Music & Dance Intelligence
David Dorfman: Dance to the Music
Dance review by Bess J.M. Hochstein
Photos: above, Kate Enman; below, Cherylynn Tsushima
Prophets of Funk, an evening-length work performed by David Dorfman Dance this week at Jacob’s Pillow, begins with the choreographer strutting his stuff diagonally across the stage on a path of light. He’s no longer a young man, and he’s taken on some pounds along with the years, but he’s still got the moves – he can get down and funky, loose and slinky, with the best of them. Before long, Raja Kelly, standing in for Sly Stone, aka Sylvester Stewart, frontman of Sly and the Family Stone, enters, with just as funky and slinky a groove as Dorfman’s.
The diagonal light turns out to be a sort of memory lane, and for its first half, Prophets of Funk, Dorfman seems to be a joy ride, fueled by the infectious music of Sly and the Family Stone. No need to analyze, just sit back and enjoy the full-throttle non-stop, exuberant dancing: high-kicking, hip-swiveling, pelvis-thrusting, hand-standing, cartwheeling, back-flipping, floor-slidng, head bobbing, toe-tapping fun. The music, hippie costumes, frequently flashed peace signs, and video backdrop of vintage concert footage and psychedelia are a blast from the past, as are bygone dance elements like the bump and the pony, but watch carefully and you’ll see some time shifting, as later-era dance influences from disco, hip-hop, and the fly-girl idiom creep into the choreography.
After a while the dance takes a detour into darker territory – how could it not, when Sly and the Family Stone—which, as Dorfman points out in his program notes, was the first racially and gender-integrated bands in U.S. history—put out songs like Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey. Dorfman takes this opportunity to address issues of power and domination, subtle and overt, while moving more into the realm of dance theater. In addition to dancing full-out, company members are also called upon to perform monologues, pantomime, and even sing.
But in the end the troupe rides out of the darkness with a finale that brings the audience to its feet, and is surely one of the cleverest ways to guarantee a standing ovation. The work finishes on a high note, with more than half the audience out on the stage, heeding Sly’s call to Dance to the Music. The performance transforms into a dance party, and since it’s an audience of all ages, shapes, and backgrounds on the stage, dancing amidst the performers, it becomes obvious that, like Sly and the Family Stone, Dorfman really does love Everyday People. Is it a coincidence that just this week Sly Stone released a new album? Perhaps Dorfman’s riding the zeitgeist, or maybe even helping to drive it.
David Dorfman Dance in the Doris Duke Theatre
Now through August 21
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Becket, MA
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 08/19/11 at 07:58 AM • Permalink
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet: Articulate Company
Dance review by Bess J.M. Hochstein
Photos: Rosalie O’Connor
A well-composed program of work by three European choreographers, in performance by Aspen Santa Fe Ballet this week at Jacob’s Pillow, shows off the many skills of this company’s ten talented dancers: speed, strength, grace, presence, agility, and humor. Although the three dances that comprise the program skip around in time, from Spanish choreographer Cayetano Soto’s Uneven, commissioned by ASFB in 2010; to the great Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián’s 1983 work, Stamping Ground; to Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo’s Red Sweet, commissioned by ASFB in 2008, the viewer can spot a few through lines in both the big picture and the details that tie these works together.
The big picture is evident: largely asymmetric movement; daring lifts and swirls; fast-paced precision and keen articulation; and bold, contemporary choreography performed by self-possessed, classically trained dancers. As for the details, all three dances include quirky movements, such as intermittent tremors in the extremities; improbable holds in the partnering and lifts; extreme, unefforted extensions; and surprising moves (such one-handed handstands or cartwheels more expected in a hip-hop performance) that somehow seem right at home.
The evening begins with Uneven, and even before the dance begins we see that it is just that; a corner of white fabric spills off the stage and into the audience. The curtain opens, revealing that the fabric forms a diagonal swath across the stage; the opposite corner has been lifted to create a triangular frame for cellist Kimberly Patterson, dressed in black, who plays the live part of a score by David Lang, accompanied by recorded music and voice. The dancers wear black-and-white leotards. Thanks to evocative lighting and a subtle fog effect, the dancers emerge from the back curtain as if materializing.
Like the set and costumes, there are no gray areas in this dance; solo, coupled, or in small groups, the dancers snap from one off-center pose to the next in a disjointed manner, limbs articulating from their hip, knee, shoulder and elbow joints. Transitions happen in a blink, as the dancers pop into angular position after position. They hit their marks, stop-and-go style – for the women, often while being lifted and whirled by the male dancers. This is the dance equivalent of atonal music – which is not to say it’s inharmonious; just complex and unpredictable, going off in unexpected directions.
Stamping Ground provides comedy to balance the seriousness of Uneven. The audience gasps when what seemed like a black-curtain background is revealed to be hanging strips of a shiny, mylar-ish material, through which the dancers make dramatic and often funny entrances and exits. The work begins in silence, with a series of solos in which the dancers perform low-to-the-ground animal-like movements – here a chicken, with that characteristic sharp jutting of the head or chest; there a monkey, elongated arms trailing as the dancer travels in deep squats and lunges, popping up every so often to look over their shoulders. Periodic stomps, thuds, and body slaps provide the soundscape as one dancer after the other takes a solo, sometimes chasing the previous beast off the stage.
Ensemble work begins along with the percussive score by Carlos Chavez, a fly-by series of witty and wonderful vignettes among groupings of dancers: two men holding a woman suspended to a tick-tock section of music as her legs match the beat like a pendulum; what looks like a game of leap frog that results in a chain of collapse; one man breaking free of two others, who fall flat on their backs, limbs stiffly splayed, later to be pulled quickly, in their rigid forms, offstage through the shiny strips by unseen hands.
The dancers bounce off the floor with no apparent muscle effort, as if the stage were a trampoline, or as if they were being jerked upward by marionette strings. Every interaction between and among dancers touches off an unexpected, laugh-inducing, reaction. They move like cartoon characters, maintaining mock-serious facial expressions. It’s a delightful work by a rightfully legendary choreographer, masterfully performed.
The evening ends with Red Sweet, which manages to combine the best of the two preceding works. Full of humor and grace in asymmetry, the work is characterized by angular positions, innovative partnering, and sophisticated patterning that matches the balletic score of string music by Vivaldi and Biber with lush cannons and cascades of movement. While the structure is traditional, the forms created by the dancers’ bodies are anything but, and therein lies the humor. It’s the perfect culmination for an evening of surprising choreography performed by well trained dancers willing to give it their all.
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet at the Ted Shawn Theatre
Now through August 21
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Becket, MA
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 08/18/11 at 10:55 AM • Permalink
David Neumann and Jodi Melnick Join Forces at Jacob’s Pillow
Dance review by Bess J.M. Hochstein
Photos: above, Julieta Cervantes; below, Cherylynn Tsushima
Is it downtown week at Jacob’s Pillow? In the Ted Shawn Theatre, Trisha Brown, enduring icon of the Judson Church dance days, marks her company’s 40th anniversary in a program that travels through the decades. Concurrently, two of-the-moment NYC-based choreographers present a joint program in the Doris Duke. It’s an insightful pairing, as it can easily be argued were it not for Brown neither Jodi Melnick nor David Neumann would be there.
The argument is clearly defensible in the case of Melnick, who worked with Brown as an assistant director and has danced with Brown’s equally iconic and influential peers, Twyla Tharp and Sara Rudner. Even without this knowledge, you can see Brown’s imprint all over Melnick’s precise, elegant, cerebral choreography for Fanfare: loose limbs seemingly initiating movement phrases; arms and legs swinging from shoulders and hips – not flung, but rotated with intention; spine held straight but not stiff. The movement, asymmetric and off-balance, is imbued with meaning that’s difficult to discern.
Melnick performs alone until near the end, on a starkly high-drama set (by renowned artist Burt Barr) with a pair of shiny, double-sided oscillating fans that reflect focused light and cast large, animated shadows on a white projection that resembles two walls forming a corner on the theater’s back curtain. Melnick also casts shadows as she determindely walks to a spot on the stage, executes a phrase, then walks to another spot where another movement sequence spills from her lithe body, all the while exhibiting remarkable stage presence and tremendous concentration with an impassive but soft face. As she casts her gaze out along her extended limbs, or a pointed finger, or off to the wings, the audience is practically compelled to follow her eyes.
There’s a jolt when the noise of a steam radiator hisses on, and Melnick, facing the audience, feet planted, repeats an almost-pedestrian sequence with, arms in constant, nervous motion while her gaze travels sideways, upward, along the sweep of her hand. The noise repeats, too, subtly altered each time. It goes on and on, and we get the feeling Melnick is waiting and looking for someone, until after an uncomfortably long time Dennis O’Connor appears from the wings. The projections disappear and the mood shifts. His arrival seems to ground her, emotionally and literally; they dance together, eventually ending up on the floor, adjacent but not touching, repeating an intriguing folding-and-unfolding sequence in unison as the light fades.
Neumann provides comic relief from Melnick’s solemnity with Tough the Tough, a work of slapstick existentialism, in which Neumann is cast by an unseen, omniscient narrator as an everyman named Steve, Steven, or at one point Stefan - a stand-in for all mankind. You can practically hear the narrator whispering “Poor schmuck” under his breath as Neumann preens, scratches, runs and paces, riffles through his jacket, carries, trips over, and sets up a bunch of folding chairs, and performs other pointless actions in response to the voice from above. Lo and behold: one segment in the middle could have been ripped right out of Trisha Brown’s playbook.
The comic tone is maintained in Hit the Deck (Studies and Accidents), which opens with a woman (Carol Wong) balanced sideways on a folding chair. Impassively, she rights herself and strides to the piano at the rear of the stage, takes her seat (on another of those folding chairs), and begins to play only snippets of classical compositions as four dancers strive to make their moves. She’s like an uncooperative accompanist in the rehearsal studio.
Big discrepancies in the bodies of his performers add humor to the exaggerated stop-and-go choreography. The comedy is further heightened by what seems to be a recalcitrant stagehand, a rotund figure (Timothy Fallon) who wants to get in on the action. First he drops a chair with a huge clatter, drawing attention and upsetting the dancers’ flow. Later he practically jumps into the piano, strumming its strings like a harp and joining in on the keyboard. There are antics requiring split-second timing with chairs tossed on and off the stage – but not too much; it’s not overdone. Finally there’s an extended pas de deux between ostrich-like Kennis Hawkis—whose hair-bun exaggerates her long-and-lean physique—and Will Rawls before Fallon returns, emphatically plants himself mid-stage rear of the stage, and begins to sing like an angel. Petite Natalie Agee executes an equally angelic solo, concluding with a nod of appreciation toward Fallon.
The evening ends with July, a lulling duet between Melnick and Neumann commissioned by the Pillow, which elicits a gasp from the audience when a scrim is removed to reveal a most striking backdrop: barn door open, evergreens behind the theater illuminated in the night’s darkness. In this world premiere of coupling and clever weight transference, we see that despite their differences in style and demeanor – Melnick’s sobriety and Newmann’s silliness—the two don’t have to look hard to find common ground: keen intelligence plus an eccentric movement vocabulary born in the Judson Church days which is strung together in a successful collaboration that’s both somber and warm. But for the bucolic setting, it would look perfectly at home in a downtown performance space, either today or in the 1960s.
Jodi Melnick and David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group
August 10 - 14 @ the Doris Duke Theatre
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, MA
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 08/12/11 at 12:02 PM • Permalink
Trisha Brown Dance Company Marks 40-Year Anniversary at Jacob’s Pillow
Dance review by Bess J.M. Hochstein
Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Trisha Brown is the Eileen Fisher of the dance world. Like Fisher’s clothing, Brown’s dances are loose, comfortable, fluid, and seemingly simple and unstructured while actually finely and smartly constructed with shrewd attention to detail. Like Fisher in the design world, Brown has a style all her own that has nonetheless inspired the work of scores of choreographers who have followed in her quick, unpredictable footsteps. And, like Fisher, Brown’s work is timeless; while her dancers may now be more highly trained and her patterns and structures more complex, her basic movement vocabulary remains consistent and stands up through the decades.
Set and Reset (1983; photo: Karli Cadel), the finale of a four-work program that stretches from 1973 to the present, is a case in point. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it’s always a joy to watch. One of Brown’s many collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, who designed the set (two triangles and a rectangle suspended above the stage, serving as screens for projected vintage black & white films, plus black and white curtains hanging in the wings), costumes (sheer, loose and flowing, with a faint pattern reminiscent of blueprints), and had a hand in the lighting, the piece flows so naturally to Laurie Anderson’s original score that it’s impossible to imagine one without the other.
Throughout this work we notice distinct, foundational elements that recur in the two more recent works of the program—the opener, Les Yeux et l’âme (2011), and Foray Forêt (1990): fluid motion; abstract composition; movement that seems to initiate from the arms or hands; the illusion of weightlessness and effortlessness despite rapid, nonstop, precise dancing; looseness in the joints that allows the arms and legs to swing freely; bodies held in asymmetry, mostly with a straight spine; arms held at right angles, legs too; interesting and amusing things happening at the edges of the stage; clever weight transference between dancers; humor; and a key section in which the dancers line up center stage, from front to back, and lunge, fold, twirl, walk, fall, lean, melt out of line and merge back in again, like a wave unfurling and re-forming, a set piece with tremendous visual appeal.
Les Yeux et l’âme (The Eyes and the soul; photo: Deen van Meer), a lyrical dance that Brown created for a production of the Rameau opera Pygmalion, conducted by William Christie, incorporates these common elements in a more formal framework and more traditionally graceful composition. This dance has more traditional partnering and interactions between the dancing partners and among the couples dancing as an ensemble. It’s a satisfying work of structure and wit.
Foray Forêt (photo: Karli Cadel) is set to marching band music that fades in so gradually after the dancers have begun moving to silence that you might mistake the score for noise bleeding in from outside the theater, until it wells up loud, then seems to march around the room itself. At first the dancers appear to be moving in isolation from each other, but then patterns begin to emerge in the way forms and movements overlap or echo, and a careful viewer will note repeated phrases. The gold-accented costumes by Rauschenberg (in their final collaboration) are nearly as eccentric as the movement. The final segment, with one dancer, now in a loose dress, accompanies by fleeting appearance by the ensemble’s arms, feet, and other isolated body parts peeking out from the wings, makes for an indelible dance image, and also leaves one questioning whether there is a narrative through-story.
The third work on the program, Spanish Dance (1973; photo: Karli Cadel), arrived like a post-intermission interlude, and a reminder of Brown’s earlier, simpler explorations of accumulation. In this case it’s bodies, rather than movements, that accumulate. Five dancers stand spaced evenly along a line in front of the curtain, facing the wing. When the music begins—Bob Dylan’s rendition of Early Morning Rain, written by Gordon Lightfoot—the last dancer begins to move, at first swaying her hips and pumping her legs in place in time to the score, then snaking her arms upward like a flamenco dancer and rhythmically shuffling forward until she bumps up against the second dancer, and sets her in motion, remaining snug against her. In the end, all five dancers are piled up, chugging along, and despite the snaking arms one can’t help thinking of a train, even without the song’s lyrics: “You can’t jump a jet plane/Like you can a freight train.” It’s a quick blast from the past, when highly trained dancers (such as those that comprise Brown’s company today) were not necessary to present a work on stage, and neither was a stage, for that matter.
Fads and trends may come and go, but Trisha Brown’s work never goes out of fashion. It may get more complex as the decades go by, but whatever the vintage, it’s clean, clear, comfortable, and easy on the eyes. It’s not for everyone, but like Eileen Fisher, Brown sticks to her knitting; she has devoted fans who know they can turn, and return, to Brown for dance that’s delightful, smart, quirky, joyful, light as air, full of surprises, and always a pleasure to watch.
Trisha Brown Dance Company 40th Anniversary Celebration
August 10 - 14, in The Ted Shawn Theatre
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, MA
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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 08/11/11 at 11:32 AM • Permalink
Hudson Music Fest: It’s Not Only Rock ‘n’ Roll, But You’ll Like It
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by Betsy Miller
Organizers of music festivals tend to follow the Woodstock model—one outdoor site, many acts scheduled over the course of several days. This weekend, impresarios in the city of Hudson will test a different construct: 10 restaurants, 2 performance venues, 5 tents, 1 radio station, and 4 miles of sidewalk will be the site of the first annual Hudson Music Fest. Beginning at noon on Friday and continuing through Sunday, the entire town will showcase music, from the lone guitarist strumming on a street corner to a 7-piece band on a spot-lit stage.
“Last year we had a creative economy workshop in town and about 50 people participated,” says photographer Chad Weckler, who, with Midhudsonmedia.com‘s Rob Johanson co-founded the Fest. “Out of that came the discussions about the music festival.” The co-founders sent out an open call and over one hundred musicians responded, including The Last Conspirators (psychedelic punk), Jugstompers (jug band), Mamalama (anglo-European and medieval), Zumbi Zumbi (calypso and Brazillian), and the songwriting team, The Compact.
With the exception of Helsinki, Basilica and American Glory, who are booking their own acts, the musicians are playing for free in exchange for the exposure and the chance to win a prize for Most Promising. The judge: Henry Hirsch, Lenny Kravitz’s longtime producer and owner of Hudson’s Waterfront Studios, whose staff will scout each of the performances, will select one act to record, mix, and master a single, all by Sunday afternoon. “It’s a 5 or 6 hour free recording session,” says Weckler. “That’ll help the artist, for sure,” as will Weckler’s follow-up interview with the recipient, broadcast during his show on local radio station WGXC.
Highlights of the fest include a free CD release party on Friday at 10 p.m. at Club Helsinki for the rock/blues duo Chris & Lolly, right. Chris plays bass, drums, piano and 6- and 12-string steel guitar; Lolly has been described as “Amy Winehouse without the drama”—a distinctive voice that doesn’t need a mic. For a $5 cover charge, The Basilica, which is quickly establishing itself as a showcase for cutting edge art, will offer up Nautical Almanac and Bunnybrains, two groups known for “bleeps, bloops, oddball noise” and psych/noise/punk. All weekend in a tent at 5th and Warren, American Glory BBQ Restaurant will be serving up Mississippi blues along with 20 ice cold microbrews. On Sunday, Jazz aficionados will find the Hudson Jazzworks workshop at the Hudson Opera House and the sounds of gospel at Henry Hudson Riverfront Park.
Ten of the town’s restaurants are expected to feature music from classical to gypsy, acoustic guitar to reggae. Weckler is hoping to get street-corners players to “echo a tune up-and down Warren Street.” So far, they’ve signed 70 acts, 100 musicians, 30 venues, and 100 scheduled performances. “We’ve made a real effort to cover the spectrum,” he says. And this is just their first year.
The 1st Annual Hudson Music Fest
Hudson, NY
August 12 – 14
Mostly free. Check listings for venues w/ admission fees
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/06/11 at 02:18 PM • Permalink
