Love Is in the Air
The Look of Love
Mark Morris Dance Group
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Eisenhower Theater
Washington, D.C.
October 26-29, 2022
By Lisa Traiger
One-time maverick choreographer Mark Morris is now mature enough to collect Social Security. In another millennium, way back in 1985, his Mark Morris Dance Group made its Kennedy Center debut upstairs in the Terrace Theater. Back then he had long brunette ringlets of curls, a sensitive and knowing ear for music, and a crafty way of interlacing modern dance with everything from Bach to country, East Indian raga to punk. And it worked. His young company of ten dancers exuberantly tackled the insouciant steps that were both smart and sly.
Since, Morris and his company have become institutions in the oft-precious modern dance world. He has been back to the Kennedy Center many, many times. Through Saturday, October 29, 2022, the company is ensconced at the Eisenhower with Morris’ newest piece, The Look of Love, an hour-and-change work set to 1960s and ’70s pop icon Burt Bacharach’s hits.
The Look of Love comes on the heels of the company’s last Kennedy Center show in 2019, when it brought Pepperland, an easy-listening, brightly colored homage to the Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Back in ’85 at his first DC program, the company danced to Vivaldi, Bach, and the Violent Femmes. Nothing was experimental, but it all felt fresh, performed with frisson. Morris’ recent forays into baby boomer songbooks align well with the Broadway retreads of jukebox musicals.
Morris’ followers know well his facility with musicality and his requirement to always use live music. At the Eisenhower Theater, the company music ensemble featured music arranger and long-time MMDG collaborator Ethan Iverson on piano, and gorgeous-voiced Marcy Harriell rendering Bacharach’s songs — with most lyrics by Hal David — in thoughtful jazz renditions, with backup vocals by Clinton Curtis and Blaire Reinhard, joined by Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Simon Willson on bass, Vinnie Sperrazza on drums. The ensemble plays in the elevated orchestra pit, and Harriell, glamorous in her bare-shouldered dress, often turns to sing to the dancers on stage.
Raised in Forest Hills, New York, Bacharach, 94, attended the same high school as Simon and Garfunkle and Michael Landon. A child piano student, he favored jazz and later in California studied with mid-century modernist composers Henry Cowell, Bohuslav Martinu, and Darious Milhaud, whom he cites as his greatest influence. But it’s songs like “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and “What the World Needs Now” that defined pop music for the 1960s and ’70s generation. Lively, singable stories of love, longing, loss, and connection, with an occasional shadow tossed in. Morris selected 14 indelible songs from the Bacharach songbook beginning with a jazzy instrumental riff on “Alfie” — surely many heard Dionne Warwick singing in their heads.
On the empty stage a few scattered folding chairs stand — one of the cliches of modern dance is the chair as a prop. It suggests the choreographer needs a device and that’s all that’s available in the rehearsal room.
The dancers enter to strains of the feel-good anthem “What the World Needs Now,” clad in sunny pastel tunics, shorts, pants, or dresses color blocked in melon-y orange, lime green, sunny yellow, ochre, and starburst pink. Morris is a master of manipulating simple movement patterns and weaving them into complex spatially shifting phrases. Fans of folk dance will recognize standard footwork featuring stomps, grapevine, and triplet steps in converging and separating lines and circular paths. Another favorite Morris-ism could be termed music visualization, when he has dancers imitate gestures that match the lyrics. It’s like he’s checking to see if we’re listening and watching enough to get his little “Easter eggs.” When the lyrics proclaim: “There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb,” in pairs, one dancer falls as another lifts an arm up — creating the base and peak of the mountain. Later, accompanying “There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine,” one dancer pushes an arm upward with a one-footed hop on sun, the second follows in the other direction on moon as a raised arm indicates a moonbeam.
Next, to “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” on the phrase “What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia,” a little chase ensues before one dancer forces a sneeze on cue at pneumonia. Again and again, Morris has the dancers mimic the lyrics in ways that are easy, obvious, and cute. In my college choreography class this “Mickey Mousing” the music was denigrated as too simplistic. I think it’s become an easy go-to for Morris; it makes the audience feel that they “get” modern dance while letting them feel “smart.”
Morris is at his best at inventing and reshuffling dancers in evolving floor patterns here. With ten dancers moving in, shifting into duos and trios, or playing a soloist against the group his amiable locomotor walks, runs, skips, skitters, and leaps shuffle and reshuffle the landscape on stage. And all this patterning mostly jives with Bacharach’s jazzy, subtle syncopations that add interest to his standard 4/4 common time musicality.
In Harriell’s churchy rendition of “Don’t Make Me Over,” dancers flop and tumble, trying for quirky opposition, then punch a fist in the air. For “Always Something There to Remind Me,” the gesture of choice is pulling on, off, or straightening clothes, as if miming changing an outfit is enough to forget an old lover. For lovers, lost, found, wanted, and wanting are what Bacharach’s lyricist pens so adeptly.
One oddity, “The Blob,” features a dissonant clatter of horns, drums, and piano as the dancers clump together in a pile-up of chairs and limbs against Nicole Pearce’s eerie, blood-red lighting on the backdrop. At first, I thought this creepy start would morph into “What’s New Pussycat?” But, no, a quick Google search told me Bacharach actually composed the film music, and theme song, for the 1958 film The Blob. And that’s what happened: they created a blob of bodies and chairs before moving on.
The evening song cycle concluded with “I Say a Little Prayer,” and here Morris brought the company full circle, returning dancers to the opening circle, as they intersect in a bit of a basket weave. Some now-expected goofy movements — dancers’ arms flapping like wings of graceless angels, as they parse out a pony-like bounce — garner a laugh or two. Then a lexicon of the gestural motifs is recapitulated as the company, two-by-two, one-by-one, makes their way off stage, leaving a lone dancer to exit. The Look of Love ends not on a high note, a bright note, or even a grace note, but on a breathy “Amen.” It’s like a sigh — of relief, of longing, of completion, perhaps. But it feels inadequate, even incomplete.
Throughout, the dancers adeptly work through Morris’ signature paces, but for the most part, they don’t project any particular deep feeling to the movement, the music, or even one another. Sometimes they were just going through their paces rather than reveling in the music visualizations. It’s as if they’re still looking — for inspiration, for ways to fully love and embrace this new work. And it’s a shame because the musicianship of the ensemble should draw these dancers in, but they haven’t fully committed themselves to loving The Look of Love.
This review originally appeared on DC Theater Arts on October 29, 2022, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2022 Lisa Traiger
On the Good Foot
Four works emphasize Havana Company’s drive, indomitable spirit, and unassailable technical abilities
Malpaso Dance Company
Choreographic Works by Aszure Barton, Daileidys Carrazana, Mats Ek and Ohad Naharin
Kay Theatre, The Clarice, University of Maryland
College Park, Md.
April 27, 2022
By Lisa Traiger
It’s been a little more than a decade since Osnel Delgado and Daileidys Carrazana walked away from Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, where they were company members, to create their own independent troupe. With Fernando Saez, who brought business management and fundraising to the mix, together in 2012, they formed Malpaso Dance Company. In the decade since, the Havana-based company has grown into one of the foremost modern repertory companies in the world. Under the auspices of New York’s Joyce Theater Productions, Malpaso has built more than a foothold in the international contemporary dance scene by acquiring works from the likes of modernist iconoclast the late Merce Cunningham; Swedish choreographer Mats Ek; former house choreographer and artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company Ohad Naharin; and commissions from Rennie Harris, Aszure Barton, Trey McIntyre, and Sonya Tayeh, to name a few. And simultaneously, both Delgado and Carranzana have been crafting works with an undeniable Cuban flair for the company.
In Washington, the troupe has danced at both Dance Place and the Kennedy Center. Wednesday, April 27, 2022, after a two-year-plus delay, Malpaso made its debut at the University of Maryland’s Kay Theatre, presented by The Clarice. Four pieces showcased the ten dancers’ drive, indomitable spirit, and unassailable technical abilities. From my own quick visit to Havana in 2015, I learned that Cubans generally are a creative and musical people. And, wow, everyone in Cuba can dance! On Saturday afternoons, music wafts from dance halls and community centers where couples gather to salsa and socialize.
Barton’s hypnotic “Stillness in Bloom,” choreographed in 2021, is a pandemic piece in the subtlest of ways. It doesn’t feel constrained — like a good-many “living room”-sized and -shaped dances that were made last year for video and small stages. Avant-garde California-based jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire created a score that sets the dancers off into currents of movement then pauses for times of repose. Clad in a variety of workout wear in bright swatches of color, two men skitter backward meeting at center as successive dancers join and fill the space with effortless swift currents of backward movement images of whirlpools and eddies transform the blank canvas of the stage with an ever-changing color palette. As the group effortlessly maps invisible channels in the space, the dancers exit leaving a quartet who together bloom into balances, a pirouette here or there, upper body tilts and arcs, as a moody cello accompanies. A couple remains, the woman dragging her partner, he pushing her in effort-filled counterbalances. As the up-tempo Mingus-esque jazz riffs return, the dancers fill the stage once more. “Stillness in Bloom” coils and unwinds like a Fibonacci spiraling sequence, and the dancers navigate the easy scoots and complex pattern shifts with aplomb.
The program opened with a stunning solo, “Lullaby for Insomnia” by Carrazana, danced by the incomparable Heriberto Maneses. Channeling all the fidgets and fussing we go through on sleepless nights, Maneses, bare-chested wore black shorts, stretched and twisted his body, one leg lifting head high, as his torso tilted off-kilter. The piano composition by Jordi Sabates was mood-filled accompaniment with a touch of Latin flavor. Stabbing moments contrast with gentle rocking and cradling. Reveries gave way to frustrations, and throughout Maneses’s simultaneously bold and soft attack, his ability to shape and mold the empty space was riveting.
Mats Ek’s “woman with water” from 2021 resembles an abstract Bauhaus painting come to life. Vivid colors from a lime green table and dancer Dunia Acosta’s vibrant tangerine shift dress contrast with Osnel Delgado’s dark suit and the bare stage. And there’s a splash of refreshment: a clear pitcher and glass of water. Danced to a score by Fleshquartet, Acosta’s lanky flexibility as she lifts her leg sky high or curves her back against the table edge continues the linearity of the stark green table. She carries the pitcher and glass, pours some water, and drinks. And repeats. Delgado appears as the interloper; in the end, Acosta has collapsed and is literally swept off by Delgado, push broom in hand.
The evening closed with Naharin’s 1986 “Tabula Rasa.” The choreographer created the piece for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre more than 30 years ago and spent time in Havana in 2018 teaching Malpaso’s dancers the work. There have been changes; Naharin’s approach has changed as have the dancers. As well, the more formal costumes — slip dresses and slacks and puffy-sleeved tops for the men — have now become standard practice wear, t-shirts, leggings, or shorts for Malpaso’s dancers.
The mesmerizing opening, an accumulation of dancers performing a simple side-to-side sway and step sideways, feels both calming and captivating. Naharin favors simple floor patterns — dancers in straight lines, diagonals, or circles — on which he overlays a movement language he named gaga. Gaga demands deep focus and awareness from the dancers and absolute attentiveness to how their bodies move from the inside out, asking them to reach internally for motivation. The result is an often visceral, earthy sense of attack.
In “Tabula Rasa,” which was created relatively early in Naharin’s choreographic career, we can see him thoughtfully breaking down the standard and expected movement motifs of dance’s system to discover a more authentic driver for his own dances. Atop that initial sideways sway step, one dancer stops, interrupting the pattern, the sway. There are unison large group moments along with pairings and solos. Sometimes the repetitive music by Arvo Part crescendos and then it softens. Later, one couple is left alone on stage for a sensual physical duet. They contort and contract, one drags the other like a sack of potatoes, before the group returns in a flinging sequence of arms and runs circling the stage. The piece ends as simply as it began — a dancer alone curled into a fetal position. This “Tabula Rasa” suggests that we are all blank slates at birth.
This review originally appeared May 1, 2022, on DC Metro Theater Arts and is reprinted with kind permission.
© 2022 Lisa Traiger
Holding
And Now, Hold Me
Directed and choreographed by Britta Joy Peterson,
with performance and movement collaboration by Sergio Guerra Abril and Dylan Lambert
Dance Place
Washington, D.C.
January 22-23, 2022
By Lisa Traiger
Choreographer and ardent collaborator Britta Joy Peterson has been creating dance, video, and performance pieces in the Washington, DC, region since 2016, when she took a position as a professorial lecturer at American University in the District.
Her newest piece, And Now, Hold Me, is part of a trilogy Peterson began work on in 2014 or ’15, she said after Saturday evening’s program at Dance Place. Each work — including “Vinegar Spirit,” which came to Dance Place in January 2019 — wrestles with time and space in intentional ways to tease out philosophical and phenomenological concepts in a kinetic palette. What’s most interesting about this triptych of pieces is Peterson’s keen focus on space and how the introduction of bodies moving through it changes, literally, everything — the architecture, the meaning, the temperature, the feeling, even the air in the room reshapes itself. For And Now, Hold Me, a duet, the space designed by Elsa Rinde creates a stage within a stage demarcated by white PVC pipes slanted like a giant soccer goal framing the performers, with a white floor floating in the larger surrounding black void.
Two men, sharply dressed in wool coats, neat sweaters, slacks, and shoes, sit cross-legged on the floor looking like schoolboys awaiting roll call. “In the beginning … and now,” one intones. Then a monologue spoken in succession by both men, but not to one another, pours forth, in poetically Biblical cadences about flesh and how it’s in and of the world, the stuff of life, it provides a way of perceiving and making meaning. “Through flesh,” one says, “I know you.” Still seated, they twist, bend, windshield-wiper their knees, gesture in perfectly intricate unison and a low thrum of sound crescendos. Like twin brothers they rise and begin to disrobe. A shift in Evan Anderson’s lights transforms the backdrop, which appeared as colorful and white vertical blinds, into a loosely woven web of multicolored ribbon, which streams from a giant spool at the side of the stage. Dancer Dylan Lambert behind stage pulls ribbon from the endless spool and adds to the spidery tapestry.
Meanwhile, with slippery grace, Sergio Guerra Abril meanders between gestural brushes of his hair and loosely articulate twists, tumbles, balances that unwind and rewind, a manifestation of the unspooling ribbon. What becomes a series of episodes, silent playlets in a sense, is broken up by canned applause, when each performer pauses for an unironic bow. Guerra Abril dons a shimmery blouse, red go-go books, and a flouncy white skirt for a playful lipsync of “Desatame” by Monica Naranjo. His playful drag and voguing offer up a fantastic death drop — a split-second fall to the back, one leg sexily raised in the air.
Lambert then has his own bit of fun impersonation. Introduced by a few bars from Van Halen’s “Jump,” he enters with towel and yoga mat, converses with imagined gym rats about exercise, bitcoin, and dogecoin, all in perfect yoga-bro fashion.
An improvisational duet on expected feminine and masculine tropes allows the dancers to tweak social and cultural expectations of the alpha male and bitchy female. Guerra Abril reads from a series of shlocky blog posts that advise that men should “take up more space to look more powerful” while women should “avoid pain at all costs.” All the while they tumble, lift, balance one another on a hip or shoulder in an easygoing improvisation. On either side, sign language interpreters make this and all the spoken word accessible.
As the work winds down, strains of Liszt’s dreamy “Liebestraum No. 3” build, shifting the demeanor of the space that has contained so many moments of bodies moving and filling the void, light painting over the darkness, architecture delineating the blank stage canvas. The two men begin packing up the clothing and props; the woven spidery tapestry, their own words and phrases, parsed out over the course of nearly an hour have reached a quiet moment of intimacy. “And, now … the end” arrives, but, still, they’re not finished. There’s one more thing to do.
They stand and, finally, hug, body to body, flesh to flesh. Two become one. Space and time have contracted and exploded. While And Now, Hold Me is absolutely not a “pandemic piece,” this moment of coming together resonated in a world where many people have not hugged or been hugged for nearly two years now as the ongoing challenges of isolation and quarantine continue to hold some hostage to COVID-19 and its variants. Peterson’s work meditates on time and space, with moments of moving beauty, irony, fun, and, finally, a thoughtful confluence of bodies and flesh. I’ve avoided writing on her work until now because I hadn’t found enough in it that appealed to me. In And Now, Hold Me, I discovered much that spoke to me, particularly through the exquisite performances of Abril and Lambert, as well as the finely conceived structure and expert production of Peterson’s artistic and advisory team. I’m glad I returned to her work to discover a deeply conceptual study of what it means to move and take up space. A solo dancer on stage evokes an individual’s world, but Peterson shows us that two people sharing space create a universe of possibilities.
This review originally appeared on DC Metro Theater Arts on January 24, 2022, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2022 Lisa Traiger
From Mercy to Grace
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE
featuring “Mercy,” “The Equality of Night and Day: First Glimpse,” and “Grace”
Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater
Washington, D.C.
October 21, 2021
By Lisa Traiger
Choreographer Ronald K. Brown is the dance world’s preeminent preacher. His works — exquisitely performed Thursday (through Saturday) evening at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater — open the heart and lift the soul. EVIDENCE, the company he founded in 1985 in Brooklyn, gives voice to the cultural legacies and experiences of the African American community. The rich triptych of works, which spanned two decades, took the audience on a spiritual journey, accompanied by the historical underpinnings of the African American experience.
Like a semiotician, Brown imbues his choreography with gestures, structures, postures, signs, and signifiers that embody the Black experience. There’s the grounded way his dancers walk and stand, knees juicy as they give in and rebound to gravity’s pull, while their upper bodies pronounce themselves as unselfconsciously powerful and graceful. And then the torso, spine, and shoulders that undulate in a subtle acknowledgment, again, of the natural energies land, sea, and air written into our bodies.
Brown fashions his movement language with a complement of subtly semaphoric gestures that convey meaning — clenched fists, the dap or single raised fist, raised praising arms, arms up as if under arrest, and hand held at heart center. These and others become a revelatory vocabulary across the evening’s three works, without becoming mimetically obvious.
“Mercy” featured the accompaniment of Meshell Ndegeocello’s genre-slashing funk/soul/jazz/hip hop in a spare and contemplative score that shifts from meditative to a heavier rock beat allow the company of dancers to unfurl from simple walking to full-bodied tilts, bird-like arms in precarious balances, and whipping spins. The lighting by Tsubasa Kamei here is moody but a series of glowing fabric columns dispersed across the stage that hide and reveal the dancers lend a temple-like feel to the work.
Yet the dancers enter walking backward, as if the world has turned upside down. In fact, it has. As the piece progresses the six women and five men navigate the space in quick-footed shuffles and effortless ease. At one moment, the men tumble to the floor as the women continue dancing; at another, there’s a freeze-frame hands-up/don’t-shoot gesture. The reality of our nation’s divisions and sins is embedded in the dance. A priestess-like figure, clad in a regal woven headdress and the elegant deep brown gorgeously draped fabrics of costumer Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya, leaves the community for a solo that suggests compassion and healing drawing on Africanist movement vocabulary, rolling shoulders, undulating spines, winging arms and bent-knee steps. Deep-voiced Ndegeocello (who, by the way, studied at Oxon Hill High School and Duke Ellington School for the Arts as a teen) chants aphoristic phrases — “Have mercy on you,” “As you think, so shall you become,” “I’m at the mercy of the shifting sea” — as a prayer of healing.
Created this year, “The Equality of Night and Day: First Glimpse” features a score by Jason Moran and recorded clips of speeches from racial justice activist Angela Davis. While still a work-in-progress, the piece is well on its way to a full artistic statement. Dancers clad in rich blue choir-like robes suggest a movement choir in the way they circle, gather, and realign themselves to Moran’s jazzy, bluesy accompaniment. And this group-think construction becomes fitting, as we hear Davis questioning America’s democratic values and actions that she says “spawn terror.” “How,” she asks, “do we imagine democracy that doesn’t thrive on racism, homophobia, capitalism … [how do we] use our imagination to come up with new models of democracy.” The dancers appear in a Sisyphean struggle, then at moments they tremble, as if terrorized or exhausted. But the most powerful and lasting vision here is of simplicity: In a quiet moment as the dancers walk, circling up in a steady understated but regal gait. They shed their robes, neatly place them at the circle’s center, and become an offering.
Brown’s signature work, “Grace,” now two decades old, remains as fresh as it did in its earliest rendition by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Under golden sunny lights against a hot-red background, the white-clad dancers driving speed, shuffling quick-footed patters, space gulping leaps, and rolling spines from bent waists unfold over a pulsing beat, first churchy then jazzy and groovy. The incessant drive that binds these dancers as they expend every ounce of muscle, sinew, and bone to the utmost becomes the perfect way to elevate this program of faith-infused works. The trajectory Brown carves tracks from the brooding over our nation’s state of societal dysfunction and prejudice and how to heal in “Mercy” to a call for action in “The Equality of Night and Day,” and reaches its apotheosis and, ultimately, a state of praise and blessing in “Grace.”
This review originally appeared on DC Metro Theater Arts on October 26, 2021, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2021 Lisa Traiger
Bowen McCauley Dance Preps for Final Bow, Gives Penultimate Performance
25th Anniversary Program
Bowen McCauley Dance
Artistic direction and choreography by Lucy Bowen McCauley
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater
May 26, 2021
By Lisa Traiger
As the dance world eases back to stages amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Bowen McCauley Dance was among the first to dip a toe in to test the waters, dancing together on the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater stage before a very limited audience of the company’s friends and supporters. The rest of the audience, including this reviewer, attended virtually.
Lucy Bowen McCauley founded her Arlington-based company a quarter century ago, and with her musical acuity and penchant for balletically flavored contemporary dance technique, it became a mainstay on the local dance circuit and beyond. But just as a dancer’s onstage career is most often measured in years not decades or a lifetime, a dance company, too, can have its limits. At the program May 26, 2021, McCauley publicly announced that this performance would be her company’s penultimate. She’s not closing up shop due to the pandemic pause; in fact, Bowen McCauley shared with me years ago that she didn’t foresee leading her company indefinitely and was considering the best time to choreograph her troupe’s final performance. Twenty-five years felt like the right time. Then a global pandemic happened. So instead of finishing with a virtual production, Bowen McCauley Dance Company will take its last bows in September at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater.
In anticipation of that finale, McCauley created a new work for the Terrace Theater virtual program, “Trois Rêves,” to Maurice Ravel’s complex three-movement piano score “Gaspard de la Nuit,” based on a bleak poem by Aloysius Bertrand. The dream ballet opens to a trio of women in flowing waves and undulations of movement; arms swirl like anemones and other sea creatures. When they cock a raised bent leg behind (attitude, for ballet aficionados), balancing on the other, an image of seahorses comes to mind. Later the men join, yet dancers never meet; all their interactions are safely distanced. The second movement, “Le Gibet,” or gallows, proceeds slowly, steadily, relentlessly as Dustin Kimball, in black down to a pair of leather gloves, plods in. As the specter of death, he lashes his arms toward the grounded dancers. They succumb. Then a white-clad angelic figure (Justin Metcalf-Burton) enters; a battle of life forces ensues like a galactic faceoff as the two never make contact. The nightmarish sequence ends with Death in a moment of morose contemplation, yet a noose drops from above. Death prevails.
The final section lightens the mood with quick-footed, playful dances of nymph-like creatures coursing around a pajama-clad sleeping figure. Bright and spirited, the women leap with catlike grace, their silky dresses floating up around them, while the men cartwheel and squat like frogs. They gambol and scamper stalking the restless sleeper with frolicking abandon. “Trois Rêves,” expertly played by pianist Nikola Paskalov, the company’s music director, demonstrates Bowen McCauley’s sensitivity for and love of challenging 20th-century classical scores that suit her balletically inspired movement language.
The program opened with 2019’s “Dances of the Yogurt Maker,” a lovely abstraction drawing on elements of swirling and churning momentum that I imagine are involved in making yogurt. The score by Turkish composer Erberk Eryilmaz also provides Middle Eastern flavor. The dancers move through shapes hinting at Turkish architectural elements — arms raised above their heads palms together allude to Ottoman arches or the onion domes of minarets. Flexed wrists and bent elbows create curlicues and broken lines as a nod to calligraphy and curvilinear arabesques — the arcing swirls of Middle Eastern design not the ballet pose.
Bowen McCauley honored two longtime BMDC dancers: Alicia Curtis — 14 seasons — and Kimball — 15 seasons. The previously filmed duet from the choreographer’s 2015 work “Victory Road,” with a country-rock accompaniment by Jason and The Scorchers, showcased the dancers’ artistry and their valuable contributions to the company.
The resilience of the company and its dancers was evident in the strength of the well-rehearsed performances as well as the mindfulness to ongoing pandemic concerns. For both live works, the dancers wore masks, and Bowen McCauley adjusted any choreography that required physical contact in “Yogurt Maker”; thus no lifts or partnering occurred. Choreographed while following COVID-19 social-distancing restrictions, “Trois Rêves” featured seven dancers moving expertly and connecting and interacting without ever making any physical contact to comply with COVID safety regulations.
This review originally appeared on DC Metro Theater Arts on June 2, 2021, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2021 Lisa Traiger
Formidable Feminist
The Eve Project
Martha Graham Dance Company
Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater
Washington, D.C.
March 5-7, 2020
By Lisa Traiger
On the eve of the day we learned that we still can’t elect a woman as qualified as Elizabeth Warren president, the Martha Graham Dance Company returned to the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater with The EVE Project, an uncompromisingly feminist program of works showcasing women as creators, intellects, thinkers, and warriors. In an era where girls and women still have to lay claim to the #MeToo mantra, Graham’s works were equal parts inspirational and instructive, aside from being exquisitely danced by a formidable company of 19.
Modern dance was founded by freethinking, independent women — Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis preceded Graham, but with her independent spirit, boundless creativity, instinctual eye for art, design, high fashion, and her era’s pop culture zeitgeist, Martha is our Ur mother of modern dance. Her lengthy career was marked by multiple masterworks that literally set the course for mid-century modernism with her preference for both mining emotional landscapes and letting the body speak her own inner psychological narratives.
At 94, the Graham company is the country’s oldest continuously performing dance company. When Graham died in 1991 at 96, the company faced some difficult years when the works looked shopworn and the dancing was only passably Grahamesque. Presently, under the astute direction of former Graham dancer Janet Eilber, this legacy American troupe is now in top form.
Eilber has brought together a cadre of exquisite dancers who have not only mastered the lifeforce of Graham — the power of the pelvis and the expulsion of breath that create that richly physical expression of emotion, the contraction and release. But other Graham staples include the torque of the body, mainly in the oppositional pull of the shoulder against the push of the hip. These dancers, too, are streamlined, though still able to access the weighty, solid groundedness Graham technique demands, they can soar and stretch endlessly. Both earth and air inhabit their realm.
These days, we talk about the body’s core as the center of strength and power. Graham accessed that vital lifeforce a century ago by experimenting with her own body in the 1920s and ’30s. She based an entire movement language on harnessing the pelvis and the breath, contraction and release to both propel the body and collapse it.
A wonderful video montage titled “Eve Forging” by Justin Scholar set the stage for a program meant to celebrate women and the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote. At center, Graham dances in “Frontier,” one of her iconic Americana works. Before a wooden fence she gazes outward on a vast landscape, her leg cocked up on the railing, swings in an arc. Around her photographic portraits of twentieth-century female changemakers come into focus — Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinem, Michelle Obama, Sally Ride, to note a few. These are women who, like Graham, made a difference and left an indelible imprint.
“Diversion of Angels,” from 1948, is both an abstraction colored with painterly brush strokes of yellow- and red-costumed dancers and a meditation on love in its three stages: adolescent flirtatious love, romantic love, and mature love. As the flirts, Charlotte Landreau, clad in a yellow torso-defining full-legged jumpsuit (design by Graham), and Lloyd Mayor, chase each other with skipping leaps. He whips her in a lift around his waist and up on his shoulder where she balances on a knee, her leg behind in arabesque. In red, So Young An zooms across the stage in slashing runs. Lloyd Knight scoops her up, cartwheels her and they melt into splits circling one another on the floor.
As the mature couple, Natasha Diamond-Walker uses her powerful centered stillness to command attention and the company of dancers often seems to orbit around her. When she and her partner Alessio Crognale embrace,they reach for the other’s face, cradle in arching lifts. The men also become a Greek chorus, heel stepping and balancing in wheeling arcs. I love, too, how the women reach their arms above head and one shoulder juts out before they run off; this stylistic Graham initiation is so wonderfully highlight by this company of dancers. “Diversion of Angels” beautifully evokes many of these essential Grahamisms, reminding us how vividly she allowed the body to speak and sing.
The evening’s oldest work, “Ekstasis,” is a solo from 1933 that clarifies Graham’s use of the torso as central to everything she created. Gorgeously performed by Anne Souder, the work is a study in angles and curves as she cocks out one hip and cantilevers her torso in the opposite direction with sensuous power. Shoulder and hip tension build up oppositional forces in the body. The result? Stunning, as is the torso-hugging shift dress Graham designed, simple, elegant and suitably elastic. Most surprising about this study, with choreography “reimagined” by Virginie Mecene, is how downright sexy Martha must have been performing this.
“Lamentation Variations” is an ongoing choreographic experiment that Eilber has honed from a 2007 one-off into a purposeful way of forging the company’s future-looking path. Graham’s seminal 1930 solo — it’s the one where she’s seated on a bench swathed in a tube of purple fabric, oozing psychic pain with every gut punch and elbow jab. Eilber invites choreographers to react to a 1943 film capturing Graham in the role, with a few rules: just 10 hours of rehearsal, public domain music or silence, no sets or props basic costumes and no longer than four minutes.
For the Kennedy Center, choreographers Aszure Barton, Liz Gerring, and Michelle Dorrance were enlisted and music included George Crumb, Michael J. Schumacher, and Dorrance and Jaco Pastorius, respectively. Each brief study had serendipitous moments that spoke to either physical, emotional, or dynamic manifestations of the work. Barton’s duet was so stunningly silky and slightly morbid if felt like a suspenseful trailer danced with utmost liquidity by Laurel Dalley Smith and Anne O’Donnell. Gerring’s lunges and falls, and walking patterns drew from a post-modernist playbook, while Dorrance’s — no surprise for the tap genius — parsed out rhythms with walks pauses, kneels and rises for a group of 10 dancers. Later for “Untitled (Souvenir),” of-the-moment modernist Pam Tanowitz set in motion a number of quirky skitters, scoots, jumps and asymmetrical groupings of eight dancers clad in fashions by TOME (Ryan Lobo and Ramon Martin) set in motion to longtime collaborator Caroline Shaw’s strings and sound composition.
With anti-war and feminist tropes, “Chronicle” packed a powerful punch, showcasing the company’s 10 women in a rousing call to solidarity and, need it be said, still? — revolution. The work, which premiered in 1936, was created between the two world wars, just 16 years after women gained the right to vote. Built in three parts, it was Graham’s response to fascism. The previous year, she had been invited to perform as part of the 1936 Olympics in Germany. She refused and made “Chronicle,” which, she noted, is not an “attempt to show the actualities of war” but evokes “war’s images.”
Stunning and fearless Leslie Andrea Williams, clad in another Graham-designed costume, a black fitted dress with a voluminous scarlet-lined skirt, rests on a platform, Sphinx-like in profile, but ready to pounce. As she rises, her hands cupped like a Graham contraction, her body tilts off-kilter, the sweep of her leg whipping the skirts. The dress becomes a shawl, a shroud, and with the crimson showing, Williams drips with blood. This is “Spectre – 1914.”
As “Steps in the Street” opens, a company of black clad women enter, slowly, individually, one by one. Each has one arm bent, elbow at the shoulder, the other tensed at the hip, with their bodies torqued, their slow backwards steps, it’s as if they’re bearing a burden — a basket, a child, the weight of the world itself resting on their shoulders.
All angles — elbows, knees, flexed feet and wrists — the women form a regiment, traverse the stage in linear paths, carving space in unison. Wallingford Riegger’s music has urgent drumming and pressing horns and the women clench their fists, raising their arms up. Lunging and gouging gestures, a foot-tapping walk performed with march-like precision and sturdy sure moments of repose build into larger locomotion, jagged stag leaps, cartwheels and another singular dash across the diagonal. These women don’t just stand their ground; the swallow space asserting their power with tense determination. The closing section, “Prelude to Action,” ends on a high note as the company of 10 walk with a slight stagger forward, stare down the audience, a flexed palm pressing to us.
In a current political climate when women’s rights, women’s bodies and women’s spirits are being challenged, this was both a cri de coeur and a call to action. Graham never gave up. Her choreographic voice has made a lasting mark and changed the course of 20th-century art. We should continue to heed her example. As she said, “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that the others are behind the time.”
Photos: top, Lloyd Mayor and Charlotte Landreau, Martha Graham Dance Company, in Graham’s “Diversion of Angels,” photo by Brigid Pierce
Xin-Ying and Anne Souder in Martha Graham’s “Chronicle,” photo by Melissa Sherwood
Peilju Chien-Pott in Graham’s “Ekstasis,” photo by Brigid Pierce
Photos courtesy John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
This review was first published on DC Metro Theater Arts and is republished here with kind permission.
© 2020 Lisa Traiger
2019 Danced: A Year of Watching
In a year of shutdowns and quid pro quo, #metoo and they, fake news and brutal losses in journalism, migration and detention, drain-the-swamp and impeachment, dance was a salvo and an appeasement in light of the incessant and depressing 24/7 news cycle of 2019.
The good news prevailed: curtains still rose, lights continued to shine, choreographers created, dancers danced, and audiences came and applauded. For all that, I am thankful.
My own 2019 dance year contained a few personal bests, including an invitation to take part in the Kennedy Center REACH opening programming on National Dance Day in September. For the free outdoor stage, I curated and narrated what was called a “D.C. Local Dance History Program.” In hindsight, a better title, perhaps “D.C. Dance Luminaries” or stars, would have made it sound sexier. I was fortunate to bring together under a single umbrella The Washington Ballet — performing an excerpt from choreographer Choo San Goh’s signature piece, the sleek neo-modern “Fives” — and Jones-Haywood School of Ballet. I even got a quick photo op with TWB AD Julie Kent and Jones-Haywood AD Sandra Fortune Green — probably a first. I was moved to bring Melvin Deal and his African Heritage Drummers and Dancers to a Kennedy Center stage for the first time.
Beyond that, I published a 2,500-word piece on the history and increasing popularity of Israeli contemporary dance artists around the world for Moment magazine.
And I continued to watch and write on dance. Here are my highlights from a year of highs and lows.
2019 began and ended with two of the most intriguing — and artistically different — programs featuring locally based choreographers. January 26-27 at Dance Place, Orange Grove Dance left me intrigued and wanting more from its evening-length Waking Darkness. Waiting Light. Filled with momentous moments of mystery, of dreams, of haunted memories and profound reflection, the four performers, including choreographers Colette Krogol and Matt Reeves, fill the work in ways that make this tightly knit piece feel expansive. With washes of light and hand-held coffee-tin spotlights, designed by Peter Leibold, and an atmospheric yet musical sound score by Dylan Glatthorn, along with Mark Costello’s projections that give the evening a noir-ish feel, Waking Darkness. Waiting Light is both physically and emotionally athletic in parsing the netherworld of half-remembered dreams and unforgettable nightmares. The visceral approach to movement by Krogol, Reeves, Jonathan Hsu, and Juliana Ponguta let this work resonate deeply.
Another local best, also on view at Dance Place came late in 2019: tap dancer extraordinaire Baakari Wilder and director/choreographer Kerri Edge brought the searing REFORM: Racial Disparities in American Criminal Justice to Washington, D.C., November 23-24. Though still under development, the evening-length piece is a polemic — in the best sense — on the legacy that slavery and racism has wrought on our beloved United States. Featuring tappers Omar Edwards, Abron Glover and Joseph Webb joining Maryland-native Wilder, along with live jazz from the Dom Ellis Trio, REFORM is the type of piece on would expect in a year of so much political and social upheaval. This is a piece that aims to change audiences’ perspectives on race, racism, incarceration and institutional prejudice. Intermingled with live solo and accompanied tap numbers are torn-form-the-headlines or -history video clips: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Yusef Salaam, one of the young men accused of being a “Central Park Five” member.
I heard chatter in the lobby after the show that tap was not an expressive medium to carry forth the heavy message this show imparts. But tap is exactly the appropriate genre to pull back the curtain on America’s long-standing racist and hate-filled roots. With its heavy-hitting footwork by Webb and Edwards, its lighter more nervous tremors from Wilder’s solo performed in prison stripes, to the chorus line of leggy beauties from the Divine Dance Institute, tap is exactly the right means to express the anxiety, fear despair and hope these men represent as they parse through the history of slavery, racism and discrimination in America. REFORM, in ways, reflects and moves past some of the methods and materials in the groundbreaking 1995 musical Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, of which Wilder is an alum, but REFORM feels more like a sequel, taking audiences further by immersing them in the ramifications of black-men’s actions that are still statistically more likely to land them in jail or dead, than their white counterparts. REFORM is difficult to watch and doesn’t leave audiences with much uplifting. Rather it’s a call to both acknowledgement — particularly for privileged audiences, white or otherwise — and action.
Two other works in 2019, too, left me feeling a sense of urgency to step forward and do something. At Dance Place February 16 and 17, Brooklyn-based Urban Bush Women’s Hair & Other Stories, crafted from personal narratives from a wide-ranging tour of kitchens and living rooms, beauty shops and church basements, that demands audience members to ask who they are, where they stand and, ultimately, will they take a stand. With text, spoken word, narrative vignettes, video sequences and participatory sections, over nearly two-and-a-half hours, Hair & Other Stories becomes both a celebration of resilient black women and a challenge to outsiders. Co-choreographers (and UBW associate artistic directors) Chanon Judson and Samantha Spies lay out plenty of provocative concepts through song and dance, narrative and lecture, stylists’ props like pomades and combs. The performers’ rolling shoulders, undulating spines, bodies pulled earthward, fluttering arms and articulations of torsos, pumping knees, and raised fists draw from the lexicon of Africanist movement. And along with the equal purity of stillness and work gestures like sweeping, brushing, and stirring motions a variety of embodied cultures are braided into the choreographic language. As in any UBW concert, the audience is asked to stand, come down to the stage and move with and alongside the dancers. that draws from deeply planted roots. We’re told, and reminded, that this isn’t merely a performance: “This is the urgent dialogue of the 21st century.”
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater celebrated its 60th anniversary at the Kennedy Center Opera House with a glitzy opening night featuring hip-hop master Rennie Harris’s “Lazarus.” It was the company’s first two-part piece and the work is a companion, really a sequel, to Ailey’s masterwork, “Revelations,” which mined his own “blood memories” growing up in the African American church. While “Revelations” is a journey from slavery to renewal to a celebration of freedom in church, that tracks African American history, “Lazarus” picks up where Ailey left off, dealing forthrightly with the U.S. history of racism, the nation’s original — and ongoing — sin. Harris draws movement motifs from Africanist body language and the searing recognition of the continuing struggle — and triumph — of being black in America. For more, see my review here.
February also brought New York-based Zvi Dance to Dance Place February 9-10, performing his 2012 Dabke, previously seen in the area at the late American Dance Institute. In fusing the Arab folk dance typically performed in lines with hands clasped or arms around shoulders with contemporary dance, Zvi Gotheiner sets his dancers into patterns of complex rhythmic stomps, fierce and barefooted. Lines and groups play off and against each other, and groups and solos merge and fade, as snakelike lines intersect and disperse. There’s a harshness of attack that’s both thrilling and disconcerting and subtle, barely-there gestures a raised fist, steely gaze, the throwing of stones, or chest-bumping confrontation, suggest sparring, even uprising. That the Arab-born dabkah, merged into the bouncier less earth-bound debke in the Israeli folk dance community, also tells a story in this dance about cultural convergence and appropriation.
Beyond hometown presenters, a new work, premiered on the Kennedy Center’s signature Ballet Across America program, intrigued me. The pair of programs May 28 – June 2 in the Opera House brought together Dance Theatre of Harlem and Miami City Ballet on separate evenings, and then, together, the two companies shared the world premier of Pam Tanowitz’s quirky, enigmatic, yet engrossing “Gustave Le Gray No. 1.” DTH offered up one of its classics, Geoffrey Holder’s sunny-hued Caribbean-inspired “Dougla” along with a presentable “Valse Fantaisie” by Balanchine. Miami City Ballet brought the little-seen Robbins/Tharp “Brahms/Handel,” smartly and lovingly performed, along with a sunny but slight work by Justin Peck, “Heatscape,” which probably plays well in sunny Miami.
Tanowitz’s “Gustave,” though, took ballet into the realm of post-modernist conceptualism. The spare piano score by Caroline Shaw, played by fearless Sylvia Jiang, set the four dancers, clad in Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung’s silky red tunics and pants. Shaw’s score was named for 19th-century French photographer Gray and it pings with staunch chords and equally staunch silences, then tinkles with a touch of, is that Chopin? The dancers are set on a cerebral course, there must be a written set of instructions somewhere detailing their squiggles, shakes, walking patterns, and formations as the four — Renan Cerdeiro, Lauren Fadeley, Anthony Santos and Stephanie Rae Williams — make their way across the stage. And, soon, the piano, and pianist, too, get in on the crossing. Yes, the dancers themselves push the piano across the stage — and, yes, Jiang continues to pluck out notes and chords, and once in her new spot, on the other side, one of the men carries out a piano bench for her to perch upon before the four gather ‘round like they might share a song to her accompaniment. When the curtain closes, it’s with a sigh of wonderment and regret, for, “Gustave Le Gray” was a piece d’occasion, likely never to be seen and wondered on again.
The Washington Ballet continued, under artistic director Julie Kent, to seek out new works for the ballet repertory. Its April 3-7 program at the Harman Center brought three, respectable, but not likely important new works to the stage. (Alas, I missed the fall program of new repertory.) Dana Genshaft’s “Shadow Lands,” with its glimmery sheer costumes and music for orchestra and recorded tracks by Kennedy Center composer-in-residence Mason Bates, already elevated the work. The balletic-based movement is clearly executed but it’s the far more subtle interactions that make this a piece to be seen again. Along with the eight dancers, two principal roles — the Observer, Javier Morera, and the Outlier, Katherine Barkman (the evening I attended) — suggest a story or at least a relationship, with meaningful looks and glances. Let’s hope this one gets another viewing to parse the piece.
And a mid-summer treat brought Meredith Monk and her vocal ensemble to the Rasmuson Theater at the National Museum of the American Indian, presented by the Hirshhorn Museum. Performing Cellular Songs: Concert Version, Monk, in her signature brown braids, was joined by three other voice artists and Allison Sniffin on voice, violin and keyboard. With Monk on keyboard and voice, the ensemble created rich sound sculptures along with a moving kaleidoscope of video scenarios designed by Monk and Katherine Freer. The all-female configuration of voices felt as if Monk has built an alternative society, damn the patriarchy. And as the singers, all clad in pure, crisp white, maneuvered around and across the stage in various geometric configurations, seated, standing, walking and pausing, they became a metaphor for being, a human kaleidoscope. There’s great mystery — even subversively so — in the way Monk builds on the beauty and significance of the voice — here solely female — in rising, alliterative, contrapuntal and choral rushes and diversions. Together with bodies and background videos moving together and in tandem Cellular Songs builds and subsides. And in the lingering hum of the final sung notes, before the audience applauds, there is enough air space for a collective breath. A sigh. Is it responding to the disappointing year we’ve had, or, maybe, just maybe, it’s a sign that everything might be all right. At the very least, that’s one way to move forward in the coming year.
Finally, I spent three weeks at the Dagara Music Center near Accra, Ghana, in July and August, studying African dance, drumming and gyl, African xylophone. This unforgettable and challenging experience emphasized for me that technique is highly valued in African dance, particularly from the Dagara people — the region the DMC emphasizes. The technique has little to do with body placement, turnout, leg and arm positions and head placement, athleticism or virtuosity — even when those values are often expected in African dance. Instead, musicality and rhythm are the key to technical proficiency and that was much, much harder than I anticipated. Staying on top of the beat and clapping on four-one, rather than one-two or one-three, took me a while to assimilate. Additionally, living in the DMC compound and going on excursions throughout the country enabled me to see the physicality Ghanaians embody in their daily lives: cooking, chopping, pounding, harvesting, carrying — anything and everything on their heads from baskets to once a sewing machine — sweeping, brick making, starting fires to cook on coals outdoors, pounding and grounding nuts and gourds. These work motions and gestures become the choreography. It was a beautiful ad unforgettable lesson on how beautifully bodies speak through and of culture.
Photos: Meredith Monk’s Cellular Sounds, photo Richard Termine
Orange Grove Dance in Waking Darkness. Waiting Light, photo @evangelina_g
Baakari Wilder in REFORM, photo Michael Leroy
Jacqueline Green in Rennie Harris’s Lazarus, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, photo Paul Kolnik
Tendayi Kuumba in Hair & Other Stories, Urban Bush Women, photo (c) Hayim Heron
The Washington Ballet’s Gian Carlo Perez and Kateryna Derechnya in Dana Genshaft’s “Shadow Lands,” photo Victoria Pickering
© 2019 Lisa Traiger, published December 30, 2019
The Wisdom of Hair
Hair & Other Stories
Urban Bush Women
Dance Place
Choreography: Chanon Judson and Samantha Speis
and the UBW company
Washington, D.C.
February 16-17, 2019
By Lisa Traiger
Don’t think you’re going to sit back and observe if you show up at Urban Bush Women’s latest, Hair & Other Stories, which made its Washington, D.C., premiere this past weekend at Dance Place. Oh no. Read the program notes and then hear the urgency in the company dancers’ voices, when they say: “Don’t get too comfortable …. We’re goin’ on a journey.”
Hair — African-American women’s hair in particular, with all its baggage as “good” or “bad” — serves as the core narrative construct, but Hair & Other Stories is about much, much more. And I’ll preface this review with my own hesitation as a possessor of so-called “good” hair, typically long (though I recently got a cut) and straight, should I be writing this review? Does my hair texture and skin color — my white privilege — preclude me from sharing my point of view, my understanding? (Let me know in the comments if you have thoughts.)
The two-and-a-half-hour evening plays as part church revival, part dance party, part therapeutic reckoning, part history lesson (including a letter to Madame C. J. Walker, the first African American female millionaire who plied her trade in hair relaxers). And it is wholly and fully engaging of mind, body and spirit for those willing to hop on the train to a future that co-choreographers Chanon Judson and Samantha Speis and the company envision, one where the racist roots of the United States are reckoned with so healing can begin.
Crafted from personal narratives culled from the performers and from participants in Hair Party workshops the company held around the country asking black and other women to talk about their hair and more at community centers, churches, kitchen tables, the work throws out a challenge to all those willing to take it:
Re-think what you thought you knew about race, beauty, class, and privilege. But it comes with a caveat: “You don’t have to leave the same way you came in.” Think of Hair & Other Stories as a permanent haircut or dye job for your intellect and soul.
The Brooklyn-based company, which now includes men — two in this performance — was founded in 1984 by visionary storyteller and social activist Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. UBW draws on the bedrocks of contemporary and African dance, song and spoken word weaving together personal and universal narratives that wrestle with the history and challenges of being black and living in America. Throughout the two-part evening, performers address the audience, drawing from the powerful Undoing Racism workshops that the New Orleans-based People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond conducts around the country. UBW and the institute have long been collaborative partners in educational settings, but never has the fundamental and life-changing material of the workshops been so specifically incorporated into a UBW performance.
The evening begins as an all-out revival meeting. The sing-song preacherly DuBois A’Keen is joined by Tendayi Kuumba and Courtney J. Cook who take an instructive approach, easing audience members into what it means to go through life in with nappy or “bad” hair. All black women are called on to stand in solidarity for the indignities they have faced on playgrounds and on the job for having unmanageable or “different” hair. White women, too, with so-called “silky” locks, are asked to stand with the exhortation: “Let the winds of change blow in your hair.” Indeed.
Early on, a table filled with pomades, oils, gels, and combs indicates some styling might take place. A careful eye will tease out the intricate wrist and finger actions it takes to braid hair. Recollections of suffering under the hot comb for silky straight styles elicit plenty of nods from parts of the audience. The women especially, in their eclectic 21st-century boho costumes by DeeDee Gomes, appliqued with sequins, patches, fringes, and other piecemeal findings, lend a timeless quality to the proceedings. Stories and histories are drawn through embodied movement culling from the lexicon of Africanist dance — rolling shoulders, undulating spines, bodies pulled earthward, fluttering arms and articulations of torsos, pumping knees, and more recent raised fists. Moments of stillness and everyday work — sweeping, brushing, stirring motions — also braid their way into the choreographic language that draws from deeply planted roots.
At one point when the performers address colorism — the valuing of lighter skin over darker skin in the African-American community and the white community — the dancers vigorously use their hands to brush their limbs and torsos as if trying to wash away their own skin. And then, as they line up and pause, breathless after those frantic seconds, the realization comes: they have arranged themselves by skin tone, from darkest to lightest.
Throughout the swift-moving program, all are called on to move — audience as well as performers. Raise an arm, wiggle in your seat, stand in solidarity or come down to the stage, the dance floor and feel in your body the weight of racism, colorism, white privilege and prejudice as it seeps into in your bones, muscles, roots, and scalp.
Lanky powerhouse Chanon Judson tackles a vignette with a trio of “Elevator Hell Stories.” In one she walks into an elevator filled with African Americans who all want her to take a comb to her unruly hair. When the scene is repeated with white riders, they all “love” her look and reach out to touch her hair. Later, she stands on a pedestal, wraps herself in black paper and dons an oversized white top hat — recalling images of Jim Crow or Master Juba. Rooted to the pedestal Judson writhes, ripping away the paper, shedding skin perhaps, filled with taunts and pain, to reveal a renewed body … and spirit.
Joining the cast, Judson’s very young daughter, maybe three years old, moves with child-like assurance, following along, taking an adult’s hand, stepping out of a baby swaddling like a pro. Early on someone brushes down her edges, the soft baby hair at her hairline, with a toothbrush, later during a wickedly sharp scene featuring black and white Barbies in a conversation about white privilege played for adult sensibilities, she settles into her grandmother’s lap in the audience clutching a Barbie. Her moments on stage are a reminder that more’s at stake than the here and now. Judson’s daughter reinforces the Hair & Other Stories hopeful message: That she will grow up free from prejudices about hair and skin and beauty. (Parenthetically this child’s presence also shows us it’s possible to make creative work and raise a family.) The other excellent performers include Stephanie Mas, Ross Daniel (who represents an enlightened white person on this journey), Love Muwwakkil and Cyrah Ward.
It’s a wish-filled message in an evening that requires work — the hard work of reflection. Co-creators Judson and Speis call it “the urgent dialogue of the 21st century.” At Dance Place, the listening, responses, and contributions to the discussion, the call-and-response, felt active and engaged. The work itself is a conversation, one that occurs on a continuum. And one that for many will continue beyond the final bows.
Photos: Courtesy Dance Place, top Tendayi Kuumba; bottom, UBW company, (c) Hayim Heron
This review originally appeared on DC Metro Theater Arts and is reprinted here with kind permission.
© 2019 Lisa Traiger
Portraits
‘Portraits’
Dana Tai Soon Burgess and Company
Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center
Washington, D.C.
June 15-16, 2018
By Lisa Traiger
The portraits hang solemnly, unmoving at the Smithsonian’s Portrait Gallery. Choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess breathes life and movement into these two-dimensional works of art with a triptych of works he titled “Portraits” for the Terrace Theater stage June 15-16. The first choreographer-in-residence at the Washington, D.C. art gallery, Burgess has immersed himself in the galleries, finding inspiration from the paintings and photographs that hang there. The pieces were originally made for the gallery. The transfer from the less-than-ideal atrium space with its soaring, wavy glass ceiling that bridges the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and the Portrait Gallery was an auspicious one. The choreography fares much better framed on a proscenium stage than in the more open setting, where site lines and cranky kids, muddy acoustics and no theatrical lighting marred the performance experience.
Burgess created “I Am Vertical” last year from a close study of the intimate single-room exhibit “Sylvia Plath: One Life.” And though the exhibit was small, displaying some of the poet’s self-portraits, along with ephemera like a typewriter, family photos and pages from her manuscripts, her inspiration proved monumental for Burgess in parsing this writer’s brief (she died a suicide at 30) but momentous life. “I Am Vertical” does a close reading of the relationship between Plath and her husband, fellow writer Ted Hughes. Hughes was both Plath’s great love and her destruction. Burgess shows us the multi-facets of a creative mind by using four dancers to represent Plath, and three perform as Hughes. Sometimes they move together, but sometimes they split into fragments of a personality. The stark but attractive set design by Kelly Moss Southall and Ben Sanders, with its black diagonal runway cutting across the white stage floor, and a writer’s desk at either end suggests the great chasm between Plath and Hughes. The choreography uses that black line to draw the two characters and also as a representation of the blackness of Plath’s suffering — she was diagnosed with clinical depression.
The women, robed in attractive burgundy dresses by Judy Hansen and mid-20th-century hairstyles, begin with a tad of jitterbug to a decaying version of Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” Their partners, clad in crisp gray slacks and shirts, bounce along, until they don’t, splintering off into their separate worlds. Burgess’s movement language here is specific — and parsed out succinctly, as Plath did with her words on the page. Each woman at times reflects what the others have done — one arm raised, the other to the side then one hand’s fingertips rest on the breastbone — suggesting tension between reaching out and turning inward. Plath’s life was a struggle between those two dichotomies. There are moments when a Sylvia and a Ted dance together, yet the various couplings among the four women and three men, never suggest ease. Rather a stiffness and formality subsumes these moments and, at times, a pair spars. He grabs a wrist. She turns away. And they both retreat to their respective desks, their alter egos silently observing. The soundtrack features some discomfiting strings, percussion and piano (Morton Feldman, Olivier Messiaen and Sophia Gubaidulina) and some archival interviews with Hughes and Plath. But most touching and telling are the segments when Plath reads her poem “I Am Vertical,” leading to the powerful, mordant ending: “But I would rather be horizontal” and “I shall be useful when I lie down finally” as each woman lies in down on the blackness in turn, the lights dimming.
Drawing from the exhibit “The Face of Battle: 9/11 to Now,” “After 1001 Nights” takes a subdued look at the battle scarred. Laid out like a chess match, the dancers, clad in drab tan slacks and shirts suggesting military khakis, move strategically in formation, initially on opposing sides. At center, two men — a veteran and a young soldier — shuffle oversized army men around a table, the dancers follow suit mimicking the formation in live form. Their lives have been rendered as insignificant as playing pieces on a chess board. The stoic, contained approach to movement suits the military setting, which later heats up with some hand-to-hand duets, but, like most Burgess works, emotions and choreographic choices are held in check. No one gets out of hand or out of line, even with John Zorn’s roaming klezmer-like score of horns and woodwinds. Burgess suggests that though war has damaged these men – and women, the scars remain buried. These veterans and soldiers remain stoic, uncompromised.
Closing the evening, “Confluence” provides a neat companion to “I Am Vertical” in look and sensibility. They both channel mid-20th-century sentiments, styles and sensibilities. Here Burgess took inspiration from a photographic portrait of one of modern dance’s iconic second-generation figures — Doris Humphrey — from the exhibit “Dancing the Dream.” A humanist in her choreographic vision, Humphrey founded a movement technique based on fall and recovery, though not much of that physicality is evident. The portrait, shot by Barbara Morgan, is all light and shadow, grays and blacks, with her subject’s pale skin pierced by deep-set eyes. The five women and five men channel introspection and angst in their chic black costumes — the women with sheer skirts over leggings and midriff-baring tanks, the men again in neat pants and shirts.
Some of Burgess’s favorite movements that arm pose — one up, one out (in ballet we’d call it third position) — and the touching of the breastbone repeat, along with some slashing side leg lifts and arms. Yet these choreographic “tells” are not quite unique enough to name them “signature” moves; they just happen to be favored moments in Burgess’s movement vocabulary. That said, the piece is attractively danced. In fact, the company appears technically as strong as I’ve ever seen it, with a marked improvement by the men, who have often been less adept than the women in prior years.
The accompanying score also channels a mid-20th-century sensibility, with Ernest Bloch’s sometimes nervous violin and incessant piano chords. “Confluence” comes together with a sense of grave purpose, a heaviness of intent that suggests Humphrey’s aesthetic — even her lightest and brightest works reflected a sense of importance and a notion of seriousness that made early and mid-20th century moderns high artists. Like Humphrey, though, Burgess’s works are always well-polished, and his never veer far from pretty. He favors clean, articulate lines and his dancers comply. You won’t find dark, gut-wrenching moments — no gut-wrenching contractions or contortions — and the dancers, even as soldiers and veterans slumped on the floor, maintain a sense of lift. They may give into gravity and fall, but they never collapse in heaps.
Beyond his residencies at the Smithsonian, Burgess, a full professor in the dance department at George Washington University, has toured his company throughout the world, often on the behest of the State Department. Originally founded to provide voice for Asian American dancers and ideals, this program in one among many that has moved beyond his founding mission as the company celebrates its 25th year in Washington, D.C.
Photos courtesy Dana Tai Soon Burgess and Company
Top: “I Am Vertical,” Christin Arthur and Ian Ceccarelli, by Jeff Watts
Bottom: “I Am Vertical,” Christine Doyle and Sydney Hampton, by Jeff Watts
© 2018 by Lisa Traiger
Published June 16, 2018
This piece originally appeared on DCMetro Theater Arts and is reprinted with kind permission.
Woke
Wake Up!
MK Abadoo and Vaughn Ryan Midder
Dance Place
Washington, D.C.
May 5-6, 2018
By Lisa Traiger
Walking into the back door at Dance Place this past weekend, felt akin to entering a nightclub, albeit a friendly one. After getting the backs of our hands stamped, we walk onto the stage, which has been transformed into a dance floor; some folks choose to groove a bit, others take seats at the periphery of the circle. The occasion, a remount of choreographic activist MK Abadoo’s Wake Up! begins as a party, but by the time the hour is up, no one is laughing.
Abadoo, currently a guest artist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, drew inspiration from Spike Lee’s 1988 social commentary on being young, gifted and black, School Daze. While the movie is also a romp into the social mores of fraternity and sorority members at a fictitious HBCU, Abadoo, an alum of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, flips Lee’s premise on its head. Instead she probes how present-day black students navigate the minefields of race, class, social and political structures of a PWI — predominantly white institution.
Abadoo’s six performers — Moriamo Temidayo Akibu, Kevin Carroll, Shanice Mason,Tariq O’Meally, Selyse and Asia Wyatt — clad in their fictional campus t-shirts that proclaim “priviridge west institute,” navigate through vignettes that lay bare the continuing effects of institutional racism and segregation on young men and women of color. While dance is elemental — the dancers toggle through club moves, hip hop, swing, jazz and blues — they also nod to Lee’s references to minstrelsy and African dance roots.
A homecoming contest turns into a lesson on “good and bad” hair — the beauty shop battle song from the Lee film — pits darker skinned women with natural locks and braids against lighter skinned women with more “desirable” hair. That is until a white woman with long straight red hair struts away the winner. The choreographer has dealt with issues surrounding black hair before, including in Locs/you can play in the sun, a work that included a 25-foot swath of hair that became both burden and amulet for black women.
Then in an imagined juke joint, Abadoo sets up a “living museum” putting her dancers on display as the “Talented Tenth.” They pose, plastered grins beneath blank eyes, and writhe under hot white spotlights suggesting, as Lee, too, did, ignominious minstrel shows in the obsequious stances — head cocked to the side, foot flexed forward like a “Steppin’ Fetchit.” Here and elsewhere throughout the evening, audience members are invited to walk through the stage space, gazing at these dancers as specimens. The horrifying realization that this is no display of talent, but a hearkening back to slave auctions — some of which took place just 12 miles away in Alexandria, Va. — causes a sense of frisson.
Abadoo’s collaborators, writers Vaughn Ryan Midder, Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley, have crafted a taut and searing script that is as much a pointed commentary as it is poetic accompaniment to the movement, which draws from vernacular club styles, a touch of showy jazz, hip hop and Africanist root forms. They don’t ignore history, rather they rely on the awareness — “woke-ness” — of the audience members to get their references to 3/5 a man, Martin, Brown, even Wakanda. The dancers are as adept with this mash up of genres as they are at spoken word. Also notable: the seamless ease that the audience is invited into the performing space and then smoothly ushered off.
DJ Miss Jessica Denson spins old school grooves and hotter new tracks for the dancers who find freedom and release even amid tension-filled moments. Early on four dancers run headlong into the back cinder block wall, again and again. The moment feels both frenzied and entirely acceptable: why wouldn’t these brown bodied dancers feel frustrated enough to slam themselves into a brick wall. The metaphor of living under the white gaze — under centuries of oppression — has been transformed: bodies slamming into bricks.
Yet, amid the harsh images and resonant history, these dancers too share joy, camaraderie and a sense of communal stake in their free form dancing. These four women and six men are unapologetically comfortable inhabiting this space — a circle, consciously eschewing the divisive privilege of a traditional curtained stage. Wake Up! is a necessary public exhortation to our divided nation that the legacy of America’s original sin — slavery and colonialism — remains ever present. Abadoo is among a rising generation of socially conscious African-American choreographers — Kyle Abraham, Mark Bamuthi Joseph, Rennie Harris, Gesel Mason, Camille Brown, and the list does go on. They understand intimately that the simple act of placing a black body on stage is an unapologetic political statement in 2018. Abadoo and her compatriots are working at the intersection of art and social justice at a fraught moment when a slogan like Black Lives Matter is an urgent call to wake up and move to the right side of history.
D.C. DanceWatcher 
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