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BODYTRAFFIC opens White Bird’s dance season with verve and flair

The small but powerful Los Angeles company hits Portland's Newmark Theatre stage with four high-energy dances, including Trey McIntyre's "Blue Until June."

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Dancers of BODYTRAFFIC, the Los Angeles company that opened White Bird's new dance season this week. Photo: Gusman Rosado
Dancers of BODYTRAFFIC, the Los Angeles company that opened White Bird’s new dance season this week. Photo: Gusman Rosado

BODYTRAFFIC, the Los Angeles-based dance company, hit—and I mean hit!—the stage at the Newmark Theater on Thursday night with a high-energy performance of four not-so-easy pieces, including Trey McIntyre’s Blue Until June.

The company is small, but oh my lord are these eight highly individualistic dancers powerful, technically versatile, intensely musical, attentive to detail, and when called for, sharply witty. Carefully chosen by company founder and artistic director Tina Finkelman Berkitt, they can dance lyrically, which they did in Blue Until June, or extremely aggressively, as in sections of Micaela Taylor’s SNAP. And the cast of three men in Alejandro Cerrudo’s closing Pacopepepluto at times was broadly funny, and at other times did some serious wallowing in their own testosterone.      

The show, which ran Thursday-Saturday, Oct. 10-12, and inaugurated White Bird‘s 2024-25 dance season, opened with Matthew Neenan’s A Million Voices, an excellent introduction to the dancers and company aesthetic. It was danced to the music of jazz singer Peggy Lee, which according to a program note inspired the choreographer because Lee’s music “was created in response to the political climate of her time, spurs us to embrace the passion of living even in the darkest of times.” 

That our own times are also pretty dark was evident in the presence of voting information in the Newmark lobby, highly unusual but probably necessary. But the minute they started to move, the BODYTRAFFIC dancers proceeded to distract us from dark times, for which I for one am eternally grateful.

A Million Voices begins with the dancers standing stage rear, their backs turned to the audience, wearing black and white costumes that reminded me of a Fellini film. There is nothing uniform about the dancers: Jordyn Santiago, who moves the muscles in her face here in much the same way that Fellini muse Giuletta Massina did hers in La Strada, wears a black and white tutu-like costume, reminiscent of a tightrope walker’s.  She wanders throughout the piece, carrying what looks like a popcorn container, but which actually holds water.

In another moment, accompanied by the Beatles song Yesterday, tall, slender, dark-haired Katie Garcia, wearing a black ballgown with a hoop skirt, pours water from what looks like a martini glass over the head of a crouching male dancer, which reminded me of Portland choreographer Jann Dryer’s “scary wimmin,” formally clad, sitting on railway ties, lifting their pinkies while they drank tea. Garcia had the same deadpan look on her face, and I’ll confess here that I fell head over heels in love with this dancer, a Juilliard graduate, who has trained with many ballet companies around the country, and performed with the David Parsons company. She was also particularly fine in Blue Until June.

Neenan’s vocabulary is highly eclectic, a mix of classical ballet and modern movement. I spotted some Bebe Miller style joint-separating movement, and was highly amused by a demonstration of muscular coordination by one of the men, as he patted his head with one hand and rubbed his tummy with the other, ending his bit with a somersault.

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Lighting design by Burke Wilmore, costumes by BODYTRAFFIC, completed  a work so dense with movement ideas and good cheer that I wouldn’t mind at all seeing it a time or two more. That cheerful mood changed drastically with L.A. based Micaela Taylor’s Snap, danced aggressively, to put it mildly, to the music of James Brown.

Taylor, who trained at Seattle’s Cornish School of the Arts, has made a gritty, urban work which she says was inspired by the “ethnically diverse yet isolating crowds of Los Angeles.” Her goal is for audiences to “snap out” of social pressures to conform and to celebrate what it means to find a home within yourself.” 

The dancers — Katie Garcia, Pedro Garcia (no relation to the former), Anaya Gonzalez, Alana Jones, Ty Morrison, Joan Rodriguez and Jordyn Santiago — have plenty of snap in their performance of Taylor’s jazzy, hip-hop/contemporary technique, rhythmically perhaps a little too on-beat, the music played at high volume. I was therefore thankful for a women’s trio danced in silence, and for Davidson’s lip-synching to Brown’s song about being objectified as a sex machine, which inserted some humor into the mix.

 Visually, a blood-red cyclorama backdrop contributed to the aggressive tone. Rather than Taylor’s message of celebration, I kept thinking of the L.A. riots in 1972, which justifiably shook the whole country, as have more recent unspeakable occurrences of police brutality toward people of color. Snap is firmly rooted in time and place, skillfully constructed, and again an excellent vehicle for the dancers on whom it was made. It will be interesting to see what Taylor does next; she heads a company of her own in L.A., the TL Collective.

Blue Until June, made for the Washington Ballet in 2000, could not be more different in mood or tone from Snap, and the dancers inhabit this choreography just as well as they do everything else on this program.  This isn’t the first time by any means that McIntyre, who was Oregon Ballet Theatre’s resident choreographer in the 1990s, and has recently assumed the position of Creative Partner with BODYTRAFFIC, has had his work on the same program as Neelan’s. Robust American Love was commissioned by OBT and premiered in the American Music Festival in the spring of 2013, along with Neelan’s At the Border. In addition, both choreographers have frequently been programmed together by Philadelphia’s Ballet X.

Set to the layered, textured singing of L.A. soul sister Etta James, the piece is also a natural for BODYTRAFFIC’s dancers and artistic director Tina Finkelman Berkitt, who is on a mission to show the world that Los Angeles possesses a rich culture that includes theatrical dance. The company tours widely, including internationally.)

Blue Until June, like A Million Voices, begins in stillness, with the dancers upstage, their backs turned to the audience.  hat stillness doesn’t last long: to the song No One Like You the six dancers do some mighty fast running across the stage. The movement in general is big, generous, occasionally perky, recognizably McIntyre’s. In one section, the dancers gallop around the stage like rodeo ponies; in others, they are showcased in solos and duets. I was much taken with Every Day I Work for You, a duet which begins with the dancers kneeling and facing each other on the floor. It’s all about marriage, it seemed to me; the give and take, the conflicts and their resolution.

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Blue Until June concludes with a rousing social dance, and I think the program should have ended there, instead of with Alejandro Cerrudo’s PACOPEPEPLUTO, although it was commissioned for this company and premiered in 2021. It is set to songs made popular by Dean Martin, and program notes include a trigger warning: “This work dares viewers to nakedly and joyfully embrace their true self-expression. It is performed in dim lighting and contains partial nudity with male dancers in dance belts.” Presumably this is directed at audience members who identify as male, and on opening night many obediently enjoyed it, audibly.

It’s  a well-made piece. Cerrudo, who is resident choreographer at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, knows what he’s doing, and so did the three dancers. Joan Rodriguez’s contemplative performance of Memories Are Made of This had some subtlety, something distinctly lacking in the choreography for In the Chapel, danced by Ty Morrison. There was something faintly ludicrous about the choreography for That’s Amore, although Pedro Garcia did his excellent best to overcome the metaphor of the moon as a “big pizza pie.”

By and large, I was charmed by these dancers and much of the choreography they performed, as well as the delight they took in entertaining this new (to them) audience, applauding us, applauding them as they took their curtain calls. And it seems to me that McIntyre has found a good home here, not only for his work—he’ll be making new dances for them and next season, they’ll perform his New Orleans pieces, Ma Maison and The Sweeter End, collaborations with the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band that we saw here in Portland when White Bird presented the Trey McIntyre Project.

As Creative Partner he’ll be assisting company artistic director and founder Berkett with the daily operations of the organization. Berkett, a former professional dancer with a degree in mathematics and economics, is to be congratulated for her thoughtful curation of BODYTRAFFIC’S repertoire as well as her clear nurturing of these dancers.

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Martha Ullman West began her checkered career as an arts writer in New York in 1960. She has been covering dancing in Portland and elsewhere since 1979 for many publications, including The Oregonian, Ballet Review, the New York Times, and Dance Magazine, where she is a Senior Advisory Editor. She is a past-co-chair of the Dance Critics Association, from which she received the Senior Critics Award in 2011. Her book Todd Bolender, Janet Reed, and the Making of American Ballet was published in 2021 by the University Press of Florida.

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Photo Joe Cantrell

Dance

Martha Ullman West began her checkered career as an arts writer in New York in 1960. She has been covering dancing in Portland and elsewhere since 1979 for many publications, including The Oregonian, Ballet Review, the New York Times, and Dance Magazine, where she is a Senior Advisory Editor. She is a past-co-chair of the Dance Critics Association, from which she received the Senior Critics Award in 2011. Her book Todd Bolender, Janet Reed, and the Making of American Ballet was published in 2021 by the University Press of Florida.

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