybe the most exciting ever here up until our own time. But go and see for yourself, the color and rough texture of our earth, this record of our pragmatics and our dreams.

“Love Fire” reminded me of the madcap, internally consistent but crazy world of playwright Richard Foreman, with movement substituting for the wordplay. Because Foreman isn’t for everyone, neither is Godder’s “Love Fire,” brought to us courtesy of White Bird, even though dancer Matan Zamir is incredibly engaging — oh, the earnestness with which he digs out those internal organs! — and Yodder herself, bold as she can be, is willing to go to great lengths for a laugh. And you have to hand it to a dance in which one dancer dons the goat-like carcass on his head and the other rides it like Debra Winger in “Urban Cowboy”—and it also makes sense in its own weird way.

All of this plays out to a series of waltzes, both exuberant and melancholy, even a bit from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, which someone makes it even more absurd, this rush of activity. What does it all “signify,” exactly? I have no idea, though I viewed it as exemplifying how we get caught up in crazy situations, despite knowing how crazy it all is. At one point in his beginning solo, Zamir was in the thrall of “The Blue Danube,” the timing of his spasms matching Strauss’s 3/4 time, and he looked out at us with an expression that said, “Hey, this is the carnival ride I’m on, what can I do about it.”

Although I found parts of the show hilarious, I noticed that sometimes I was laughing alone, oops, and even I didn’t get the foggy visitation at the end by Yochai Matos and his play with fluorescent lights. But maybe you will! Here’s a video from a different Godder piece.

Which gets me to Adrienne Rich, who died earlier this week at the age of 82. I was invited to appear on the Culture Club segment of Think Out Loud, and I was asked to come up with topics for consideration, and Rich was one that I suggested, given her cultural importance, especially to the early days of feminism in America, not because I’m an expert on her or anything. I was asked to find a Rich poem to read on the show, and I found Translations, which appeared in the The Nation, and which I hope they won’t mind if I use. The segment was dominated by discussion of Trayvon Martin and the prospects of health care reform in the Supreme Court. I contended that both were at heart a matter of uneven distributions — of justice in the case of Martin and of health care in the case before the Supreme Court. Others opposed that position. So be it.

Anyway, we didn’t have time for that poem. It’s from 1972. In fact, it’s subtitle is December 25, 1972. And the more I read it, the more I like it. Maybe you will, too?

Adrienne Rich/ Courtesy Poetry Foundation

Translations

December 25, 1972

Adrienne Rich

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebook

the phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
never mind. she’ll get tired—
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political

Stop making sense: Linda Austin’s ‘A Head of Time’

Austin, all dressed down and ready to leap into the space-time continuum.

As I was watching Linda Austin’s slyly funny new dance performance A Head of Time at Imago Theatre on Saturday night, my brain jumped to a “Cul de Sac” comic strip I’d seen a few hours earlier in the morning newspaper.

“MOM,” the kid cries out in the middle of the night.

Mom rushes into the kid’s bedroom: “What is it, Alice?”

Alice, sitting up in bed: “I had a dream. There were MONSTERS & THINGS & BEASTS & SPIDERS! And BATS! And CREATURES! And LEAKY FAUCETS! And SMELLY SHOES!”

Pause in the last panel. Then Alice, wistfully: “How do I make that dream come back?”

Austin’s been at this contemporary-dance racket going on 30 years now, and she’s adept at making the dream come back. Chances are the narratives she puts on stage don’t make a lot of sense, at least in the old-fashioned linear way. Not that they’re illogical. They’re more non-logical, closer to free-association leaps than anything you could hammer into a point-by-point outline for a seventh-grade English essay. And like free-association games, the overall pattern might be indiscernible but each link probably has a rational connection to the one that came before. What you get in an Austin dance is a dream-story: fleeting images tied together by little, perhaps, but an empathetic feeling and the coincidence of being clustered together. Maybe it’s Freudian. Or maybe it’s only a cigar.

Another thing about A Head of Time, which had just three performances and closed Sunday: You do want the dream to come back.

A little like Imago’s Carol Triffle, her sister in splintered coherence, Austin can carry you into potentially horrific territory – monsters & things & beasts & spiders – and make you like the trip. No matter how harsh things might get (and in this piece it’s not very, unless you consider getting buried beneath a tumbling wall of quilts and blankets harsh) a feeling of benevolence hovers over the enterprise. Austin’s a comedian in the broad sense of the word, which aligns her with the likes of Triffle and BodyVox and Do Jump! on the Portland performance scene, although each approaches comedy in its own way.

Austin’s way, like Triffle’s, is on the abstract edge of things, but its “lightness” doesn’t signify a lack of seriousness. Good comedy’s a subversive beast, and in its way more sophisticated than tragedy. Tragedy says, It’s all hopeless: we’re going to die. Comedy says, OK, and so what? – let’s do something in the meantime. If a person proposes to actually live life through to its end instead of counting down the clock, a touch of the comic is an excellent companion.

A Head of Time began before it began – that is to say, as you walked into the theater space you walked across the stage through an installation that consisted mostly of the eight performers standing or sitting around. In the middle of the floor was a silver bucket in which you’d been instructed to deposit the flower petal you picked up when you got your ticket (which, as it turns out, was the flower petal). Video screens of various sizes and types were scattered around the stage, and blankets were tossed on the floor. The audience passed by a tall wall of shelving that was filled with folded textiles so it looked from a distance like a big hanging rag rug; it, too, served as a video screen. One of the dancers in the installation was munching on something. “There are cookies on the table over there,” she said brightly, and pointed them out. Nice touch. As far as pre-game shows go, it was kind of sweet.

Austin was joined on stage by two male dancers (Keyon Gaskin and Philippe Bronchtein) and five more women: Jin Camou, Catherine Egan, Esther LaPointe, Danielle Ross, and Lucy Lee Yim. It was a good ensemble. For quite a while, as the performers were lying and rolling around narcoleptically on their blankets, lazing into things, I wondered whether maybe this performance oughtn’t be called dance.

Performance art, maybe. Or Catching Forty Winks. It was appealing, in its low-key way, but seemed to be coming out of the arguable if defensible school of thought that all movement, if considered from the proper perspective, is dance. Then, almost imperceptibly – one of those canny moments from Jeff Forbes’ lighting cues tipped it off – the movement became undeniable dance, brisk and purposeful and skillfully performed. Austin and her dancers were smudging the distinction between performance and existence, but doing it in a highly performed way. Contrary to Cole Porter’s lyrics and persistent misinterpretations of Merce Cunningham, anything does not go: even the idea of entropy has a shape. “Think of the stage,” a voice intones at one point. “Do not think of real life.” At another point, in a stage whisper: “We are that thing which must happen.”

No doubt. I wasn’t sure what it meant (I’m not sure it mattered what it meant) but the moment was right, and I rolled with it. A key to enjoying truly abstract forms of art: Don’t try to “understand” it. In the immortal words of the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense. Or stop trying to make things make sense. Tough prescription for a writer, but that’s what the art doctor ordered.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ideas to the piece. It only means that the ideas that helped the creators form the dance aren’t necessarily important for the audience to understand. Indeed, once the piece is shaped, they might not matter even to the creator anymore. They might have been just a prod. Recorded and spoken words in A Head of Time come from the avant-garde theater artist Richard Foreman, Austin, and the cast. The highly effective score is by Seth Nehil, with field recordings (mostly snatches of conversation) by Austin; the unobtrusive but vital videography by Austin and Karl Lind.

And the program includes two quotations from Charles Yu’s novel How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe that may, or may not, illuminate the meaning beneath the non-meaning:

 “Everyone has a time machine.”

“I am transmitting a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.”

It’s an alluring dream, all right, filled with oddly untethered and strangely imponderable things.

And creatures and leaky faucets and smelly shoes, too.

Dance review: Kidd Pivot meditates on Free Will

A man and his puppet in "Dark Matters"/Courtesy of Kidd Pivot

For a  moment during the first gripping half of Kidd Pivot’s “Dark Matters,” presented by White Bird, I flashed on the following thought. The increasingly demonic stick puppet seeking to control its creator is really my computer. And the five darkly clad and anonymous puppet masters handling the sticks represent the legions of programmers and webmasters who gradually seize command of my life. Thank goodness I keep the scissors in a safe place.

Oops. I don’t want to spoil “Dark Matters” for anyone, because it does have a specific narrative in that first half before becoming more abstract, though even more powerful, in the second.  Choreographer Crystal Pite’s creation is a brilliant piece of dance theater, beautifully and dramatically lit (by lighting designer Robert Sondergaard) and designed (by set designer Jay Gower Taylor) with a pulsating sound track (by composer Owen Belton). And I wouldn’t want to do anything that would take away any of the joy of discovery you might find there.

That means, after I tell you that the dancing itself is at least as accomplished as the rest of the elements, you might want to stop right here! I’m not going to give away anything, really, because each moment is so full of possible meaning that I couldn’t possibly exhaust it. But I do intend to speculate a little as I describe “Dark Matters,” and I know some people would rather go into it with a clean slate. (more…)

Spring awakening: NDP’s torrent of new dance

Andrea Parson and Elijah Labay of Northwest Dance Project. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

Snow and ice on the windshield yesterday morning (but only a little: I’m a Flatlander). Winds up to about a zillion miles an hour on Monday (trees down on Marine Drive). And my dentist tells me he had seven inches of snow at his house (he’s an Uplander). Remember those sunny days last week? As Rodgers and Hammerstein put it in State Fair, it might as well be spring.

Spring also means new stuff growing, and in Portland that often means a new show by Northwest Dance Project, which pretty much grows nothing but new stuff: that’s the way it rolls.

In its Spring Premieres program on Friday and Saturday nights in the Newmark Theatre, NDP rolled out three new dances ­– Wen Wei Wang’s Conjugations, Sarah Slipper’s Airys, and Patrick Delcroix’s Chameleon. And unlike the weather, which was whipping every which way but loose, these three new dances seemed to be blowing from a similar place. An angsty sort of place; a place that made me think more than once of cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s earnest modern interpretive dancer.

Now, I like Feiffer’s dancer, who is sweet and compassionate and oh so serious and not to be taken lightly, even though Feiffer presents her in a light-hearted manner. And I very much like the talent and style of this scrappy and ambitious company, which in addition to being a vital player on Portland’s dance scene has been making a lot of noise in international competitions. It’ll be performing in London in late June at the 2012 Olympic Arts Festival. That’s heady stuff, and I sometimes fret that not enough Portlanders know how good these young dancers in their midst can be.

But on Saturday night I also found myself wishing for (a) a little more variety, (b) a lot more editing and shaping, and (c) even a hint of lightness or humor. Dance isn’t television, and it doesn’t need a laugh track. But a well-chosen evening of shorter pieces should offer some syncopation of weight and mood.

Conjugations mixes in a lot of references to social and pop dance styles, from break dancing to raves, and it has an easy curiosity about the ways that people meet and mingle. Wen Wei, who began his career in his native China and has lived and worked in Canada since 1991, has created passages that showcase NDP’s athletic and flexible dancers extremely well. I especially liked the work of Ching Ching Wong, who exudes a sassy attitude that seems ideal for comedy (although comedy isn’t what she’s asked to produce here), and Patrick Kilbane, who’s developed into a first-rate dancer in front of our eyes. But just as the recorded music is a mishmash of stitched-together pieces, so the piece itself lacks a solid structure. It ambles, loosely, never quite seeming to come to a conclusion about what it wants to say or be.

Slipper is Northwest Dance Project’s artistic director and guiding force, and she’s a gutsy choreographer: like so much of her work, Airys seems to come from an intense place. But unlike, for instance, the gripping emotionality in her exquisite Samuel Beckett piece Not I, the anguish in Airys seems overstated. When a clutch of dancers gathers to mime an outraged waving of fists, it feels less like genuine anger than a Martha Graham moment gone wrong. Slipper also knows how to create an effective image onstage, though, and Airys provided the visual and emotional moment from this program that still sticks most vividly in my mind: the wonderfully expressionistic Andrea Parson cradling a length of drapery in her arms as if it were a fallen comrade.

Ching Ching Wong, Patrick Kilbane, "Chameleon." Blaine Truitt Covert.

Like Wen Wei, Delcroix has worked with Northwest Dance Project’s performers before. He’s a smart, capable dancemaker who spent years dancing and then staging pieces by Jiri Kylian, and he’s actually been knighted by the French government as a chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which is a pretty nifty line to be able to put on your resumé. I liked Harmonie Défigurée, the piece he created a year ago for Northwest Dance Project, quite a bit, and Chameleon was the best-shaped and most self-assured of the three pieces on last weekend’s program. It’s got some body heat, and a visual trick: the dancers are smeared with paint in various colors, which rubs off on the other dancers when they come into contact with them, leaving visual memories of the exchanges. But it’s dense, and like the other works it felt provisional, as if it hadn’t found a clear reason for being – and it was hurt by coming at the end of what already was a pretty heavy evening of dance.

All of that was almost, but not quite, trumped by the dancing itself. Throughout the program, the company’s eight dancers were a joy to watch. Maybe because they work with so many choreographers, they’ve developed admirable flexibility and focused intensity. And they work extremely well as a team: they aren’t just a collection of dancers, they’re a genuine company. In addition to Wong, Parsons and Kilbane, they include Samantha Campbell, Elijah Labay, Lindsey McGill, Lindsey Matheis and Franco Nieto. As a team, their combination of precise technique and athletic abandon has helped put them on the map.

In this program, though, I wish they’d had more finished and varied dances to work with. One of this company’s great attractions – its commitment to producing new works by many choreographers – is also one of its potential drawbacks. Over the years the programming has been a roll of the dice: neither the dancers nor the audience knows exactly what’s going to happen. Sometimes the evening’s works balance out nicely. Other times, as in this program, you get too much of the same thing. In a way, it’s gamblers’ luck. Any original work is an experiment, and sometimes experiments work, sometimes they don’t – that’s part of the package.

Still, there are ways to improve the odds. Without telling guest choreographers what to do, Slipper could suggest what kind of piece she’d like from them: short, long, light, dramatic, to a certain style of music, solo or small group or whole company. Besides creating a better-balanced program, it would help the choreographers focus their energies and increase the odds that their pieces would have a long life after their premieres.

Maybe even past the climatic puzzlements of spring.

Dance weekend: 4 men and a chancy machine

Troika Ranch premiered "Enter Comma Prepare" at Reed.

It’s been a busy week in dance, but let’s face it: In Portland these days, almost every week is a busy week in dance. More of note is coming soon. Northwest Dance Project’s spring show March 9-10 at the Newmark features new work by company director Sarah Slipper and international dancemakers Patrick Delcroix and Wen Wei Wang, both returnees to this troupe of talented young dancers. And White Bird follows shortly after with the return March 15-17 of the audacious Canadian/German troupe Kidd Pivot, also in the Newmark.

First, what I missed over the weekend: alternate casts of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Giselle (which might have shifted the ballet’s emphases in subtle or significant ways), and BodyVox-2’s program of works by BodyVox founders Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton. I especially regret missing the latter: I like this young company, and seeing it perform works created specifically for an older generation of dancers might have been illuminating. It’s a recurring question in the world of dance: What happens to a piece once it breaks free from its original circumstances?

Now, on to what I did see: 4 Men Only, a quartet of solo works that played Friday and Saturday nights at Conduit (just try to imagine any of these pieces being performed by anyone other than their creators); and the premiere of Troika Ranch’s Enter Comma Prepare, a piece balanced precariously between tyranny and chance, at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium.

4 Men Only wasn’t, really. It was more by men only, and not even entirely that: Lisa DeGrace’s loosely sprung and melodically deliberate music was essential to the success of Meshi Chavez’ Une fleur pour mon amour, and Robin Greenwood’s lighting design was crucial to the entire evening.

Gregg Bielemeier: anchovies and teeth.

Then again, what’s in a name? Veteran dancer Gregg Bielemeier calls his fluid and funny new work I Chipped my tOOth on an Anchovy, and while the title’s reference to the currently hot Portland performance troupe tEEth is obvious, we’ll leave it to him and them to figure out exactly what it means. Matters of bite aside, I’ll suggest that Bielemeier has some of the attraction of a good anchovy: a little salty, a little spiky, maybe even an acquired taste, but once you’ve acquired it the salad’s hopelessly bland without it.

As a performer, Bielemeier is a fascinating combination: a natural comedian who cultivates a streak of irreverent anarchy, coupled with a genuine and historically informed gracefulness that’s more romantic than sentimental. As his movements to Joni Mitchell’s smoky-jazzy Both Sides Now suggest, he’d be a remarkable ballroom dancer, but with a jagged edge: he breaks up the rhythmic sweep with sudden counterintuitive shrugs, hurrying the beat, rubbing it the “wrong” way, which somehow ends up being right. Dipping into a bag of clothing onstage, he slips in and out of various costumes, telling stories of his small-town childhood and tipsy nuns and predatory priests, making the memories both affectionate and caustic (anger, or at least deep frustration, the quickening matter of so much comedy, slips past the playful façade). Plus, he turns a grinning satyr’s-promise of nudity into a PG-rated belly laugh.

Bielemeier actually plays well with others: I’ve seen him perform seamlessly in ensembles. But he doesn’t care overly much about formal structure (his pieces tend to switch gears abruptly, although not disconcertingly), and he’s such a singular performer that it’s also good to see him playing by himself – and, of course, with his audience, which he never forgets. As he made clear in the title of one of his signature works, Odd Duck Lake, he’s an irredeemably odd duck. Lucky for us.

Meshi Chavez is a highly talented up-and-coming Portland performer, and his intensely absorbing Une fleur pour mon amour could hardly be more different from Bielemeier’s chipped tooth. Yet the two work well together in the same program, combining sharp contrasts in approach with similar levels of self-assurance and craftsmanship. Despite its French title, Une fleur has Japanese antecedents, specifically in the post-World War II performance art of butoh, which finds beauty in an obsessive slowness of motion and sometimes (but not always) grotesque contortions of the human body.

Meshi Chavez: from soil to light.

Chavez performs in the white facial and body makeup of a geisha, and stillness is at the center of his art. Quoting his very brief program note is actually helpful in understanding the painstakingly lovely progression of the piece, which moves in a deep and rigorous graduation until almost the end, when it spins in quick release: “Without the darkness of the soil a flower never would unfold into the light. It cannot know the exact moment or condition that will cause it to bloom. Yet once that yearning has awakened, it has no other choice than to spill forth that which we call beauty.” I couldn’t, and won’t, say it better.

Bob Eisen, a longtime fixture on Chicago’s post-Judson contemporary dance scene who now splits his time between New York and Russia, made his Portland debut with For Lulu, performed to Lulu, last year’s unlikely buzz-saw of a collaboration by Lou Reed and Metallica. Lulu is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of a musical mating – you’re not exactly in favor of it, but its sheer audacity makes it tough to keep your eyes or ears off it, either — and Eisen transforms it into a hyper-energetic and surprisingly exhilarating act of slightly crazed and entertaining movement.

His distinctive appearance helps him pull the thing off. Eisen is long and whooping-crane lean, with a prodigious wingspan, and he wears his 65 years with an easy economy of motion and head-banging intensity of effect. Dressed in pajama tops and multi-pleated harem pants, he looks like Ichabod Crane in a white shock of Art Garfunkel hair. I thought For Lulu continued a little too long after the music ended, although Eisen’s eventual emphatic trod off the stage gave it a bang-up finale. Put Eisen and Bielemeier together on the same program and you get a whole lot of Gray Power. Learn from it, kids.

“Very American,” my seatmate called the evening’s fourth and final piece, Greg Sax’s what is not still …?, by which I think she meant open and loose-limbed, and to which I might add innocent and a little self-absorbed. Not that self-absorption doesn’t partly define almost any solo piece: it’s the nature of the beast. Lacking mirrors, Sax, who’s also a filmmaker, adds filmed versions to his live performance, screening images of himself dancing on three long cloth banners that drop from the ceiling. In the process he addresses the audience like a potential lover, a little awkwardly, overly eager, as if he were composing a personals ad and wasn’t quite sure how best to present himself. Like a product to be sold? With brutal honesty? With brutal honesty that is in fact a product to be sold? “I just wanna … make you … happy,” he declares, or implores. It’s a dance of self-definition, and the fact of its disconnection is how it connects.

Troika Ranch’s Enter Comma Prepare was part of Reed College’s annual RAW, or Reed Arts Week, which this year had a theme of “Rupture.” And things were erupturing Friday night all across campus. What with drums banging and torchlight paraders marching and chanting through the square, it felt a little like Halloween before the candy manufacturers took over.

Troika Ranch was formed in 1994 by Dawn Stoppiello, who grew up in Portland and performed in high school with the Jefferson Dancers, and composer Mark Coniglio. The troupe was based in New York for 15 years, and is now based in Portland since Stoppiello (who’s also put in a stint with the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company) moved back to her hometown. The intersection of technology and human culture has been the group’s focus for many years, and the binary rigors of the computer world — coupled, it seems, with some of Merce Cunningham’s explorations of the vagaries of chance ­– is at the heart of its performances: humans and machines, partners for better or for worse.

I mentioned above that Enter Comma Prepare seemed like a precarious balance between tyranny and chance. The tyranny wasn’t entirely the machines’. The piece imposed a human-made herding mentality on its audience, first crowding it together in the lobby until after curtain time, then throwing the doors open with an imperious and disembodied “enter” command to a sort of staging area where the performance began with forced intimacy. The performers (a fine group of accomplished locals including Vanessa Vogel, Carla Mann, Jonathan Krebs, Nancy Ellis, Suzanne Chi and Stoppiello) circled around the audience, which was mostly leaning against the walls, and occasionally gave someone a hug.

Dawn Stoppiello of Troika Ranch.

This was, depending on your understanding of the implicit contract between audience and performer, either a generous inclusion in the dance or a violation of private space. On the other hand, I was familiar with most of the performers and a lot of the audience, and it appeared that at least the dancers were hugging people they actually knew, whether they’d been clued in beforehand or not. And this certainly was an interesting rupture. For performers — and particularly dancers, who work with their bodies and other people’s bodies — physical closeness is as natural as air. For some people in the audience, it’s a sign of welcome and inclusion. For others, physical intimacy is private and mutually agreed upon. So was the intimacy given freely, or imposed? All performances, of course, are tyrannical in a sense: the performers determine where the audience will go, and guide it there. But usually audiences enter the theater understanding the rules of engagement. Here, part of the performance was that the rules of engagement were to be broken.

Finally audience and performers alike moved into the larger auditorium, where chairs were clustered cleverly in several small islands so the dancers could flow around them like electrons coursing through a mother board. And so they did, to a drone of computer-generated instructions intoned over loudspeakers in a metallic voice like Hal 9000’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Jonathan. Southwest,” it would say, or “Nancy. North,” and off the performer would go. At one point I had a fleeting image of Cary Grant ducking into a cornfield while a homicidal pilot chased after him from above, shouting “North by northwest!”.

Skill and rigor and even a dollop of humor marked the performances, in which, if you tried, you could detect traces of exhilaration as the dancers trotted through the maze. But once you got the point that the performers would be following their instructions without question (stage managers must love this show) the evening became something of an endurance contest. At least for me, and on this particular night, there wasn’t enough intrinsic interest in the movements to hold my attention through the repetitions, and by the time a few lines from Plato were delivered via microphone, I’d pretty much checked out.

That was certainly partly my own fault. Like a Cunningham dance, Enter Comma Prepare is at least as much an experiment as it is a traditional performance, and probably more so. That means you have to be willing to be experimented upon — and sometimes you are, sometimes you aren’t. It’s a matter of chance in more than one way.

I was lucky enough during his lifetime to see Cunningham and company perform several times, and on most of those occasions the results were revelatory. But you had to be with it. I know this confession could get me drummed out of the League of Tough-Guy Arts Observers, but once I discreetly ducked out of a Cunningham performance at intermission. It wasn’t that it was a “bad” show. On that night, Cunningham’s mind and mine simply didn’t mesh. And when the experiment isn’t working for you, it’s OK to give it a break.

And to know, in the case of Troika Ranch, that it’s going to be worth giving the experiment another try.

Choreographer Garth Fagan talks about the masterwork, “Griot New York”

Norwood Pennewell Nicolette Depass in Garth Fagan's "Griot New York"/Courtesy Garth Fagan Dance

By Angela Allen

After jazz musician Wynton Marsalis watched the love duet “Spring Yaounde” in rehearsal, he tore up the music he’d written for that section of “Griot New York.”

The duet was the most beautiful dance he’d seen, Marsalis told Garth Fagan, “Griot’s” creator. And the third dance in the full-length piece, “Yaounde” features a novel kiss that travels from chin to mouth to forehead while dancers pull off leg extensions demanding Herculean off-center balancing. Marsalis was blown away.

“He sat down and composed a new piece with one hand on the piano and the other on the trumpet,” Fagan, 71, said in late February from his home in Rochester, N.Y., where the Garth Fagan Dance company is based. “It was a magical day.”

That exhilarating moment occurred more than two decades ago, when Fagan, Marsalis and sculptor Martin Puryear were cooking up “Griot.” In 1991, the almost two-hour piece debuted at Brooklyn Academy of Music, prompting reviews that praised Fagan for advancing modern dance’s vocabulary with fresh choreography. The New York Time’s Anna Kisselgoff called his work lyrical, idiosyncratic and original.

I would add profoundly human and intensely physical.

Portlanders had a chance to see Garth Fagan Dance bring back “Griot New York”  at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in late February, a joint presentation of the Portland Jazz Festival and White Bird Dance, fitting for a Marsalis-Fagan collaboration.

“Griot” holds up two decades later, if the applause and post-show chatter were indications. Will it be a contemporary dance classic, the signature of the Garth Fagan company and dancemaker Fagan himself? So far, it lives on with dignity and élan.

But I had to track Fagan, the man, down to make sure how he sees his piece. Artists know when they’ve let loose a warhorse, and someone like this guy with a ponytail and unorthodox choreography insists on being cutting edge. (more…)