Julia Eichten (L) and Amanda Wells of the L.A. Dance Project in Merce Cunningham’s Winterbranch (without makeup). Photo: Stephanie Berger

A choreographer who has just formed his own small company must be very, very brave to make Merce Cunningham’s 1964 Winterbranch the centerpiece of its debut program. Benjamin Millepied is certifiably brave. Starting a group in Los Angeles and naming it the L.A. Dance Project is already adventurous. I’m an Angeleno by birth, with the scent of eucalyptus and Pacific salt air embedded in my environmental DNA, and though the city’s cultural profile has soared in recent decades, I know that live performance isn’t a major component of what one once could call “celluloid city.”

Millepied first showed his choreography in 2001, the same year that he was promoted to the rank of principal dancer at the New York City Ballet. He’s been adventurous and ambitious from the get go. So, Winterbranch. I remember sitting in the New York State Theater in 1965, back when the dance was fairly new, feeling that La Monte Young’s score, Two Sounds, had skewered my brain, immobilizing me in my seat. A huge Klieg lamp intermittently blazed into the audience’s eyes. There were boos and bravos, outrage and thrill.

On the program that L.A. Dance Project brought to Montclair University’s intrepid, high-quality Peak Performances series from October 25th through 28^th, Cunningham’s splendidly daring work was framed by Millepied’s own new Moving Parts and William Forsythe’s 1993 Quintett. The Alexander Kasser Theater was full on opening night. No one walked out on Winterbranch, no one booed, and the applause was prolonged, if not vociferous.  Heavy metal has perhaps increased our tolerance for overamplification (the Kasser Theater’s volume was at the current legal max, but that may be relatively restrained). And it was a few years after Winterbranch’s premiere, New Yorkers started going to places like the Electric Circus to experience hallucinogenic interplays of light and darkness.

As staged for the L.A. Dance Project by ex-Cunningham dancer Jennifer Goggans, assisted by Robert Swinston, with Robert Rauschenberg’s original lighting as reimagined by Beverly Emmons, Winterbranch is still a profoundly disorienting piece. Rauschenberg—who in 1964 was not only Cunningham’s resident designer but traveled with the company as a stage technician—made different choices about the lighting at every performance (elements of chance and random selection played a role in the process).  Cunningham had requested a nighttime ambiance: “night as it is in our time with automobiles on highways, and flashlights in faces, and the eyes being deceived about shapes by the way lights hit them.” (Cunningham in his 1968 Changes: Notes on Choreography).

The L.A. Dance Project’s lighting designer, Roderick Murray, gives us that for sure. Nothing beams at the audience (John Cage and Jasper Johns had disliked that aggressive element in lighting expert Thomas Skelton’s 1965 chance-determined effects), but lights flash on and off, as if mistaking their cue. From high up on stage right, a bright ray occasionally moves across the stage the way a car’s headlights on a rarely trafficked road might pass your window. Other streaks of light wander too. You strain to see what’s happening in the darkness or in a faint glow or just outside a bright pool. In the opening sequence, a man wearing dark clothes squirms all the way across the stage; the only light flickering on him may come from a flashlight he’s holding.

Charlie Hodges and Alexandra Wells in Winterbranch. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Who is this man?  It’s impossible to be sure. The dancers are Frances Chiaverini, Julia Eichten, Charlie Hodges, Morgan Lugo, Nathan Makolandra, and Amanda Wells. A few seconds later, Wells is visible, standing stage right, holding her arms above her head. She’s wearing dark sweats, and there are black smudges under her eyes like those football players sport to counteract glare. Slowly she lowers her arms. Two men enter with a piece of beige cloth and spread it on the floor beside her. She falls on it. They carry the blanket with her slung in it to the other side of the stage and set it down. She gets up and goes away.

For a long time, everything happens in silence. Someone is carried on. Someone is hauled away on a piece of cloth. Another “car” passes. Young’s score starts its ferocious noise (one sound, says the program, created by “ashtrays scraped against a mirror, the other by pieces of wood rubbed against a Chinese gong”).  Hodges and Wells are discovered in a pose—he lying on his belly with his head toward the audience, propped up on his elbows like a sphinx, she reclining across him on her side, resting part on her weight on one hand. Both stare toward us. He pushes and rolls in such a way that he seems to be tipping her toward her feet and folding her up. Then they’re in darkness. A second or so later, they’re back in their pose.

Hodges and Wells dissolve the pose. Photo: Stephanie Berger

At one point, a mysterious object is pulled across the stage on a rope. Rauschenberg was accustomed to make this out of whatever he found backstage, and Murray’s version rolls along, blinking a red light and festooned with I don’t know what (a broom, a pail, a. . . ?). It’s faintly comical, faintly ominous. In fact, all the images that you can see or half see have a violent edge to them. Eichten and Hodges grasping hands and spinning each other. All six dancers rushing onstage in pairs and whirling down to the floor. Five people in a clump that gradually moves toward the stage’s down left corner, collapsing and recovering as it goes (when the five reach their destination, Wells walks on and dumps a load of cloths on top of them. They crawl off). The piece is even darker than I remembered; you can’t be sure what’s happening in the shadows.

Of all the explanations that people offered to Cunningham at one time or another as to the meaning of Winterbranch, he most appreciated the remark by a sea captain’s wife that the dance made her think of a shipwreck.

(L to R) Nathan Makolandra, Morgan Lugo, and (aloft) Charlie Hodges in Benjamin Millepied’s Moving Parts. Photo: Stephanie Berger

It was intelligent of Millepied to program his own new work, Moving Parts, first. It’s lighter in every way than the two masterworks, and it introduces the company members you’re going to grow to love. The title doesn’t refer only to the dancers’ bodies; Christopher Wool’s “visual installation” consists of three large panels that the performers wheel into different configurations. These bear black letters and numbers of various sizes set in pleasingly geometrical designs. The costumes are less pleasing—black unitards by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, with appliqués of wide yellow, red, or light blue banding. At the Kasser, Nico Muhly’s very effective score was played by composer at the organ (recorded), Hideaki Aomori on clarinet, and Michi Wiancko on violin—both seated at one side of the stage. Murray supplied the fine lighting.

The mood is upbeat and the dancers cheerful. Their verve helps hold the piece together; although Moving Parts has attractive moments and patterns, it seems to run on a kind of nervous energy, avoiding accumulating and developing its ideas. The movement struck me as atypical of Millepied. Anyone expecting ballet might have been surprised. He could almost have been channeling shreds of post-Trisha Brown ideas. Many of the steps are loose and twisty and flung out; the dancers spend a lot of time on the floor. It crossed my mind that he might have drawn ideas from Wool’s painted designs, but if so, that’s not clear.

Wells cuts loose, Lugo follows. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The screens swoop around often, and it’s entertaining to see dancers disappear behind them and reappear elsewhere, but the movement doesn’t make statements related to the various spatial configurations, and the dance of the screens increases the illusion of the choreography as busy and aimless (I get the impression that Millepied was deliberately avoiding repetition). When I think back on Moving Parts, only a few images stick in my mind—such as dancers running linked together or three men at vigorous play.

(L to R) Eichten, Chiaverini, Lugo, Makolandra in William Forsythe’s Quintett. Photo: Stephanie Berger

If individual dancers remain part of a mysterious and somehow threatened tribe in the elegantly apocalyptic world of Cunningham’s Winterbranch, they become heroic adepts in William Forsythe’s Quintett, the program’s brilliant closing work. Forsythe staged it for L.A. Dance Project, along with three of the original five collaborating performers: Stephen Galloway, Thomas McManus, and Jone San Martin (the other two were Dana Caspersen and Jacopo Godani).

Forsythe created Quintett in 1993, when his wife, dancer Tracy-Kai Meier-Forsythe, was dying of cancer (she passed away in February, 1994). It honors her in a tone that is both fierce and quiet. This is partly due to its accompaniment, Gavin Bryars’s haunting Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet—the endless, heart-breaking loop of an indigent man’s frail old voice singing the first lines of the titular hymn over a subtly evolving orchestral accompaniment. The music begins faintly, seeming to come from far away, perhaps as if the five dancers onstage at the opening were hearing in their heads. By the end of Quintett, it’s fully present.

Frances Chiaverini, Nathan Makolandra, and Quintett‘s mysterious piece of equipment. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Galloway designed such different outfits for the dancers that you might imagine that the costumes allude to various other dances of Forsythe’s. Some are simple, others quite extreme. For instance, Chiaverini (who alternates with Wells in this piece) wears a very short, full, orange shift over flesh-colored tights that give the illusion of nakedness, while Hodges wears trousers, a fancily jeweled, semi-transparent blue tee shirt, and eyeglasses. Forsythe’s lighting includes banks of white overhead lamps.

Forsythe conceived this beautiful work as a love letter to his wife—a testament to her strength and her courage (at times, Chiaverini seems to embody her spirit). His style, as always, presents a dancer in motion as a complicated conversation among body parts—arm with head with foot, knee with hips, flashing leg with rolling shoulder. This can look kinky, a bit perverse (Hodges has a tiny solo in that vein). But Forsythian choreography can also turn dancers into creatures of silk or softening wax; sometimes they gather themselves into a ballet move or pose, then stretch it toward asymmetry or imbalance until it slips into something entirely different and finds kinship with that. The mood varies. Lugo attacks a solo as of he’s suddenly coming apart. In a brief trio for him, Eichten, and Hodges, Hodges perches on Lugo’s thigh and gets a swift smack on the butt to dislodge him.

Makolandra (crouching), Hodges, and Eichten in Quintett. Photo: Stephanie Berger

In the beginning, with everyone on stage moving independently, Makolandra goes to the center and delivers a phrase of dancing that will appear later as a kind of motif. He’s tall and slender, and when he bends smoothly forward from the hips and stretches one long arm out, it’s like a grave proclamation “This is it—no more and no less than everything.”  Even if you didn’t know the history of Quintett, you’d sense that you were watching a marathon of sorts—dance as life competing against passing time. The performers’ superb intelligence, flexibility, strength, sensitivity, and endurance are juxtaposed to moments of stillness, of stumbling, of falling, of departing. They watch one another, as if needing to keep track of everything that’s happening.

In the end, the large, mysterious object that’s been sitting onstage looking like some formidable piece of radiological equipment projects a small parade of clouds that travels across the theater’s back wall.

Chiaverini, Lugo, clouds. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Millepied works with what he terms a “Curatorial Collective.” It’s composed of Muhly, Charles Fabius, Dimitri Chamblas, and Matthieu Humery—the last three experienced in aspects of producing in the fields of visual arts, music, and dance. This sounds like a good idea, and Millepied is currently fielding a number of different projects. He also has gained support in his adopted city. Moving Parts was commissioned by Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center, Los Angeles.

It’ll be interesting to see what the L.A. Dance Project tackles next, whether any of the dancers will choreograph for their peers, and how Millepied will hone his own craft to fit the wonderfully gifted group he has assembled.

Yannick LeBrun of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Kyle Abraham’s Another Story. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Imagine a night at City Center watching the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater when the spectators cheer at the curtain calls and applaud certain stunning dancers or sections of a dance, but don’t whoop and holler in the middle of a serious (even reverent) passage. Imagine an evening in which electric high jumps, long balances, and legs kicking the sky are worked into the choreographic fabric and not presented with an eye for our approval.

The night I’m talking about is one that displayed a world premiere by the extremely up-and-coming Kyle Abraham, the company debuts of Garth Fagan’s 1979 From Before and Robert Battle’s 1998 Strange Humors, and Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, which the company premiered in 1999.

The Ailey dancers are so fine, so accomplished, so charming, so committed to giving their all—and we love them for this—that often their capacity for simplicity and nuanced performing doesn’t get explored. I have to hand it to Robert Battle, now in his second season as artistic director, for broadening the repertory of Ailey classics with interesting choices of new and established works. Ailey had in mind a repertory company from the start, and his selections of other choreographers were often bold ones, as were those of his successor, Judith Jamison. Not for the Ailey the problems faced by the companies of Martha Graham and José Limón when their sole choreographers died.

All the pieces on the December 19^th program eschewed balleticisms; they also re-textured modern-dance virtuosity, giving the steps an African or Caribbean tang. You see dancers bending low—hips swinging, knees folding, legs wide apart, feet hitting the ground resiliently or scudding along it. Floor moves referencing hip-hop occasionally sneaked into the weave of the choreography.

Abraham enters Ailey’s domain with reverence for the dancers and the company profile. Another Night is a little less adventurous and a little more showy than pieces he makes for his own small group, but it’s smart, beguiling, and finely constructed— slipping casually but elegantly in and out of the terrific recording by Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers of Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Paparelli’s “A Night in Tunisia.”  The four women and six men who populate it wear bright-colored, individualized attire by Naoka Nagata that would look fine at any hot-weather neighborhood party, although the handsome blue dress for ringleader-hostess Jacqueline Green could do just fine for cocktails at a chic lounge.

Watching Jacqueline Green (L to R): Renaldo Gardner, Kirven James Boyd, Samuel Lee Roberts, Aisha Mitchell, Jamar Roberts, Belen Pereyra, Yannick Lebrun, Hope Boykin, Antonio Douthit in Another Night. Photo: Paul Kolnik

One of Abraham’s smart decisions was to make Another Night a gathering. That is, the dancers behave as if they were part of a friendly group at an occasion for dancing; they perform for us all right—and the spatial design acknowledges it—but more importantly, they perform for and with one another. When they leave the stage, they convey the decision to do so with looks or gestures that say, “come on, let’s go get a drink” or “the floor is all yours, baby.”  Renaldo Gardner saunters in with a mostly-eaten bag of chips and hands the leavings to a couple of women so he can dance.

Occasionally the performers pause and give the impression of listening to the drum solo or the piano. They watch one another dancing, maybe joining in if they feel the urge. At one point, the gorgeous Green, all by herself onstage, is fluidly deconstructing her hips and shoulders and sweeping her arms around her long, slim body when Jamar Roberts happens by. He likes what he sees, tries out a move. She stops, sizes him up, and gives her approval. OK, he can join her and learn her steps. Which he does with zest.

The movement is full-bodied—loose and easy in manner, but precisely designed, and the piece rides on excellent contrasts and overlaps among brief solos, duets, trios, and larger group dances. Abraham and the performers give the impression that this get-together is happening in a space larger than the stage—that beyond the wings there’s a boardwalk or a boulevard full of other enticements waiting to be explored. In the end, the gang gathers to watch Green create some cool beauty, then—so long—they’re off. She keeps dancing.

Belen Bereyra in Garth Fagan’s From Before. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Fagan’s From Before makes an even stronger point of showing the individuality of its performers, even though it was made in 1978 for his Rochester-based company and has grown a little more populous on entering the AAADT’s repertory. Sixteen dancers instead of ten come and go in what Fagan once identified as an exploration of his West Indies heritage with the decorative elements stripped away. The drums and bells and rattles in Ralph MacDonald’s wonderful original score pulse along in accumulating repetitive patterns, while male voices intermittently chant in counterpoint to them. The performers wear simple, variously colored unitards, and the patterns they form and dissolve are clean, clean, clean.

What seems remarkable is the complexity Fagan draws out of simplicity. He doesn’t stuff the choreography with movements, and the steps in each mini-section acquire new luster when echoed in different configurations. This piece shows his mastery of visual dynamics. He knows how to let your eyes rest and then startle them with something new. Occasionally he has dancers pause for a surprisingly long moment or pits background against foreground. Five performers freeze in stop-motion positions, while Linda Celeste Sims, treading in place downstage, undulates her body in uncanny ways. Late in From Before, Yannick Lebrun appears for a mini-solo that includes a step we haven’t seen yet: he shoots into a straight-up jump, legs together, arms spread to the side like the wings of a plane; he looks as if he’s been launched into space by an invisible force.

Jamar Roberts in Fagan’s From Before. Photo: Paul Kolnik

 From Before works beautifully as a program opener because it introduces you to many of the dancers in brief solos, and each of these is distinctive. One solo features a particular arm gesture; in another, the dancer spends a lot of time with his skittering feet wide apart and his knees bent. Belen Pereya, getting down, pays attention to a particular way of kicking a leg out to the side. Kelly Robotham introduces a widespread stance, balancing on her heels. Roberts, a major presence in the piece, begins it by circling the stage and departing, while Robotham and Glenn Allen Sims stand quietly at the back of the stage. Roberts takes space-devouring strides, pulsing his shoulders and ribcage forward and back so rapidly that they all but vibrate.

Alicia Graf Mack, Sarah Daley, Vernard J. Gilmore, Jermaine Terry, and Marcus Jarrell Willis are the first to begin travelling in various channeled paths—walking with slightly bent knees, kicking out a foot to take each step and undulating their torsos. It’s a simple step, but as others gradually join, a passage evoking urban foot traffic gradually becomes an orderly promenade. The audience applauds the immaculate unison—as well they might.

The Ailey dancers perform From Before with dedication, intensity, and precision.  Roberts does an excellent job with the role that Fagan created for the matchless Norwood Pennewell, although he doesn’t have quite the slippery ease and unwavering balances that marked Pennewell’s  performing in the piece (who does?).  L.C. Sims, a marvelously eloquent dancer, goes a little overboard with the flirtatious, self-satisfaction induced by the magically limber dialogue between her hips and her shoulders.

Samuel Lee Roberts(L) and Kirven James Boyd in Robert Battle’s Strange Humors. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Battle’s Strange Humors is a smart, athletic duet for two men; they’re combative, but in synch, willing to slip from confrontation into unison. John Mackey’s score begins with a leisurely passage for cello, and Kirven James Boyd and Samuel Lee Roberts start off slowly, with individual statements to what? The morning air, maybe. They perform the big, bold steps close to each other in a small area of turf. Their combat isn’t literal, and no one thinks about winning. Fierce fellows, they open their mouths wide and yell, or don’t yell. Just when you’re lulled by their macho give and take, they face front, plant their feet wide apart, and fall, stiff-legged, straight backward.

Ailey dancers in Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, Linda Celeste Sims left front. Photo: Paul Kolnik

The audience loves Brown’s Grace. Led by L.C. Sims— a no-nonsense spiritual guide with an eye on distant goals—the dancers voyage across the stage in groups. Some wear white, some wear red, and, although they’re all garbed in white at the end, nothing portrays those in red as especially hard-struggling sinners. There’s a last-minute flurry of doubt by Gilmore (in white), but Sims isn’t having it. To luscious musical selections by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis, Jr., and others, the eleven  travel—bodies ablaze, limbs laboring—dancing in and out the “doorway” of scrim at the back that lifts every time they’re bound—however temporarily— for glory. And glorious they are: Sims, Demetia Hopkins, Matthew Rushing (as a guest artist), Antonio Douthit, Ghrai DeVore, Guillermo Asca, Rachel McLaren, G.A. Sims, Boyd, Pereyra, and Gilmore.

The AAADC is losing two invaluable members this season. Sharon Gersten Luckman is stepping down after eighteen years as the company’s visionary and superbly efficient Executive Director, and years before that in the organization in other capacities (she may be the sole woman in such a position who wears her hair in a graying pigtail down to her waist—wisdom meets open-mindedness).  The marvelous Renée Robinson gave her last performance on December 9 after 31 years in the company, and the only current AAADC member to have worked under Ailey himself. The leading role in Grace was made on her, and she performed the work’s opening solo on the occasion of her receiving a Dance Magazine Award on December 3. You could see resolve, strength, and vision shining through her at every moment. She’s moving on to new endeavors—accent on the “moving.”

Myriam Gourfink in her Breathing Monster at the Center for Performance Research. Photo: Damien Valette

You’re informed by program material that the compellingly idiosyncratic French choreographer Myriam Gourfink works with scores, sometimes with computers, in devising her dances, and that the breathing techniques of yoga are fundamental to her process. You learn that she is concerned with the “micro-movements” affiliated with breath and how these infinitesimal inner adjustments conspire to move her through space. All this projects to the spectator as uncannily extreme slowness on the part of the performer, as well as a pungent duality. In her Breathing Monster, Gourfink seems to be nearly weightless as she moves her body and limbs fluidly through complex trajectories. At the same time (say, when you watch her support herself on one foot and one hand and slowly, slowly move her other leg from behind her to the front and place it down on a surface), you’re aware of the enormous effort and control her journey demands.

Breathing Monster constitutes one of two programs of Gourfink’s choreography presented by Chez Bushwick on January 11 and 12). The piece’s combination of austerity and sensuality is set off by the whiteness of the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. White walls, ceiling, floor. For Breathing Monster, some of the usual seating is pushed back, and the limited audience that surrounds the performing area makes do with scattered chairs or the floor. Near one corner, composer Kasper T. Toeplitz is situated on a low platform—his laptop open, his electric bass at hand. When we enter, Gourfink is already in place. Wearing dark brown tights and top (each decorated with a single snaking white line), she sits at one end of a trail of long, narrow, white-topped tables joined together. Fluorescent tubes attached to the first and last tables denote the beginning and ending of a path about three feet off the floor. Although she sits perfectly still, her legs hangings over the edge of the first table, the long, empty stretch at her left suggests a vacuum to be filled, a road to be taken.

And she begins. Toeplitz starts softly massaging the strings of his bass, creating a distant rumble that gradually gets louder and begins to pulse. That Gourfink is traveling along the tables is clear, yet her forward momentum is barely perceptible. She’s attentive to her body. Her inaudible breathing gradually impels it to bend, causes one arm to reach up and over to touch the table, her weight to shift. By the time a number of seconds—maybe minutes?— have gone by, she has twisted and inverted herself so that her cheek is on the table and her rump is in the air. And she’s still evolving. Breathing Monster lasts for 46 minutes.

Breathing Monster in a performance in another site. Photo: Nicolas Chaussy

 Close to Gourfink in the small space, you have time to focus on details, such as the way she sometimes braces herself on a tent of fingers, rather than on her palm. When she pauses for a second, her weight supported on both hands and feet, her body facing the ceiling, you can watch her belly swell and subside with her breath. As one of her legs gropes through the air, her toes separate and wiggle slightly, as if sensing the climate surrounding her foot’s destination. And, of course, you can wonder what that immediate destination will be. For all her calm, unstressed flow, the performer generates a kind of suspense. Once, when she has finally placed a hand on the next table, I’m sure she will move onto it, but, no, in order to assemble herself correctly, she has to backtrack a bit.

She never stands. Rarely does she linger in a position. Seldom do we see her face, so complex are her convolutions, so minimal the adjustment in her flow. Sometimes she gazes upward, and it’s tempting to imagine her a torpid monster emerging from its winter burrow, with a force above her causing her to stay close to her “ground.” Once, at the boundary between the third and fourth table, she rotates and re-settles with comparative swiftness. It’s almost shocking.

Toeplitz gives her an environment that changes subtly. Little percussive tickings, pockets of silence, the sound of a bow on strings, a squeaking like that of a rubbed balloon. At the end of the allotted time span, he reverts to the rumble he began with and makes it gradually diminish. At the exact moment that she reaches her destination, the sound finds silence.

Koma of Eiko and Koma in The Caravan Project at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Anna Lee Campbell

Slowness and endurance are integral to the work of Eiko and Koma, but their creeping pace is occasionally interrupted by occasional tiny, quick adjustments or a sudden minimal shift of weight in deference to gravity. They sometimes seem to be erupting from the earth, where they’ve been buried for centuries. Earth, piles of leaves, tree trunks, water—they can inhabit them all, become one with them.

These remarkable artists of the body have been revolutionaries for years. During the 1960s in their native Japan, when students and artists made rebellion a way of life, they might ride into their performances on a motorcycle and race away afterward. In 1999, they figured out a way to expand that idea and reach an audience that mightn’t be able to afford theater tickets: The Caravan Project. Inspired by Joseph Cornell’s small boxes with magical worlds inside, they drove to appointed parks or other sites in a Jeep Grand Cherokee, pulling a trailer that could be opened on all sides to create a small performance space. No one paid to see them; you could happen upon them the way you’d happen upon an interesting tree or flower.

The Caravan Project at MOMA. Photo: Anna Lee Campbell

In connection with the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, Eiko and Koma parked their trailer in the museum’s front lobby and during museum hours between January 16 and January 21, they perform in it for seven hours a day (longer on Saturday). If one of them needs to leave for a short rest, museum attendants are on hand to drape blankets over him or her, but the trailer is never uninhabited. You have to pay the museum fee if you want to get close to them, but they can be seen from a distance for free.

I make it to their last performance on Martin Luther King Day. It has attracted a larger crowd than usual, but there’s still room to move around the trailer and get new perspectives, to sit on the floor for a while, or go up into the galleries and look down at the scene. You can go away and come back. In fact, you have to pass the trailer in order to get your coat and leave the building. Some people watch for hours at a stretch.

Eiko rising. Photo: Anna Lee Campbell

The trailer’s interior is draped with—stuffed with—a fuzzy, loamy, brown substance that hangs like Spanish moss or puddles around a rear tire; small dead leaves and twigs and grass stems adhere to it and to the two performers. Eiko and Koma look as if they’ve been dug out of a bog. Their garments are ragged, and their heads and faces are covered with what might be ripped cheesecloth; it mashes their features. Lights—including a buried one that Koma uncovers—cast an amber glow over this nest.

These elemental creatures move by increments. What are they trying to accomplish?  Perhaps simply to exist. Individually, they worm their way onto the edge of the trailer or sink into its central well and disappear. They grasp tree limbs shorn of bark and hang precariously out of their refuge, gazing into a distance they seem not to see. Once, Koma leans out so far that he falls to the floor with a thump pronounced enough to make nearby spectators wince. Once, he stands on his toes on the trailer’s hitch platform, reaches to the vehicle’s roof and jiggles futilely on his toes, struggling, apparently, to climb up there. Several times during the hours that I watch them, Koma laboriously crawls to Eiko and nuzzles his face into her neck or burrows his head into her spine. Sometimes she seeks him out. Occasionally one of them gropes for and grasps the other’s hand. But no act can be interpreted for sure as premeditated or conclusive.

Eiko and Koma. Together. Photo: Anna Lee Campbell

Guards will stop you if you step over the taped lines, but you can still see the pair at close range, whether through the wide doors open on either side or the narrower, half-open end ones. And you can be moved by this strange, numb drama that seems to go on forever; although one moment is never identical to any other, all fundamentally convey an inevitable and never-ending struggle to find comfort, succor, and rest—or perhaps just to survive.  Watching Eiko’s preternaturally long toes reaching to touch the floor or seeing her drowse, draped along the trailer’s edge, you think she could be a hundred years old. “Who are they?” people ask. “No,” a man says to his wife, “they’re not mechanical, they’re real.”  Some viewers are mesmerized, others puzzled, others disturbed. A small tide of people swirls randomly around the trailer, ebbs, swells again.

In the last five minutes of the last day of this extraordinary performance installation, Koma, walking slowly and with difficulty, closes all the openings, gently pushing Eiko’s head back inside. Then he clambers arduously onto the trailer’s roof. No jeep comes to drive it away.

David Parsons’s Dawn to Dusk. (L to R) Eric Bourne, Steven Vaughn, Elena D’Amario, Melissa Ullom, Abby Silva Gavezzoli. Photo: Eric Bandiero

It’s hardly fair to David Parsons to see one of his company’s performances at the Joyce the night after the New York City Ballet’s first all-Tchaikovsky program of the season. Wednesday, Balanchine’s Mozartiana, Thursday, Parsons’s Wolfgang. The company that Parsons founded in 1987 is wildly popular with audiences. He gives them a lot: lively, accomplished dancers; eye-catching lighting (by Howell Binkley) and costumes; variety in terms of subject matter and mood. His movement style, which owes something to his own years as a major dancer in Paul Taylor’s company, is robust, buoyant, and informal in manner (although it can be stark and grotesque when that’s called for). He knows how to structure a piece and pattern its space effectively.

 Wolfgang (2005) embodies most of the above. But in terms of musicality, it often rubs up against the Mozart symphonic music it’s set to. For one thing the volume is turned up to rock-concert levels, and the dense-with-steps choreography acknowledges mostly the meter of the music, its climaxes, endings, and new beginnings. Parsons seldom develops phrases in terms of a whole, especially in the fast sections; nor does he always sense the music’s qualities or let it breathe. At one moment, Mozart’s melody rises in pitch, becomes lighter, suspends. And what does Parsons have a dancer do on that topmost sigh?  A high kick.

His newest work, Dawn to Dusk, is a color-saturated vision of Florida’s watery landscape. What the company showed at the Joyce is excerpted from a longer work, Face of America: Spirit of South Florida, which was commissioned by Wolf Trap as part of its “Face of America” series. This series sponsors site-specific choreography in the country’s national parks (Barbara Parker of the Wolftrap Foundation for the Performing Arts is listed as Parsons’s choreographic collaborator). The dancers appear on the stage and on screen. They aren’t the only performers. In magnificently clear videos by Blue Land Media and the still photos by Clyde Butcher, snakes twine and flick their tongues, alligators lumber, birds fly across the screen that fills the stage’s backdrop, and a wading bird sticks its long beak into the water. Three pieces of music by Andrew Bird seem appropriate.

Bourne, Vaughn, D’Amario, Ullom, Silva Gavezzoli, and friend. Photo: Eric Bandiero

Early on, Parsons establishes a connection between the filmed images and the dancers. In footage filmed in the Everglades, an immense alligator slithers along, and onstage, Abby Silva Gavezzoli backs away from it. Then Gavezzoli herself drops to all fours and, briefly, becomes a swamp creature. Later several dancers move along linked together in a sinuous chain like a gator’s tail. We see performers up to their thighs in water: Steven Vaughn, crouches, arms spread, wary as a bird. When wind surges across a landscape of grass and palm trees, the dancers (there are eight in all) roll around the stage.

Some of the dancing catches your eye—Eric Bourne, for instance, moving his hands in sinuous ways. A woman (I forget which) is lifted by the men and swirled in a swan dive position. But the projections overwhelm the live action. The images are so large, so primal that you forget to watch what’s happening in three dimensions right in front of you. And dancers performing synchronized movements while standing in a swamp look out of place.

Dawn to Dusk. How to show that, when the natural light is fading? Here Parsons’s vision takes a strange turn. Suddenly we’re in a Miami hot spot having an evening on the town, and the music is Tiempo Libre’s “Ven Pa Miami.”  This is uncomfortably like a scene in a travelogue, but it must be that Parsons sees it as another way to connect animal life with the human species. The gambit doesn’t quite work, even though it’s a pleasure to watch Elena D’Amario party with her pals: Melissa Ullom, Christina Ilisije, Jason MacDonald, Ian Spring, and those already mentioned). Gavezzoli dropping again to all fours just before the lights go out doesn’t quite get the message about our bond with nature across

(L to R): Christine Ilisije, Lauren Garson, Melissa Ullom in Katarzyna Scarpetowska’s Black Flowers. Photo: Eric Bandiero

Katarzyna Scarpetowska, who used to be a member of Parsons Dance and has already choreographed a piece for the company, offered a new work during the Joyce season. Titled Black Flowers, it’s set to two Etudes and two Preludes by Chopin (Scarpetowska is Polish by birth). But Scarpetowska makes you aware of the music primarily in terms of the lyrical, sometimes mournful, sometimes turbulent moods it sets; she doesn’t always breathe with her compatriot.

Her opening is intriguing, three women and two men, wearing black clothes (costumes by Reid Barthelme), stand with their backs to the audience. Slowly, dreamily, they thread their way around one another, never turning their faces to us. The image is almost tidal. In a brief video interview, Scarpetowska said that she thought of the men as part of the women’s memories. That’s not obvious in the choreography, but we do see these people wandering, the women reaching out to touch what isn’t quite there, yet nurturing the men. There is a duet by Bourne and Lauren Garson, after which Garson lashes herself wildly around. MacDonald and Ullom dance together more quietly. At one moment Vaughn jams his head against Ilisije’s belly as if he’s trying to burrow into her.

Jason MacDonald (L) and Eric Bourne in Black Flowers. Photo: Eric Bandiero

If the men are remembered lovers, it’s strange to see them without the women: Vaughn in a solo; MacDonald frozen in a lunge, while Bourne stands on the calf of his friend’s leg, as if to see better into the distance.

Parsons Dance offers its audiences a hearty meal of dancing. It’s a lot to try and digest. The program includes his famous solo, Caught, danced at this performance by Bourne, and the vigorously frisky, flashy, sexy finale, In The End.

Trisha Brown’s new I’m going to toss my arms—If you catch them they’re yours. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

On Thursday, January 31, the second day of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was announced that Brown, because of health problems, had retired as artistic director of the company she founded over forty years ago, and would choreograph no more dances. Consider these words bordered in black—mourning for the works she might have continued to give us.

Although many in the BAM audience that night had been expecting just such an announcement, most did not yet know of it. The occasion was festive. The superb performers were cheered over and over.  A revival of the 1983 Set and Reset was being presented this night only, and members of the original cast and others who had performed the marvelous dance were invited to rise from their seats and be applauded.  Brown is seventy-seven now, and quite a number of the spectators who filled the house to overflowing had followed her career since her rambunctious days in the 1960s as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater.

Over the decades, her intellect, her delight in movement, her wit, her originality, her novel structures, her appetite for exploration have challenged and thrilled us. The BAM programs reveal not only what is consistent about her style, but also how differently she approached each new project.

Trisha Brown’s Les Yeux et l’âme. Tamara Riewe center. Photo Yi-Chun Wu

All but one of the programs opened with Les Yeux et l’âme, a work she created in 2010 as part of a production of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera, Pygmalion. At festivals in Europe, her company performed it with Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie. I didn’t see Les Yeux et l’âme at BAM, but at Jacob’s Pillow in the summer of 2011 (performed, as at BAM, to the recording by Les Arts Florissants). As in all the dances that Brown—beginning in the mid-1990s—composed to music of the past, her choreography doesn’t cling to the beat or swoon along the melodic line; it captures something about the musical structure and ambiance. Collaborating, so to speak, with Rameau (1683-1764), she created with her dancers the allées and vine-wrapped trellises and formal gardens that Rameau’s baroque traceries invoke. Brown’s own slim, black, line drawings dart and whorl and dart again across the backdrop.

Set and Reset is one of a series of 1980s works that she dubbed “unstable molecular structures.” Forget formal gardens; a comparable metaphor might be birds fluttering and flocking in an urban landscape. There’s always something moving onstage—not just the seven dancers. Their filmy costumes, silk-screened with black-and-white photos by the piece’s designer, Robert Rauschenberg, stir in the wind of the performers’ motion.  So do the translucent curtains that edge the space and make the border between onstage and offstage porous. Black-and-white film montages flicker on Rauschenberg’s set—two pyramids flanking a four-sided shape. The three structures, standing onstage as Laurie Anderson’s music begins, gradually rise to hang above the dancers.

Anderson’s splendid score is also full of changes, despite its ongoing, ringing pulse. Woodblocks, or a sudden screeching, may sound out above deep bass tones. Anderson’s voice—after its first introduction into the texture with a chanted, repeated, and varied “long time no see”— interjects varied enigmatic syllables and tones, as if she were dissecting a phone conversation—dial tones, ringers, and all. The lighting that Beverly Emmons designed with Rauschenberg is beautifully subtle and clear.

Set and Reset, the original cast: (L to R) Stephen Petronio, Vicky Shick, Randy Warshaw, and Trisha Brown “walk” Diane Madden. Photo: John Waite

The original performers contributed a lot to the choreography. Some of the more unexpected and perilous moments may have crystalized from those improvisations. In every way, Set and Reset is one of the most deliriously slippery pieces in Brown’s oeuvre. The dancers’ joints move as if recently oiled. Their straight arms appear to swing and circle of their own accord. The movement takes simultaneous circuitous courses through their bodies; performers may begin by gently kicking one leg up; when the foot touches ground again, it sets off a current that travels up their spines, rolls into their shoulders, and makes their heads toss, before it snakes down one arm and spills from their fingers. Processes like these are far more fluid and complex that I can make them seem. And all the time, the dancers are stepping, swiveling, springing, and leaping with a nonchalant ease that rarely gives “up” more attention than “down.”

Rarely, too, are more than two people doing anything at the same time. As performers race on and off the stage, they sometimes collide or snag on one another in ways that alter their courses. No one seems deliberately to lift another; momentum results in a hoist that simply augments a jump already in progress. The performers (Tara Lorenzen, Megan Madorin, Leah Morrison, Tamara Riewe, Stuart Shugg, Nicholas Strafaccia, and Samuel Wentz) are wonderfully supple in this soft stew of impulsive-looking activities—tall, slender Morrison (in Brown’s role) in particular. Near the beginning, she races across the stage and is upended, half out of sight, in a running position, by a catcher (Strafaccia, I think) in the wings; at the end, Strafaccia runs to the opposite side of the stage and somehow reverses the same move. Who knows the rules of the game that happens in between?

Actually, that dive isn’t the first thing that happens in Set and Reset. Four people, shoulder to shoulder, hold Lorenzen above their heads. She’s lying on her side, stiff as a board. As they travel along the back of the space, she “walks” on the back wall. The reference is to Brown’s Walking on the Walls, which her dancers first performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971 (they did the job via slings suspended from ropes attached to pulleys and ceiling tracks, and, in the process, turned the laws of gravity into questions). This came out of a period during which the Judson vanguard considered everyday movement a choreographic resource, and structured their dances as tasks.

Vicky Shick in Brown’s 1966 solo Homemade. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

That Brown would define tasks with more imagination than most of us do was inevitable. At BAM, choreographer-performer Vicky Shick (a member of Brown’s company from 1980-86) re-created Brown’s Homemade (1966). The artist Robert Whitman filmed Brown dancing this solo; she then performed it while a projector (strapped to her back by a brown velvet baby carrier) ran Whitman’s black-and-white, 16-millimeter movie. Shick performs it to a film by Babette Mangolte, based on the original.

The title and the onetime baby carrier are giveaways. The movement suggests a housebound woman doing all manner of little chores and dreaming a bit along the way. These tasks (except maybe the imaginary balloon blowing-up) aren’t literal renditions of anything, but Shick—moving about an area that’s limited by the span of a long electric cord—pats this invisible surface, smooths that one, bends down to scoop something up, talks silently, smiles, points, breaks into an idle soft-shoe bit. Behind her, her tiny film image copies her gestures, sometimes in perfect synch, sometimes not. That little dancer has no spatial restrictions; as Shick turns, her doppelganger tilts, flies around the back wall, leaps out over the spectators’ heads, coasts along the balcony, disappears, then returns.  Shick performs the solo wonderfully. The only disappointment is that when a computer was substituted for the mechanism of the projector, no one thought to provide an audio track of the clicking reels. I missed that homey sound.

Jamie Scott leaps into Brown’s Newark (Niweweorce). Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Newark (Niweweorce) came four years after Set and Reset, bearing different priorities. Its subtitle is the Anglo-Saxon name for Newark, England, but slur the title and you get “new work.”  What’s new about it besides its status? Gender and stillness. Brown once said that during a difficult period in her life, she’d begun moving furniture around. That muscular effort and the search for new positions fed into Newark. For those who found her “molecular structures” confusing, Newark, one of the Valiant Series (her term), was easier to parse. Much of the time, the eight dancers put periods and commas at the end of movement phrases. Your eye can grasp designs before they dissolve.

Also, for the first time, Brown distinguished men from women in terms of movement. Against a violently red backdrop, made luminous by Ken Tabachnik’s lighting, Strafaccia and Shugg execute in unison a series of blocky, muscular moves on the floor. They balance on various combinations of feet and hands, upend, turn. Usually in profile, they could be Greek athletes in a frieze. The women (the four from Set and Reset plus Jamie Scott and Cecily Campbell) are softer and more sinuous, except that Riewe seems to function as an artistic mediator—sometimes as straight-forwardly athletic as the men, sometimes more equivocal.

(L to R): Stuart Shugg and Tara Lorenzen, Nicholas Strafaccia and Tamara Riewe. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

I don’t mean to imply that the women don’t display strength. Strafaccia launches himself and Scott wraps her arms around his legs and holds him airborne, his arms spread, for several seconds. Some of the two-person designs the women create with the men involve difficult cantilevered balances and braced stances.

Donald Judd’s “visual presentation” is a crucial part of the work. Before long, a red drop-cloth falls in front of the dancers. When it lifts, a new yellow wall of fabric has appeared behind them. Over the course of Newark, others will descend and rise—all except a lavender one—in brilliant red, blue, or yellow. The sound concept, too, was Judd’s. Long stretches of silence are punctuated by clunks or buzzes or a blaring somewhat like that of a foghorn. In this changeable climate, the dancers in their gray unitards enter and leave and go about their marvelous work.

Brown’s most recent piece premiered in October, 2011. The BAM performance marked its New York debut (and that of Les Yeux et l’ame).  The title is a long one: I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours. (It could even be a satirical reference to dance writing in which body parts sometimes acquire a life of their own.) In Toss, the setting is also crucial. For a woman who began choreographing with no décor except what she found and/or could climb on, Brown has collaborated with a number of major figures in the visual arts. For this last piece of the evening, and of her career, her colleague is artist Burt Barr (also her husband).

Neal Beasely and Leah Morrison in I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Barr has banked the audience-right side of the stage with fans—all of them mounted in circles (like shallow drum bodies of various sizes) that are set on their sides. These “wheels” vary in their dimensions and color. The largest looks to be about four feet in diameter. They are silver or gold-hued, wood or metal. They gleam in John Torres’s lighting. The dancers sometimes move within this curious forest, and they must pass through it to leave that side of the area. Except for the fans, the stage is stripped to its walls. Anyone needing to cross the stage for an entrance from the other side must walk along the back in plain sight.

On the other side of the stage, in the far corner, Alvin Curran, who composed the music, sits at a grand piano. Part of his evocative score (titled Toss and Find) is pre-recorded, but he begins dropping single notes—later, sweet melodies— into what becomes an increasingly complex texture. From beneath the whir of the fans, continuous and intermittent sounds surface—rumbling, children’s voices, a faint horn call, a harmonica tune.

(L to R): Stuart Shugg, Nicholas Strafaccia, Neal Beasely, and Samuel Wentz. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The dancers begin by swaying, as if undecided as to which way the wind is blowing. At first, they move in unison—leaning, tilting. But soon, various ones of them dash away or break into new patterns. The movement has the Brownian softness and springiness and fluidity, but it’s decisive. The dancers spread space with their arms, cover it with big steps; without violence, they slash and cut the air—their arms and legs swinging straight and pulling them into twists and turns. Often various of them—Beasely and Morrison, say, or Lorenzen and Riewe— move  in synchrony; sometimes they all do.

Kaye Voyce has costumed them in white blouses and pants—some cut trimly, others full; occasionally you can glimpse bright colors under the outfits. The reason for this attire soon becomes part of the plot. Neal Beasely, half-hidden behind a large drum, takes off his shirt and comes back into view bare-chested; the fans blow the shirt across the stage. While the dancers ride the wind, their garments do not. As Toss progresses, blouses and pants are gradually shed and drift away. By the end, the men wear only bright-colored trunks and women are clad in what could be bathing suits.

The BAM season inaugurates the company’s new life without Brown at the helm. A three-year international tour titled “Proscenium Works, 1979-2011” will showcase Brown’s major works for the proscenium stage. There are also plans for this period and after it that involve exhibitions, events in museums, and more. Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas, former company dancers who have been assisting Brown over the past several years, will become associate artistic directors of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, with Barbara Dufty continuing as executive director.

The title for Les Yeux et l’âme came from a line in Rameau’s Pygmalion, when the brought-to-life statue says to the amazed sculptor who created her, “I can see in your eyes what I feel in my soul.” I wished that night at BAM that Trisha Brown could have seen in my eyes what I feel in my soul about her astonishing works—could have seen it in a multitude of eyes, a multitude of souls.

While I was watching Brown’s gorgeous I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours —and minding terribly that it was to be her last—I saw that Riewe seemed to be having a lot of difficulty getting her wide-sleeved, billowy blouse off. In the midst of wishing that the costume designer hadn’t made the garment so unwieldy, I suddenly started to think of the  dancers gradually divesting themselves of their clothing as a metaphor for Brown divesting herself of her dances. Let them go, dear Trisha. They will be honored. They will be cherished.

Members of Armitage Gone! Dance in Mechanics of a Dance Machine; foreground: Cristian Laverde König. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

When I look closely at a broccoli floret, I don’t ponder fractal geometry; I may marvel at images derived from Fibonacci sequences, but I don’t pretend to understand Walsh functions. Choreographer Karole Armitage might consider me an intellectual wimp. Her Three Theories premiered in 2010 at the World Science Festival.

Although Armitage’s new Mechanics of the Dance Machine at New York Live Arts (1/31-2/2 and 2/7-9) attests to her ongoing fascination with physics, you don’t need to see her sources reflected in the choreography in order to be intrigued by the patterns she devises. This isn’t one of those occasions when you read an ambitious program note and then look at the dance it purports to elucidate and say, “huh?”

What you see onstage (and, because of a schedule screw-up, I saw the piece at its final dress rehearsal) has a logic whose presence you deduce. Like Merce Cunningham, in whose company Armitage danced for a number of years, she often presents the space as an open field in which various events occur simultaneously or succeed one another or pass through. You don’t question why the dancers are doing what they’re doing. On the other hand, she performed in a number of Balanchine’s ballets during her young days dancing with the Grand Ballet de Génève, and her present style can be considered as a juiced-up descendant of Balanchine’s approach to scores by Stravinsky or Hindemith.

Daniel LaMont Moore (foreground); behind, and to his left, Megumi Eda. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The apparent irregularity of choreographic patterns and encounters in Mechanics of the Dance Machine plays against and within Clifton Taylor’s extraordinary collaborative lighting design. His palette is heavy on reds. At times the white floor becomes a checkerboard of red and white squares, but the size and number of squares may vary, or appear in the more conventional black and white. He also creates aisles of light, or makes the front half of the area bright and the back dark, or turns the whole floor red.

Mechanics is set to Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto For Turntables And Orchestra, performed in a recording by DJ Yoda & the Heritage Orchestra. The remixes include works by Monster Bobby, Kreepa, and Medasyn; an exerpt from J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No.1 in D Minor sneaks in as a tuneful surprise. Craig Leon’s “Four Eyes to See the Afterlife” from the album Nommos also figures in the dance.

(L to R): Masayo Yamaguchi, Lourdes Rodriguez, and Ahmaud Oliver connect. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Through this visual-aural landscape prowl eight members of Armitage Gone! Dance, two guest artists (Charles Askegard and Cristian Laverde König), and five women who are part of the company’s Professional Project. The men wear light-brown briefs and the women even briefer panties and bras edged in red, with a few red dresses worn by the Professional Project dancers (costumes by Alba Clemente and Deanna Berg MacLean). I say “prowl” because the dancers often move like animals out hunting—sleek, hot, hungry, and calculatingly skillful. The principal women are sometimes on pointe, sometimes in flesh colored socks, and little that they do looks “beautiful” in a balletic way. The adept cast members throw their legs around in precise abandon— perhaps swinging one leg to the side or back and then pulling it around to the front and beyond, bending forward as they do so (the butt presentation is a frequent occurrence). When two or more dancers meet, they form unusual, sometimes bizarre, interlocking designs. The effect is fiercely sensual, but without lasting dramatic intent.

The beginning sets the hot-cool ambiance. The splendid Megumi Eda makes an appearance downstage right. A short distance away, Abby Roesner is preoccupied with her own preening dance. Beyond them, two couples—Lourdes Rodriguez and Jeffrey Sousa, Ahmaud Culver and Masayo Yamaguchi—engage in different intimate pursuits, the women on pointe. One memorable image: Sousa cradles Rodriguez in front of him; she’s lying on her belly in his arms in a ballet-swan position that rightfully would be seen flying overhead. He lowers her to the floor without breaking her line, looking as if he’s considering eating her, daring anyone to take her from him.

Jeffrey Sousa, lowers Lourdes Rodriguez. At left: Masayo Yamaguchi. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Clearly this tribe values aggressive heterosexuality. König watches Roesner from a crouched, hunched posture before closing in on her. Sousa whispers in Yamaguchi’s ear—perhaps challenging her to their ensuing combative duet. The five women from the Professional Project sit along the rim of the area of light where Askegard bends Emily Wagner to his will, looking somewhat courtly, even though he has to rub his leg up her thigh; the watching women shift into various aggressive postures like grounded predatory birds awaiting the outcome. (The second week of Armitage Gone! Dance, König replaces Askegard, who’s performing up the street at the Joyce with Jacqulyn Buglisi’s company.)

Cristian Laverde König eyes Abby Roesner. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Eda epitomizes the Armitage dancer. In her various appearances in this piece, including in a meaty solo, she displays her lithe, leggy beauty. She uses her long body as a snake would, sliding it into surprising angles and curves. A brilliant performer, she has been a vital part of Armitage Gone! Dance for ten years. This season marks her last with the company. Our loss.

It’s difficult to convey in words the complexity and variety of Armitage’s choreography for this work. The patterns form, accumulate, dissolve—sometimes visible only briefly. You occasionally sense a build in terms of ebb and flow, but Mechanics of the Dance Machine doesn’t work toward a climax. If you take “mechanics” to refer to the dancers rather than to a process, then you could say that they’re constantly tinkering with the machine’s parts—fitting this to that, disconnecting something else, trying out new supplies in various combinations. But their demeanor is anything but workmanlike. Each coupling, each linkage, has the intensity of an erotic encounter, with us as fascinated voyeurs.

L to R: Silas Riener, Cori Kresge, Rashaun Mitchell, and Melissa Toogood in Mitchell’s Interface. Photo: Stephanie Berger

I remember years ago attending a evening of solos by an Indian dancer; it could have been Balasaraswati or Ritha Devi, and shortly after that, going to a performance by (maybe) American Ballet Theatre’s Bayadère. My friend and colleague, Marcia B. Siegel also saw both performances. When we spoke later, we both remembered how the familiar classical arm and hand movements of ballet had suddenly seemed so simple and the faces of the dancers so expressionless, compared to the precise complexity of the Indian performer’s fingers and hands,  and the multitude of emotions that appeared on her face.

We got over it, of course. But I still occasionally think about the role of the face in western theatrical dance, especially in works that purport to tell no stories (I’m not counting the numbers by show-biz chorus dancers whose smiles sparkle on demand). Two back-to-back performances I attended this past weekend raised the issue of the face in very different ways.

Friday, March 15, Rashaun Mitchell’s new Interface at the Barshnikov Center. His facial expressions and those of his splendid collaborating dancers—Silas Riener, Melissa Toogood, and Cori Kresge—are vital to the concept driving the piece. Mitchell, a relative newcomer to choreography, danced in Merce Cunningham’s company for its last eight years of life. Riener and Toogood are also company alumni, and Kresge was a member of Cunningham’s Repertory Understudy Group, as well as a teacher in his school. Mitchell is in the process of coming to terms with and breaking away from his heritage, so while the dancers sometimes move with serene, elongated bodies and stretched, articulate legs, they also crouch and crawl, shudder, jiggle, and contort themselves in ways that set one part of the body against another.

Melissa Toogood and Cori Kresge support Silas Riener. Photo: Stephanie Berger

In addition, for no apparent reason, they will smile or look anxiously in one direction with a furrowed brow or squeeze their features together as if they’ve smelled something disgusting. Part of the rehearsal process for Interface involved the performers looking into mirrors to investigate what could be done with their faces. An interesting thing happens in the performance. Although the facial expressions rarely coordinate with what the rest of the body is doing and aren’t meant to enhance its actions, a grin, say, or a grimace gives the performer unavoidable feedback, which then subtly alters the movements of the rest of the body. Try this for yourself: screw your nose up toward your eyes, lower your brows, open your mouth wide, and snarl or hiss. Don’t you feel a further impulse to hunch your shoulders?  Don’t you feel, for a fraction of a second, enraged?

Facial expressions—especially extreme examples of them—have been taboo in most post-sixties contemporary dance and in the work of masters like Cunningham. The thinking is that the body will do all the expressing that’s needed (although most of us appreciate a dancer whose face looks alert to life and what’s going on around him or her). Mitchell has carefully choreographed the expressions in Interface with a postmodernist’s appetite for disjunction, and he uses them sparingly but fervently. Hot material employed coolly.

 The setting and music add to the impression of things taken apart and reassembled. The visual design (by Fraser Taylor, Davison Scandrett, and Mitchell) consists a white floor in the middle of the larger black one and tall screens that cover some of the Howard Gilman Space’s two windowed walls and/or the areas between them. The screens are composed of large patches of black-and-white designs (maybe on fabric). Some show reedy vertical lines, some a ragged weave, others scribbles; they’re diverse enough in the black-white ratios and the patterns for you to notice that all designs are repeated two or three times. A few areas can also hold small videos. The original music that Thomas Arsenault (Mas Ysa) creates and plays at a console (I didn’t get a close look at his equipment) is highly variegated in timbre and texture. It may sound like a faint scratching, wind, growls, balls rolling over a floor, footsteps, men talking, and more—all rising and sinking in an abrasive storm of sound that occasionally calms down, even falls silent.

Foreground: Silas Riener, At back: Melissa Toogood (L) and Cori Kresge. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Scandrett’s lighting and Mary Jo Mecca’s understated, individualized costumes also have an impact on the arrestingly enigmatic dance. The lighting, for instance, can make the windows reflect the dancers. You know what you see; but pondering all that it can mean, means not to mean, and does mean keeps you watchful. Could this dance bite?

The four dancers begin at the corners of the white square, and at first you’re not sure they’re moving at all, so slowly and subtly do they begin to lean and crank their bodies; they look almost doll-like in their attention to joints. It’s only after they’ve reached the center of the room and stand looking around that you notice the changes in their faces:  a tongues pushing out a cheek, a mouth pushed poutily forward, lips parting. At one point, as the four back up to the corners, they keep their eyes on the person opposite, but avert their faces slightly, as if fearful and retreating.

Riener on Mitchell, Toogood and Kresge at back; Mitchell onscreen keeps watch. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Curious moments stay with me. Mitchell striding around the black border with Riener, bent over, his cheek glued to Mitchell’s hip, struggling to keep the pace. Riener balancing on the ball of one foot for a very long time. Mitchell fallen face down on the floor and Riener standing on his back for an even longer time. Toogood releasing her hair while the others watch. Her hair becomes a part of her solo—a mask, as well as something she can lash around or use to sweep her feet with once she sits down. Her face is neither expressive nor inexpressive; it’s invisible. Without animosity, Mitchell grabs her ankles and spins her until you hurt for her, then slings her away. She lies still until Kresge sits her up and carefully braids her hair. Toogood looks almost as if she might cry. Is this arbitrary choreography or expression fomented in the moment?

Interface is a weave of everyday movements (like walking over to look out a window), ones that challenge the body in dancerly ways, and ones that put it in jeopardy. The facial expressions, pruned away from movement that might corroborate them, remind us of how often we suppress  or modify what our faces could reveal.

Interestingly, one of the first dances that Merce Cunningham made by chance procedures, Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951) based its sections on the nine permanent emotions of Indian dance—mostly in abstract ways, but his interpretation of hatred (or, the odious) was a warrior yelling at his foe. In one photo, Cunningham’s mouth is wide open.

Ashley Chen in John Scott’s The White Piece. Photo: Chris Nash

Saturday, March 16. In John Scott’s The White Piece at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart, its fourteen dancers always look engaged, but at times the individual contributions that they make or copy, suggest extreme situations. Then their faces reflect what their bodies and words are telling us—showing elation, lasciviousness, desire, fear, disgust, anger, pride, and more.

In 2011, when Scott brought his Fall and Recover from Ireland—where his company is based— to La MaMa, ten of the twelve performers were people whom he had met through the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture (CCST), where he first taught a workshop in 2003. They had come to Ireland for asylum and were able to become citizens. We didn’t see in the dance the violence that had caused them to flee. The theme of Fall and Recover was survival against all odds and the power of community to heal.

The White Piece explores related issues: The struggle to achieve identity in a new land, the threat of deportation, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that manages immigration, the courts, the language problems.  Its title refers to the belief among some Cubans and the Yoruba people of Africa that a piece of white cloth has the power to heal and purify. For beleaguered asylum seekers that Scott has known (some of whom perform in The White Piece), dance is that healing magic. In The White Piece, Scott has created a potent piece of theater. If it’s not moving in the same way that Fall and Recover was, it’s because the two main topics, love of others and a sense of self, are shown through game structures that can be entertaining as well as thought-provoking. If you hadn’t read the program note, you might not fully sense its dark underpinnings.

Philip Connaughton and Rebecca Reilly in John Scott’s The White Piece. Photo: Chris Nash

The performers begin by walking around the Ellen Stewart  Theater, where the seating has been arranged along one of the rectangular space’s long sides. They vary in age, girth, color, country of origin; some are professional dancers, some are not. They hold sheets of white paper, from which, one at a time—maybe in random order, maybe not—each reads a sentence about the forms love may take. Some are universal: “Love as an agent in transformation.”  Some summon up specific images: “Love as a fan in a stuffy room.”  Some are quirky: “Love as a happy tractor” or “Love as a horny seagull.” The reader then expresses that thought briefly in movements that the others copy as best they can; sometimes vocal noises are involved. Theme and variations become an instant world of similarities and difference.

A number of these shared recipes are simple and visually pleasing, e.g. everyone slowly spinning, arms spread wide. Others are violently energetic, and it’s permissible for some performers to abstain occasionally. All are okay for rolling on the floor or making suggestive hip motions, if that’s what’s called for, but not necessarily for yanking and hurling themselves around when Philip Connaughton defines love as “a battle with yourself.”

John Scott in his The White Piece. Photo: Ewa Figaszewska

Some of the images in The White Piece suggest people lining up to pass through customs or treading a border warily or finding refuge in enigmatic ways. At one point, Connaughton lies on his back, and Cheryl Therrien (a former Merce Cunningham dancer) lies face down on top of him; both turn their heads to stare toward us. Ashley Chen bends over, hinging his body at the hips, and Connaughton lies atop that human peak and swims in space.When the performers all line up facing us, trying to follow James Hosty’s directions, a cacophony of gibberish emerges.

Everyone is involved in some way almost all the time. While Hosty, Chen, and Daniel Squire (the latter two also former members of Cunningham’s company) call out and demonstrate the various likes and dislikes and habits that define them, Scott provides momentary counterpoint by leading a parade of other cast members along the back of the space. Then Therrien follows Joanna Banks along another path.  The three men are tirelessly inventive. In a metaphor for community, if one of them calls out “Me: cherry pie” as Squire does, and follows it with an energetic danced equivalent of what that means to him, then the other two have to acknowledge— by repeating his words and movement— that these matter to them as well, however alien they feel. By the end, all the dancers are wearing white clothes, standing in a line that leads away from us, and moving in a determined community of “me”s.

Kiribu in The White Piece. Photo: Ewa Figaszewska

Throughout the piece, Ivan Birdwhistle’s score provides an unobtrusive medley of evocative sounds, and Eric Würtz’s lighting warms and cools the space subtly. Philip Sandstrom realized the lighting at La MaMa, because, in an ironic coincidence, Würtz could not come with the company because of visa problems. I puzzled afterward about the orderly montage of photos behind the dancers, with various images of radical artists and political activists and articles about them repeated ever few feet. These had been used during rehearsals to inspire the performers and were there during the show to remind them of their power to speak out.

Ashley Chen and Cheryl Therrien in The White Piece. Photo: Chris Nash

In retrospect, I appreciate the quiet moments in The White Piece—say, Banks kneeling at the head of Mutufau (Junior) Kehinde Yusuf, who’s lying supine, and gently patting him and gesturing as if casting a healing spell. And the stillnesses: Rebecca Reilly just standing with her arms held out. Also the wilder ones: Hosty stamping out a dance while swinging his arms and emitting shrieks and calls, like a furiously protective mother bird. All the individuals are interesting to watch and listen to; that includes Crinela with her calm demeanor and faint Eastern European accent; Kiribu of the powerful singing voice; slim, contained, unexpectedly strong Sarah Patience; Florence Welalo Poudima of the intent gaze.

This brings me back to facial expressions. They’re an intrinsic part of everything in The White Piece that involves speech or particularly explosive or straining movements. Yet sometimes the performers’ faces are expressive in a more transparent way. At one moment, Welalo Poudima catches my eye. Her beautiful face is still, but she’s seeing an imagined something—seeing it with her whole being.

(L to R) Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson, and I-Ling Liu of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Photo: Lois Greenfield

Bill T. Jones is a taking a holiday from the spoken word. The last time he did that may have been in 1992. Unlike his Serenade/The Proposition (2008), Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray (2009), and Story/Time (2011), none of those on view during the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s season at the Joyce Theater (March 26 through April 7) makes use of text. None of them presents a view of current political or social injustices. All but one are set to the works of major dead composers that Jones reveres, and Beethoven figures importantly in Jerome Begin’s new score for Continuous Replay (Jones, 1991; from Zane’s Hand Dance, 1977). Audiences for these programs are fortunate to be able to hear the music played live by the Orion String Quartet (Daniel Phillips, violin; Todd Phillips, violin; Steven Tenenbaum, viola; Timothy Eddy, cello).

As one who is gearing up to direct and choreograph Super Fly for Broadway, Jones evidently needed to take a deep, quiet breath. Watching five of his works, spread over two programs, you get a strong sense of what matters to him, and of how he stitches his values and his delights into his choreography. Jones loves beautiful bodies in motion—arduous, full-spirited motion, but he also has reverence for those that are older or stouter or less nimble, as evidenced by the naked multitude you may remember in the final section of his 1994 Last Supper at Uncle’s Tom’s Cabin/ The Promised Land, and the former company members who appear as guest artists in Continuous Replay at the Joyce. He likes smart, powerful dancers who don’t fit a mold, and he makes use of their individuality. The two most recent works on the programs, Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? and Story/, credit the choreography to Bill T. Jones “with Janet Wong and the Company.”

(L to R): Antonio Brown. LaMichael Leonard, Jr., and Erick Montes Chavero in Bill T. Jones’s Story/. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Community matters to him. In every work seen at the Joyce, the superb performers are aware of one another—whether during some passages or all the time. They are quick to catch a colleague about to fall, or to pull upright one who has collapsed. They’re good at assists—two people, say, adroitly and nonchalantly, helping one person to jump over a third. The fluid complications that arise when four or five dancers merge in a push-pull, duck-under, loop-around group are not only arresting to watch; they embody an ideal of peaceful, but muscular cooperation.

Dancers flock, herd, gather force, form chains; they may travel along together as a group, even though everyone in the group is moving differently.  D-Man in the Waters (1989), Ravel, and Story/ all begin (or nearly begin) with the performers clustered in one of the stage’s far corners to voyage forward along a diagonal together, perhaps breaking out of the group, perhaps not, and sometimes (as in Ravel) retreating to the corner to begin again. In D-Man, people at the rear of the group, over and over, rush to the front; the image of a breaking wave is accompanied by one of constantly—and peacefully— changing leadership.

Jones has had a long love affair with repetition. He likes to have certain passages recur, perhaps slightly transformed (the music, of course, summons him with its own repetitions). This happens  not only within a dance, but among dances. In an interview with Robert Johnson of The Star-Ledger, Jones said that over more than 30 years spent making dances for the company, he has acquired a lot of “choreographic real estate” that he can draw on and “recontextualize.”  He acknowledges in the Playbill  program that he based the third movement of his 2012 Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? (a New York premiere) on a study by former company member Eric Bradley.

He borrows from himself and—directly or indirectly— from his partner Arnie Zane, who died in 1988. In D-Man, the dancers sometimes flutter their forearms rapidly in front of their faces; the gesture has a family resemblance to a single one performed sharply, with an accompanying vocal hiss, in the accumulating phrase that Zane constructed and performed in Continuous Replay (1977). When I watch Jennifer Nugent crossing the front of the stage with a calm, deliberate, tiptoe walk in Ravel: Landscape or Portrait?, I flash back to a similar journey made by the whole company in the second movement of D-Man in the Waters, and it’s a surprise when Nugent breaks the pattern by going up to Erick Montes Chavero, as he twists himself around in a patch of light, and whispering something in his ear.

The company in Bill T. Jones’s Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? Antonio Brown jumping. Photo: Paul B/ Goode

Jones has favorite steps too. The dancer shoots into a jump, legs together, arms usually winging high. He/she somersaults, lunges, sweeps one leg out as a lever to induce a turn, spins in a modified pirouette (this last is my least favorite). The marvelous company members grasp in their own ways the boldness of Jones’s style—its groundedness, its space-devouring steps, and—by contrast—its small, finicky gestures. They’re adept at the sinuous, controlled muscularity that causes shoulders to roll, arms to snake, hips to sway—often all at once. Nothing looks lazy or completely fly-away. Death-defying moves are in the cards. These are heroes.

The compositional strategies give logic to the beauty. Spent Days begins with three dancers (Talli Jackson, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, and LaMichael Leonard, Jr.) moving quietly with their backs to the audience (I’m reminded that Jones once performed Trisha Brown’s solo If You Couldn’t See Me in a duet version; she remained turned toward the back of the stage the entire time). The music is the Andante from Mozart’s String Quartet No. 23 in F Major, and Liz Prince’s lightweight costumes flow softly.

Spent Days Out Yonder: LaMichael Leonard, Jr. (foreground); at back, Joseph Poulson holding Erick Montes Chavero. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Jones has built a long, long river of movement to this ravishing music written by Mozart a year before his death. Just as the composer embellishes and twists his opening passage, the choreographer develops the phrase that begins with the three dancers moving only their arms and gradually expands to involve other parts of the body, to take up a little more space, to encompass changes of direction, jumps, and a denser texture. Mozart passes his melody among the stringed instruments; Jones sets up a process of replacement; people entering to join the phrase, leaving it at various times. Maybe it will be Antonio Brown, Erick Montes Chavero, and Jenna Riegel whom you see feeding in. Maybe Nugent or I-Ling Liu or Joseph Poulson. Sometimes three people keep the phrase going, sometimes more. Small skirmishes occur intermittently behind the main event, parades cross in front of it. At the end, the musicians have to prolong their last note while the dancers exit in a slow, pouring cauldron of movement, but that’s a small flaw in a dance that I’m falling in love with.

Continuous Replay also accumulates, grows, and diminishes, but it looks nothing like Spent Days Out Yonder. In his original, rigorous solo, Zane was perhaps paying homage to Trisha Brown’s Accumulation (1971) and her subsequent related works. Montes Chavero begins the process alone (he shares the role of “The Clock” with Riegel), building the sequence of precise gestures and moves, returning to the first after each new addition as he slowly traverses the width of the stage, comes toward the audience, and turns to progress across the front. The dancers who feed in and out of the phrase begin naked, as does Montes Chavero, but unlike him they add items of apparel—first black, later white. Jones has added other events as well as people—having some performers simply run through at times, giving others fancy entrances, and creating another dance off to the side, in which, for a while, the beautifully fluid Liu starts stretching her limbs into space, balancing on one leg, and attracting others to her private party.

For those familiar with Jones/Zane history, there’s another kind of party going on. On March 26, we could pick out Arthur Aviles, Dwayne Brown, Catherine Cabeen, Seán Curran, Lawrence Goldhuber, Ayo Jackson, and Colleen Thomas in the advancing horde. The Orion Quartet plus string players Aaron Boyd, Molly Carr, Pauline Kim Harris, and Julia MacLaine gallantly merge elements of Beethoven’s String Quartets Op. 18, No. 1 and Op. 135 with recorded sounds in Begin’s Music for Octet.

Joseph Poulson carries Jenna Riegel in D-Man in the Waters. At back: LaMichael Leonard, Jr. and Antonio Brown (obscured). Photo: Paul B. Goode

Eight players are also needed for D-Man in the Waters, since it’s set to Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20 (1825).  The work premiered in 1989, when company member Demian Acquavella was swimming against a powerful current: AIDS. Jones and the other dancers were honoring his gallant ongoing struggle, which was to end in 1990. At the last performance of that 1989 season, granting Acquavella’s wish, Jones carried him, costumed, onstage and the others bore him through parts of the choreography. As Jones said, taking a bow at the end of opening night at the Joyce , “There are ghosts in this dance.”

The current Jones-Zane company members would have been toddlers or unborn when D-Man premiered, but they dance it as if to stint its hurtling energy would be unthinkable. The choreography builds on the turbulent water imagery and captures the ferocity of Mendelssohn’s music. This is a celebration of vigor and the will to survive, not a presentiment of loss, although several times a single performer vaults toward another and clamps on, to be carried away, and in one brief section, Jackson stands in the middle of a square made up of the company’s four women and interrupts his dancing in time to catch each of them as she crumples.

The final image of D-Man in the Waters, Erick Montes Chavero flying. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Most of the time, however, the dancers—clad in Prince’s guerrilla-warfare clothes—leap exultantly through space in a multitude of ways, dive, slide on their bellies, somersault, roll, swim. Occasionally, in the background, two people struggle together; one of them trying to move forward, the other holding him or her back. They form chains that whip around the space. It’s a gorgeous, valiant killer of a dance about not dying. Montes Chavero is tossed high by the group, and the stage goes dark while he’s still in the air.

Both the newest dances have décor by Bjorn Amelan, as well as the splendid lighting by Robert Wierzel that graces all the works. For Ravel: Landscape or Portrait?, the stage is enclosed by the slimmest suggestion of a room—a rope cube whose boundaries are delineated by corner verticals, with horizontals connecting them on the floor and overhead. Story/ takes place on a grid of white lines, four rectangles wide by three deep, and the members of the Orion Quartet are seated upstage left.

Ravel: Landscape or Portrait? Erick Montes Chavero (lifted) and (L to R): Talli Jackson, LaMichael Leonard, Jr., I-Ling Liu, Jennifer Nugent, Jenna Riegel (in front), Antonio Brown, Shayla La-Vie Jenkins. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Ravel is set to Maurice Ravel’s 1904 String Quartet in F Major. The dance, echoing its moody impressionism, is less legible than the other works and as enigmatic as its title. Apparently, Jones has created two variations for the third movement, but I can’t tell whether I’m seeing “Landscape” or “Portrait.” While the group waits in a corner, Montes Chavero faces them and touches the floor in ways that suggest he believes it to be earth—his terrain. The dance begins; then the group retreats to its corner and starts over. For a moment, Montes Chavero looks straight at the audience, as if recruiting out attention. We see the expected breakouts from the group, the coalescing again. The other three women and Brown dance to a pizzicato passage. Often the performers—wearing a playful array of outfits—freeze in mid-action. In this dance, they’re especially watchful of one another in this.

Boundaries become important (what’s inside, what’s outside); crossing them, while not dramatized, becomes a choreographic issue. And in one stunning visual effect, a projection of dark foliage on a white surface, fills the back wall and floor of the stage and then spills out to turn the entire wall of the theater into a leafy grove for Nugent—as supply muscular as a cat—to inhabit. The dance ends as it began, with Montes Chavero alone. Could he be rolling dice?

Jennifer Nugent and LaMichael Leonard, Jr. in Story/. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Story/ grew out of Story/Time (2012). In the earlier work, Jones, seated onstage read 70 one-minute autobiographical stories, while the dancers’ movements coincided with them, or didn’t. He was inspired by a similar process of John Cage’s, as well as various Cagean ideas about indeterminacy. There are no stories told in Story/—at least, not in words. Jones also allowed the Orion Quartet to choose the music for the dance from a list; he, Wong, and the dancers then created what the program calls “a random menu of movements” that could converse with that score. The musicians chose Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor (Death and the Maiden).

The choreography is very eventful—meaning event-full. Now the dancers are moving into poses, freezing, moving again. Now they’re in a corner, yelling in unison before advancing in slow motion along a diagonal. Montes Chavero enters with a round object (maybe one of the green apples from Story/Time), which he occasionally holds while dancing, or tosses. Nugent and Poulson have a brief silent dialogue, pointing their fingers in various directions. Riegel rolls across the stage, dispensing smoke from a gadget attached to her legs.

All kinds of vivid trios, duets, and quartets surface and disappear—some within seconds. Orderly formations materialize and erase themselves. One of my favorite moments occurs when two different quartets, performed in place, coexist on the stage and, just in case you couldn’t grasp the intricacy at first, generously repeat their intricate maneuvers.  A few words invade the conversations that the performers are having with Schubert. In a group phrase at the end, one or another of them calls out “ready” and “reverse” to cue the choreographic possibilities. But for all the contrasting vignettes and the grid that organizes the game plan, the piece flows along remarkably amicably with the beautiful quartet, and death hides itself very successfully in vibrant life.

Mark Morris Dance Group. James and Martha Duffy Performance Space, Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn, New York. April 3 through 14.

Mark Morris’s A Wooden Tree. (L to R):
Amber Star Merkens, Rita Donahue, Dallas McMurray, Jenn Weddel, Aaron Loux, Michelle Yard, Maile Okamura, Mikhail Baryshnikov. Photo: Stephanie Berger

You can’t predict much about a dance by Mark Morris. There’s no doubt that he responds to music and —with love and respect—choreographs that response into what he hears. He acknowledges with great sensitivity a composer’s tempi and structures and atmosphere, but you never know what else the sounds will trigger.

Antonin Dvorák’s Bagatelles for two violins, cello, and harmonium, Op. 47 (1878) inspired him to present a drab waiting room into which a woman with a clipboard intermittently walks to summon one of the six assembled people to leave the stage and come with her (The Office). Carl Maria von Weber’s Grand Duo Concertant, for clarinet and piano, Op. 48 (1814-1815) leads to his new Crosswalk’s racing traffic, collisions, and intersections by eight men and three women (the latter costumed in orange dresses that evoke traffic cones).

You might guess that Morris would cast Henry Cowell’s Suite for Violin and Piano (1925) as a duet, but not that the man in Jenn and Spencer (another world premiere) would be dressed in trousers and a dress shirt with its sleeves rolled up, while his partner and antagonist would wear a loose-fitting lavender evening gown, so long that it grazes the floor, and indulge in complications not usually embarked on in such attire.

Ivor Cutler (1923-2006), the Scottish composer, singer, and humorist, wrote songs—both childlike and astutely ironic—that have an English-music-hall sound, but laconic lyrics that undercut climaxes right and left. As is often Morris’s wont when dealing with vocal music, his choreography for A Wooden Tree (a New York premiere) fits gestures to Cutler’s words, but rarely in a completely predictable way. Were that even possible.

The Office: (L to R) Spencer Ramirez, Maile Okamura, Jenn Weddel, Dallas McMurray. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The Office (1994), which opens the program, is an enigma; it’s full of robust dancing that stamps and twists and chains its way through the hinted-at Czech melodies and rhythms in the five sections of Dvorák’s Bagatelles, but this little society that Morris has created is gradually shrinking. There are hard-backed chairs in the antechamber to who knows what. The people who sit on them wear unfashionable everyday clothing (by former company dancer June Omura). They don’t look citified like Laurel Lynch, the doorkeeper; she’s dressed in a dark, tailored suit and sensible shoes. She could be inviting people, one by one, to a job interview; or they could be waiting to be transported, re-assigned, questioned for evidence. None looks happy at leaving, but neither does anyone fight the seemingly inevitable departure; few look back.

The Office: (L to R) Maile Okamura, Dallas McMurray, Billy Smith, Laurel Lynch. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Morris works with simple means—folk-dance steps given a pleasing twist and pulled into varying patterns—and he skillfully and sensitively tailors the ambiance of each section to the remaining number of people. Chelsea Lynn Acree is the first to leave, after which Dallas McMurray, Spencer Ramirez, and Billy Smith step in counterpoint to Maile Okamura and Jenn Weddel. When Smith is summoned, the remaining four form a square and energetically change places across it. At this point, the “Allegretto scherzando,” which has started out like the opening movement of the same name, asserts its difference. The musicians (Georgy Valtchev and Maxim Moston, violins; Andrew Janss, cello; and Colin Fowler, harmonium) suddenly seem to bear down on the melody, and the dancers’ stances get wider and their shoes strike the floor more emphatically.

When Weddel leaves, and Dvorák’s “Canon: andante con moto” starts, Okamura and McMurray form a counterpoint to Ramirez. No matter how few people are left, they always find ways to join hands and form a chain. They dance as if they never want to forget these steps, or one another. Okamura and McMurray seem happy in the final “Poco allegro,” but shortly before its final vigorous moments, the melody that opened the Suite reasserts itself in a mournful guise, and, when the music ends, Okamura is sitting alone in the silence, with five empty chairs and no hand to hold.

Maile Okamura (L) and Amber Star Merkens in A Wooden Tree. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Since Ivor Cutler himself favored deerstalker hats and plaids, costumer Elizabeth Kurtzman has concocted a loony assemblage of Scottish outfits for A Wooden Tree. For instance, while Michelle Yard and some of the other women wear solid-color cotton dresses, Okamura sports long plaid shorts, a short-sleeved white shirt, knee-high argyle socks, and a tam o’shanter. Cutler sings his minimally melodic songs accompanied by a harmonium (an intriguingly subtle link with the Dvorák score that accompanied the preceding dance).

Morris finds ways to enlarge and undercut the very specific images. In “Rubber Toy,” when Cutler’s deep, slightly rough voice rhymes “lips” with “pips,” Mikhail Baryshnikov (guest artist as one of the gang) opens Okamura’s mouth (she’s the toy), and mimes spitting seeds into it. But when these, we’re told, sprout into a forest of girls, a lusty group makes a tableau of foliage. In “Little Black Buzzer,” the singer complains that he’s lost at the top of the world with a cold bum and a white face, trying to get a message to the outside world. Baryshnikov sits on the floor beside a chair and, with remarkable clarity, taps Morse code on its seat in counterpoint to the music, while the five women in the piece circle him, stepping jerkily in a dot-dash rhythm.

A Wooden Tree: Rita Donohue and Mikhail Baryshnikov (foreground) and (L to R) Aaron Loux, Dallas McMurray, Maile Okamura, and (half hidden) Amber Star Merkens. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Needless to say, Baryshikov immerses himself with verve in this community. His performance skills enable him both to fit in and to draw your eye. He’s a virtuoso of modesty—never more so when he and Weddel sit on chairs facing each other for “Beautiful Cosmos” to portray a long-married couple, companionably drinking tea, with little to say.

A Wooden Tree contains much interesting byplay on the sidelines, and the dancers (the cast includes Rita Donohue, Aaron Loux, and Amber Star Merkens) are as tartly and endearingly eccentric as the music.

Morris pulls a little joke of his own. After the poignant chair duet, Michael Chybowski dims his excellent lighting, the audience applauds, and the cast takes a bow. Then: Music! Lights! And a finale: “Cockadoodledon’t.”

Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez in Morris’s Jenn and Spencer. Photo: Stephanie Berger

If you listen to Cowell’s Suite for Violin and Piano after seeing Jenn and Spencer, you may find yourself thinking of the instruments as two beings who echo each other, argue, pose questions and provide answers, and embrace in ways both calming and disruptive. That Valtchev and Fowler will make provocative and lovely music together on their instrument is, of course, a given, just as it’s a given that Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez—who’ve lent their names to the title— will reveal themselves as beautiful dancers, no matter what tensions Morris sets for them.

The tensions are many; so is the attraction between these two. When they circle the stage running, they never take their eyes off each other. And they contend in stranger, more intimate ways than simply pulling their grasped hands apart or striving to push an opponent away. Once, in the opening “Largo,” they lie on the floor, flailing until the soles of their feet meet and scrub against one another’s (the piano chords suddenly seem to be saying “no, no, no”). Then the two slide together, legs apart, until, for a tangled second or two, their crotches are locked as firmly as homing jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

Jenn Weddel in Jenn and Spencer. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Throughout the duet’s five sections, Ramirez and Weddel occasionally leave the arena, but never for long. They have moments alone to assert themselves.  The couplings they create in the “Andante tranquillo” can seem idealized (he lies on his back, legs in the air; she lies on his upturned feet and swims in air) or crudely erotic (he lies face down; she lies on top of him; he sharply bends his knees, thrusting his lower legs ceiling-ward through the space between hers). Shortly after this, he crawls on his belly toward a downstage corner, and she accompanies him on foot—stepping back and forth over him, whipping one leg around each time, the arc of her satin skirt as threatening as a storm cloud in a wind.

The “Andante calmato” sounds anything but calm. The piano begins with a rumble of dark chords, and at first Weddel and Ramirez walk staggeringly, joltingly. In the duet’s most violent moment, he bends and grabs one of her ankles while she’s lying on the ground, then revolves, turning her by that leg so that she has to keep rolling; for several long, uncomfortable seconds, she looks like a snagged fish flipping at the end of a line. The final “Presto” ends with her smacking him. He falls. She exits.

L to R: Laurel Lynch, Noah Vinson, and Chelsea Lynn Acree in Morris’s Crosswalk. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Jenn and Spencer is the dark heart of the evening. The closing piece, Crosswalk, announces itself from the get-go as mostly fleet, boisterous, and busy—like Weber’s Grand Duo Concertante, for which Todd Palmer matches his clarinet to Fowler’s expert piano playing. What can you expect from the opening image?  Dancers face in various directions, crouched in on-your-mark positions, ready to launch themselves into dangerous terrain. The very first rush spins Lynch and knocks her to the floor.

This is a crowd scene. It involves the four men we’ve seen earlier in the evening, plus Samuel Black, Brian Lawson, Noah Vinson, and apprentice Benjamin Freedman. Countering or joining this octet are Acree, Lynch, and Stacy Martorana. The splendid dancers race, somersault, skip, walk in opposing directions, and vault into the air to beat their legs together. Traffic control (i.e. choreography) works very well. Pairs unfettered by gender distinctions collaborate to lift a third person, who legs drawn up, seems to be jumping a barrier (or just jumping for the pleasure of it). You think the trios may collide, but they don’t.

Crosswalk: (L to R) Chelsea Lynn Acree, Noah Vinson, Laurel Lynch, Spencer Ramirez, and Billy Smith. Photo: Stephanie Berger

There are some odd  vignettes. During von Weber’s “Andante con Moto,” while some cast members pair up and stroll with the piano’s chords—not touching, but keeping close together, their crossed arms held out—Acree and Lynch decide to grab Vinson  and yank him in two. Then they clasp his head and stroke the backs of his legs. He turns the tables though. Suddenly the two women are close together, walking on their hands and feet, as ungainly and out of step with each other as two straggling cows being urged along (my favorite moment). Vinson’s the momentary herder. Pretty soon you can’t tell for sure who’s controlling whom, let alone why. I think he dies.

But he’s not too dead to sit up when he hears the final “Rondo:Allegro.” All he needed was that green light. The leaping and rushing accelerates. Pairs form and un-form and reform. At a climactic moment, Lynch assembles the men, backs off and races toward them; she jumps, is tossed high, caught, and sent on her way. Finally someone yells “Go!” As if that isn’t what they’ve been doing all along.

Stephen Petronio Company at the Joyce Theater, April 30 through May 5, 2013

Dancers in Stephen Petronio’s Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30), Emily Stone center. Photo: David Rosenberg

Over a hundred black-clad members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City form a V around the corner of the Joyce Theater—some on 19^th Street, some on 8^th Avenue; over a hundred pairs of eyes focus on composer Son Lux (aka Ryan Lott), who, shielded by a parasol, is playing guitar alongside trumpeter C.J. Camerieri and violinist Rob Moose. “Come out!” sing the kids in sweet harmony to a burgeoning crowd of spectators—most of whom have come to the Joyce to see Stephen Petronio’s world premiere, Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30). “Come out!”  Their voices are quiet, but urgent.

Meanings float around above the pavement we share. “Come out” in order to proclaim you’re gay. Come out from the darkness into the light—whether that darkness is death, ignorance, or the womb. Emerge from the sepulcher, Jesus!  You, too, Lazarus!  Phoenix, rise up from those ashes! “Come out!” is also what I’ve been saying to the place in the grass where daffodils should be pushing up to confirm Spring.

It may not be entirely coincidental that we’re seeing this glorious new work of Petronio’s in the year that honors the 100^th anniversary of the Stravinsky-Nijinsky ballet The Rite of Spring; although the Chosen Virgin danced herself to death, she was responsible for another kind of renascence: she made the crops grow.

Janine Antoni in her “living set.” Photo: Paul Ramirez Jonas

Petronio wants us to experience LLD—at least in part—as an installation. We must enter the theater by climbing stairs and descending the left aisle to our seats along a pathway of light. In addition to handing out programs, ushers give us little cards that query in gothic letters, “Should I look among the living/ Should I look among the dead/ If I’m searching for you?” This is a pretty deep question. The choreographer lies supine at the edge of the stage; he’s dressed in a white shirt and black suit, but he’s barefoot. The red velvet front curtain, lit to jewel-like splendor by Ken Tabachnick, is draped up at the bottom and its hem sits just a foot or so above his head. High above the right side of the audience hangs the kind of stretcher used for lifting the injured or dead to a waiting helicopter. It appears to contain a mossy bed, on which its designer, artist Janine Antoni, lies motionless. Above her are suspended plaster replicas of dancerly legs, skeleton legs, heads, arms, and more. Who will rise?  Who will die?

A large cadre of the young singers enters to fill the left side of the U-shaped balcony; the chorus’s founder-director, Francisco J. Nuñez, conducts them from the other end of the balcony, across the house. The rest of the chorus members fill both aisles, framing us, containing us. They echo words that Son Lux calls out, such as “I want to die like Lazarus did.” Meaning, perhaps, that expiring not long before Jesus walks in, needing a miracle, is a good way to go. Many of the words that infiltrate Son Lux’s eerily beautiful score (played by Camerieri, Moose, and the composer on piano, percussion, and electronics) were drawn from slave songs of the early 19^th century, when the hope of resurrection made the labor easier to bear.

Refresh, revive, resuscitate, reincarnate, make new. These processes have clearly been on Petronio’s mind.  For the opening scene of LLD, Petronio has recycled and refurbished the white costumes that Tara Subkoff designed for his 2003 Underland. He has also reconstructed solos made for other company dancers in years past and refurbished them for individuals in the current group. Compositional devices like accumulation and retrograde come into play; perhaps he first became expert at these during his years of dancing with Trisha Brown.

Joshua Green in Like Lazarus did (LLD 4/30). Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Not all of this is visible in the dance of course. In his program note, Petronio refers to “our dancing flux,” and anyone watching the maelstroms he creates on stage, doesn’t have time to think about the process behind the work. But although he’s a voluble choreographer, he’s not a facile one, and although his dancers are virtuosos, they dance like celebrants in a carefully designed rite, never holding a pose so you can admire its beauty and as apparently effortless as we imagine angels to be.

Petronio’s works have nothing in common with those of Isadora Duncan, but both choreographers seem to conceive of the body as a kind of holy machine, in touch with the earth’s processes. A powerful motor drives the whirling arms; slashing legs; mobile hips; and rippling, canting torsos. Amid the spins; the leaps; and the explosive, straight-up jumps that Petronio creates, you can divine a compulsion like the one Dylan Thomas hymns in his poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”  You may find the choreography of LLD relentless, with the dancers as intrepid, complicit, untiring heroes, but there’s something exalted, white-hot about it.

The beginning of the dance asserts order. The singers in the aisles have left. So has Petronio. The three musicians have gathered in a corner; the conductor and the chorus members in the balcony are on their feet. Nine of the company’s ten members stand onstage, divided into three trios. You see every action in triplicate. Over and over, one person from each group dances toward the audience and then back to place, while those still at the back continue their interactions. The phrase seems to grow as the process continues; I begin to think each set of three is echoing what’s been established and adding something new. Counterpoint develops.

Joshua Green and Natalie Mackessy (center), Davalois Fearon (L), Barrington Hinds (background).
Photo: David Rosenberg

But soon Petronio develops an idea that’s particular to this dance. Intermittently, throughout it, people yield to weakness and collapse or lie down. Others catch them, cradle them, lift them, or pull them to their feet and into the ongoing tide of dancing. “These are my Father’s children,” sing the young voices. Joshua Green, Gino Grenek, and Joshua Tuason, who’ve been carefully laid out by three others, revive and leave as Emily Stone and Natalie Mackessy dance close together, each in her own way. Small Mackessy collapses onto tall Stone, just as Davalois Fearon makes her first entrance. (She, Barrington Hinds, Jaqlin Medlock, and Julian De Leon are the first to appear wearing minimal black costumes—sometimes veiled in brown—by H. Petal; intricately cut and strapped, they bare much of the performers’ mobile backs.) The smoke at the rear of the stage seems a little denser. “Allelujah!” call out the singers. A little later, to a thudding drum and cymbals, Nicholas Sciscione, Tuason, and Green treat Davalois as a colleague who needs lifting into the light.

L-R: Nicholas Sciscione, Joshua Tuason, and Joshua Green support Davalois Fearon. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The music collaborates wonderfully with this constant process of leaving and arriving, of succumbing and recovering. The disparate voices of piano, trumpet, and violin (along with Son Lux’s singing) herald what needs to be heralded, sigh or shiver when appropriate, and jangle amid stormy electronic weather. Heavy piano chords sound when the dancers enter hand in hand, like a chain gang of diverse individuals. When the four women dance in unison, we hear words from Sojourner Truth’s famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” And just as stillness occasionally vies with movement, silence pits the music.

There’s an enigmatic passage when Tuason stands alone, his back to the audience, in front of a white ribbon or rope that has descended from above. Lit from below, he undulates slowly, muscularly, gazing at it. Climbing doesn’t seem to be an option. And when that scene is over, the lighting turns rosy, and the others re-enter in new costumes that include red kilts for the men. A drum joins in. The dancers cluster and fall and pass through in groups. The sung words turn apocalyptic: “The moon will turn to mud. The world will be on fire. The stars will fall. . .”

Nicholas Sciscione reborn in the final moments of Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30). Photo Julieta Cervantes

There have been solos before: Grenek writhing on the floor, Green smoothly pulling and twisting himself through invisible holes in the space around him. But the final solo, performed by Sciscione, sends an unambiguous message of rebirth. He’s wearing only flesh-colored briefs, turning in circles while lying on the floor, rolling, twisting, pushing his butt up the way babies do, struggling as if on a difficult, pre-ordained journey. The chorus now slides into counterpoint. The male voices sing a variant of the words on the card: “Should I look among the living? Should I look among the dead?” The women echo Son Lux in a lullaby: “Sweet dreams; shut your eyes and dream.”  Finally Sciscione gets to his feet; he’s taking teetering, tiptoe steps toward the back of the stage as the lights go out.

Afterward, I climb up to the side of the balcony to get a better look at Antoni as she lies in her cradle. Until now, I’ve only been able to discern her motionless profile. Almost everyone has left the theater. Her eyelids are fluttering.

RIOULT Dance New York premieres “Iphigenia” at the Joyce Theater, June 5 through 9.

Pénelope González surrounded in Pascal Rioult’s Prelude to Night. Photo: Basil Childers

Pascal Rioult was an important member of Martha Graham’s company during the last part of her life. Three years after her death in 1991, he founded RIOULT Dance New York and built it into a prospering entity, with performances in the U.S. and abroad, a wide-ranging outreach program to introduce children and adults to modern dance, and year-round health insurance for his dancers. His choreography has been warmly received, and the audience for the company’s opening night at the Joyce Theater applauded enthusiastically.

In the past, Rioult has boldly tackled musical masterpieces. The New York Times declared that his 2003 Black Diamond, set to Igor Stravinsky’s Duo Concertante, could hold its own against George Balanchine’s duet utilizing the same music. Subsequent reviews have been less admiring of  Rioult’s approach to great music of the past, and he may have been reconsidering this aspect of his work. Although two pieces on the Joyce program, Prelude to Night and Bolero (both 2002), derive from his interest in Maurice Ravel, the other two, On Distant Shores (2011) and Iphigenia (a world premiere developed at the Kaatsbaan International Dance Center), were choreographed to commissioned scores by prominent contemporary composers. Michael Torke wrote the score for Iphigenia, and Aaron Jay Kernis created the music for On Distant Shores.

Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, and Paul Taylor all danced with Graham’s company, and you’d never guess that from looking at their work (well, maybe one or two favorite Taylor steps do hark back. . .). Few contemporary choreographers who were once associated with her still honor her themes, her structures, and aspects of her style. Rioult has struck out in other directions in a number of his works, but the Joyce program reveals a strong Graham influence.

As is usual with his presentations, the four dances shown have interesting sets and well-designed costumes, and the members of his company (11 plus one apprentice) perform the pieces with skill and dedication. But the programming struck me as strange. For one thing, the total performing time was slightly over 90 minutes; two intermissions and one fairly lengthy pause made for a very long evening. For another, three of the works focused on a dilemma prominent in Graham’s oeuvre: a woman in torment—either from inner demons or outside forces beyond her control. Two of these occur in Graham’s favorite mythic landscape, that of ancient Greece, and employ the strategies of dream and flashback that she pioneered. In terms of psychological nuance and dramatic insight, this is territory that Graham staked out, and competitors, or those paying homage, enter it at their risk.

L to R: Clytemnestra (Marianna Tsartolia), Iphigenia (Jane Sato), Agamemnon (Brian Flynn), and Achilles (Jere Hunt) in Pascal Rioult’s Iphigenia. Photo: Eric Bandiero

For Iphigenia, Harry Feiner designed a circular white floor and a set of slim wooden rails that could evoke a palace or a forest or a thicket of ship’s masts. In any case, the irregular structure provides a place for characters to lurk when not actively involved in the plot. Torke’s score for clarinet, bassoon, French horn, cello, and bass is a masterful mingling of tough, 20th-century dissonances with lush, romantic passage, and (a special treat) it’s played live by Camerata New York, conducted by Richard Owen.

Rioult has pared Euripides’s tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis down to its four essential characters: Agamemnon, King of Mycenae; his wife, Clytemnestra; his eldest daughter, Iphigenia; and the great warrior Achilles. Three men and three women act as the chorus. The goddess Artemis, angered, has becalmed the Greek fleet that’s bound for Troy to recover the kidnapped Helen and generally wreak havoc. She can be appeased if Agamemnon sacrifices his child. Clytemnestra and Iphigenia journey to Aulis, thinking the girl has been summoned to marry Achilles.

Jere Hunt and Jane Sato as Achilles and Iphigenia in Iphigenia. Photo: Sophia Negron

Rioult’s work begins with a brief foreshadowing of its ending (Iphigenia held aloft, crumpling into death), then flashes back to her happily at play, and works forward. The actress Jacqueline Chambord appears from time to time to speak a few relevant lines from the play.  Jane Sato, as Iphigenia, watched approvingly by Mariana Tsartolia as Clytemnestra, has a long opening solo which Sato performs excellently—frolicking around the space, her body pliant, her arms scooping up air. But the solo goes on for what seems like a very long time. Iphigenia keeps revealing herself as charming, innocent, and a bit roguish well after the point has been made, and the choreography hints at no other aspects of her character.

The male characters don’t walk; they stalk, their bare chests thrust out. They lift proud Agamemnon (Brian Flynn), their leader, and show their prowess. One unexpected, enigmatic, but satisfying moment occurs when they cluster around him, and he pushes their heads down one by one. The three women of the chorus have less to express. Rioult shows us in brief the betrothal, the ensuing tender duet between Iphigenia and Achilles (Jere Hunt), her pleadings with her obdurate father, and Clytemnestra’s rage against her husband. Iphigenia dances alone and troubled, echoing some of her earlier movements. Achilles, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra tangle. The opening is reprised in part. Torke’s sectional music enhances all the mood changes.

Iphigenia stops the quarrel. Jane Sato (foreground) and (L to R) Marianna Tsartolia, Jere Hunt, and Brian Flynn. Photo: Eric Bandiero

But what Rioult can’t show us is that this is more than a family quarrel. The war against Troy is at stake; the army needs Achilles to stop defending his bride. When Rioult’s Iphigenia decides to accept her fate and even rejoice in it, it seems as if she’s doing it out of exasperation, just to stop a fight among her parents and her bethrothed. And from that climactic point until her exit into darkness, no further revelations occur, and the action becomes murky. Although Sato imbues the central character with warmth, and the other dancers do their best, it’s like watching a Greek tragedy performed by cardboard figures.

Charis Haines in Rioult’s On Distant Shores. Photo: Sophia Negron

Rioult has subtitled On Distant Shores “. . .a redemption fantasy.” This time the heroine (Charis Haines) is Helen of Troy, and the choreographer refers to Euripides’ play of the same name, in which, according to one legend, the gods, for various tricky reasons, have substituted a likeness of Helen and stashed the real beauty in Egypt. The dance begins with four men (Flynn, Hunt Josiah Guitian, and Holt Walborn) lounging near a backdrop onto which lighting designer David Finley has projected a luminous, rippling sea. Recorded voices murmur in Kernis’s score.

The real Helen, it seems, is imagining the havoc she has caused and expressing her pain and perhaps guilt. Dancing alone, while the men lie supine, she twists into a back fall over and over again. The four, who seem to stand for all the fallen at Troy, rise briefly into slow-motion fights and silent howls. Like a nurse prowling the battlefield, Haines pulls one (Hunt) up and into a duet, then another (Flynn, I believe). Walborn walks her as if she were a doll. But all sink back to the floor in the end.

Pénelope González in peril in Rioult’s Prelude to Night. Photo: Basil Childers

The heroine of Prelude to Night journeys through her own imagination and nightmares to excerpts from Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole (castanets and all) and his Alborada del Gracioso. This is the most dramatic piece in terms of movement imagery. It’s also confusing at times. As it begins, a woman in a red dress (Penélope González at the the performance I saw) is yanked about by four men in white (Iphigenia all over again), after which she agonizes in a pool of light in front of a row of white pillars (another set by Feiner). They attack her again, and, in a familiar, effective theatrical device, she slips out of their grasp, leaving them frozen, then returns and fits herself back into their grasp. At times when she holds their hands, she seems to melt a little.

González takes her hair down and exchanges her red dress for a white one that’s brought to her. Two other women appear in identical red dresses (costumes by Russ Volger) and are then led away (am I seeing things? Does Rioult have a thing about doubles?). This section is the protagonist’s nightmare. Sato enters, borne on the shoulders of a masked man, clawing her hands witchily.  Magically, the white pillars have turned rusty and ragged-topped. Three masked couples plus one man (all in minimal black attire) savage her. The men’s masks have little elephant trunks instead of noses. She really has a time of it. Her legs are pulled apart; two men grab her, one of them gnaws on her arm.

In the final section, the pillars are white again, the men wear black coats over white outfits, the music and the lights are brighter. Nevertheless, legs together, arms spread, Gonzalez is rotated like a human crucifix. Things don’t seem to have improved much for her. Of all the three women that Rioult has made suffer in these three dances, she’s the most passive. And what has she achieved in the way of an epiphany? Not much.

Members of RIOULT Dance New York in Pascal Rioult’s Bolero. Photo: Basil Childers

After all this female agony, Bolero comes as a relief. Rioult exits his Graham mode to approach the familiar relentless score as a mechanistic display that speeds up and becomes more complex as it develops along with the music. The dancers, spread out in lines, make stiff, angular gestures against Feiner’s backdrop of geometrical architecture. A single woman slowly unfolds one leg to the side and balances a second before rejoining them. A man echoes that move. The patterns keep going and shifting internally, sometimes freezing for a few seconds.

As the people begin to change places, to move into new formations (lines, circles), to pair up, to strike out in space, to cluster. you occasionally see what’s been missing in the other three dances: counterpoint as an antidote to unison. It’s very welcome, as is the fierce, no-nonsense build of the dance, and the image of the dancers as equally skilled workers rather than impotent, beleaguered women and the muscular men who dominate them.

Zvi Gotheiner, Cherylyn Lavagnino, and Dusan Tynek share a series at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, June 12 through 22.

I should have sat down at the computer right after getting home from the opening of Musa! A Festival of Dance with Music at Baruch Performing Arts Center. The inaugural performance was so dense with dancing that keeping my memories of it intact has been a challenge. Also, although the remaining programs in this series (produced by Philip W. Sandstrom and Equilateral Theatre Inc.) showcase no more than three dances apiece, the first one featured five, plus one intermission, two long pauses, and a lighting glitch that necessitated fixing.

From June 12 through 22, Musa! is presenting choreography by Zvi Gotheiner, Cherylyn Lavagnino, and Dusan Tynek in solo or shared programs. All three create pieces rich in dancing and musically sensitive, and they craft their dances expertly—no maelstroms of limber creatures hurtling around without discernible reason. All are inventive, although none ventures into dangerously risky territory, unless you count Lavagnino’s imaginative manipulation of ballet conventions.

Kuan Hui Chew in Sky and Water. Photo: Phyllis McCabe

Gotheiner’s Sky and Water (a world premiere), set to an excellent original score by Scott Killian, alludes to its title primarily though patterns and rhythms. The choreography was inspired by the art of M.C. Escher, with its whirlpools, helixes, and parallel ranks. At the outset, the dancers accumulate on stage, gradually building power like a tide. Kuan Hui Chew begins alone, calmly and fluidly articulating her flexible body. Like all the dancers, she wears a short, black outfit with one white sleeve (costumes by Reid Bartelme). By the time seven others have entered and fit into the ongoing pattern that Chew has established, they’re ready to break into four-part counterpoint, and then magically reassemble into two lines of four. After Nicole Marie Smith and Nathan Coder have danced close together in a silent, undulating conversation that bubbles around the sounds of a piano, they separate into a canon to pursue identical thoughts at different times.

Gotheiner also plays with the notion of replacement. Chew, William Tomaskovic, Smith, and Ying-Ying Shau move within a tightly squared constellation. Then Alison Clancy replaces Chew, two others replace Chau and Smith, and those evicted form their own trio off to the side. Later everyone orbits around Clancy, who is succeeded by others in tiny solo displays. In contrast to the big space-covering passages, there are more constrained ones—such as the little episode when two lines of people sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor, their legs stuck out in front of them, and make little twitchy moves.

Brief duets carry on the idea of fitting, or not fitting into someone else’s patterns and rhythms—one encounter for Chew and David Norsworthy, one for Todd Allen and Chelsea Ainsworth. Some passages in Sky and Water, seem slightly contrived, but the interplay of forces can be exhilarating. A nice surprise: Clancy and Allen have been dancing separately but simultaneously for a few moments, and, just as the lights go out, she whispers something in his ear.

L to R: Timothy Ward, John Eirich, and Ned Sturgis in Dusan Tynek’s Apian Way. Photo: Phyllis McCabe

Dusan Tynek’s 2008 Apian Way (excerpted for this performance) also enters the world of natural forms. Note the single “p.” This is no exploration of an ancient Roman thoroughfare; it’s a reference to the busy world of bees. The very musical choreographer has chosen a very different world of intricate alliances for his score: four movements drawn from two of J.S. Bach’s sonatas for violin (Nos. 1 and 3) and the Sarabande from Partita No. 1.  The opening Presto for six dancers is a buzz of traffic: rushing, leaping people travel at different speeds—their paths curving, merging, intersecting. Groups cluster as if to converse, flapping their arms and making little flicking gestures with their hands.

The Adagio of Apian Way features the four women of Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre (DT)²  (Alexandra Berger, Ann Chiaverini, Emily Gayeski, and Elisa Osborne) rearranging themselves quietly together. The Sarabande is a duet for Chiaverini and Samuel Swanton. Suddenly Roderick Murray’s lights practically explode into noontide brightness, and John Eirich, Ned Sturgis, and Timothy Ward perform an exuberant trio. If these are the drones of the hive, they manage a terrific display of testosterone-fueled competiveness and athletic camaraderie (to Bach’s Allegro Assai) before their designated mating flight.

L to R: Elisa Osborne, Ann Chiaverini, Alexandra Berger, and Emily Gayeski in Dusan Tynek’s Widow’s Walk. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Tynek’s 2011 Widow’s Walk closes the program with very different music, all recorded by ETHEL: Lennie Tristano’s 1955 Requiem (arranged in 2006 by Mary Rowell), The Blue Room: March (2002), and The Blue Room: Tarantella—both these last by Phil Kline. As the program makes clear, the title refers to the railed, rooftop structures on 19^th century houses along the New England coast. There, the wives of sailors would walk, gazing out to the sea from which their loved ones might, or might not return.

In Tynek’s beautiful piece, we see four women in long gowns, pacing with deep, bent-forward lunges around and around in a square. We see the men dance energetically—pausing now and then to point their fingers in different directions. And we see couples enjoying themselves in the happy times when they were together; their steps are vigorous, like those in a folk dance. The middle section takes a turn toward abstraction. To Kline’s steady rhythm, the men start a pressured walking from one side of the stage to the other. But, hopping on one leg with the other lifted behind them, they keep being forced back by the unseen tide. One man may move forward, while another, driven back, passes him. Each manages a separate struggle within the same tide.

Members of Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre in Widow’s Walk. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

But as they do this, the four women, now wearing white bathing costumes and caps (costumes by Anna-Elisa Belous), leap among them, leap past them, disappear, rush through again. You can imagine them as the foam tossed up among the gradually slowing men. In another section the men struggle together, holding onto one another, pulling apart and together, lifting one of them high. As if the memories (and the weather) have become impossibly turbulent, the women—wearing their gowns again, but with their hair loose—race on and off the stage, as do the men, now without their shirts. Sometimes a woman snags on a man and is picked up and carried off; sometimes she dives onto him. The pace never slows; the stage is a whirlpool, the strings in the music raging. In the end, the women are back to their memories, their dreams, and their lonely pacing.

I greatly admire how warmly Tynek’s dancers respond to one another and the space around That’s also true of Ramona Kelley and Justin Flores in Compadre, one of two works by Cherylyn Lavagnino that appeared between Tynek’s Apian Way and Widow’s Walk. While accordionist JP Joffre and pianist Evelyn Ulex, playing live, whip into Astor Piazzola’s piece of the same name, Kelley and Flores flirt and dance with a peppery fervor. They’re charming together in this tango encounter that’s performed in pointe shoes rather than high heels. The dancers in two movements excerpted from Lavagnino’s Treize en Jeu are less aware of one another (at least, that was true on opening night). Of the five couples that perform brief duets, Giovanna Gamna and Michael D. Gonzalez were the most acutely attentive to each other.

L to R: Claire Westby with Samuel Swanton, Christine Luciano with Eric Williams, Selena Chau with Justin Flores, Ramona Kelley with Adrian Silver in Cherylyn Lavagnino’s Treize en Jeu. Rehearsal photo: Travis McGee

Treize en Jeu marked the musical high point of the evening. It’s set to Franz Schubert’s luscious Trio in E-flat major D 929 (Op. 100), and the score was played live by Jane Chung (violin), Sarah Biber (cello), and Andrea Lam (piano). Lavagnino’s choreography captures the music’s 19^th-century romanticism by molding ballet steps to convey moods and relationships, without the manners that are integral to the classical repertory and without the deliberate deformations that some contemporary ballet choreographers visit upon the traditional steps. Her duets—athletic, playful, or tender—don’t resemble the usual pas de deux; they erupt from the flow of dancing and slip into intimacy without fanfare or sentimentality. The women are strong as well as elegant and use their pointe shoes primarily as extensions of their feet, rather than as platforms to be pounced onto. Both men and women slip down to the floor as easily as they soar into the air.

The choreography deploys the thirteen dancers in pleasing, overlapping patterns—the women in sleek black leotards, the men in dark shirts and trousers (costumes: Rabiah Troncelliti). You can imagine a party going on somewhere out of our sight; people just breeze onto the stage, pause for some interchanges, and depart to listen to the music and have a glass of wine. Some occasionally assemble in little, informal background choruses.

Laura Mead and Justin Flores in Treize en Jeu. Rehearsal photo: Travis McGee

The dancers are also more diverse than those in a large ballet company. It’s stimulating to watch Clare Westby with Eric Williams, Laura Mead with Justin Flores, Christine Luciano with Samuel Swanton, Kelley with Adrian Silver, Gamna with Gonzalez, Flores with Chau, plus Kristin Diess and Jackie McConnell. There’s no confusing one with another; discipline doesn’t mask individuality.

The basement theater in Baruch College is a sizeable, serviceable, high-ceilinged black box, with a performing area shallower than its width would suggest and little wing space. Still, all three choreographers made excellent use of what the stage offered. The lighting designers—Kathy Kaufmann for Lavagnino, Mark London for Gotheiner, and Murray for Tynek—also managed fine effects with what seemed like a relatively modest amount of equipment. Yes, the opening night program was heavy— freighted with big, musical, full-bodied dancing— but beauty abounded.

Wendy Whelan’s “Restless Creature,” duets choreographed by Kyle Abraham, Joshua Beamish, Brian Brooks, and Alejandro Cerrudo. At Jacob’s Pillow, August 14-17.

Wendy Whelan in Joshua Beamish’s Waltz Epoca. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Ballet dancers tend to have short careers onstage. If they retire at around 36 (as they often do), they’ve spent as many years training to dance as they have performing. Some stay in the field as teachers, choreographers, and company directors. Others become actors, photographers, lawyers, physical therapists, and more.

A few, however, need to continue dancing. Their bodies itch to move; new adventures don’t faze them. Some contemporary forms set no rules for body-shape or age, and eschew the flashy virtuosity that might tax a well-used body. Jirí Kylián formed Netherlands Dance Theater III to showcase stellar mature dancers. Rudolf Nureyev performed in works by Martha Graham and Paul Taylor, among others. So did Mikhail Baryshnikov, before he became even bolder—touring with Twyla Tharp, with Dana Reitz, moving on to Mark Morris and others in his White Oak Dance project, and finally, in his “Past Forward” program working with Judson Dance Theater’s 1960’s vanguard—Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, et al. He’s still seeking out new choreography.

Do ballerinas pursue such venturesome paths?  Not so much. When we speak of Wendy Whelan’s new program, “Restless Creature,” which premiered at Jacob’s Pillow on August 14, we may be talking about a fluke or a landmark. Who knows?  Whelan is still performing principal roles in the repertory New York City Ballet, a company she joined in 1984—and performing them wonderfully. Her mind and body are a respository for choreography by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Peter Martins, Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, and many others. She is 46.

Wendy Whelan and Kyle Abraham in Abraham’s The Serpent and the Smoke. Photo: Christopher Duggan

In looking ahead, Whelan made an interesting decision—and one that requires stamina as well as daring. She invited four gifted male dancer-choreographers to create duets, which she would perform with them. Two of the men—Joshua Beamish and Alejandro Cerrudo—are still under 30; Kyle Abraham and Brian Brooks are under 40. Beamish, Abraham, and Brooks have companies of their own; Cerrudo is Resident Choreographer for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Whelan hoped that they would challenge her, excite her to go beyond what she knew—without, she must have presumed, destroying or denigrating what she has.

Some of the challenges are obvious. In working with these choreographers, she has had to give in to gravity in ways not common in the NYCB’s repertory and to experience different ways in which a man and a woman may form an onstage partnership. She has been asked to move small parts of her body—sometimes simultaneously—in ways that ballet dancers are rarely required to do. She is seldom supposed to resolve a movement in a pose. She has had to venture far off-balance before being caught. She has had to relinquish her pointe shoes, to let her bare feet feel the floor.

One interesting aspect of “Restless Creature” is the image it projects as a whole. Here is this fascinating woman—slim, delicate (albeit with the tensile strength of steel), expressive, yet cool. She enters one man’s world and dances with him, then another’s, etc. The dancer’s voyage is clear in the way Whelan performs each piece of choreography. Although she’s beautifully sure as a performer, she seems to be testing the steps, thinking about them, intently focused on what she’s doing. A restless creature exploring new terrain. But you can also come to see the evening as a woman’s progress through a series of relationships. This man asks things of her that others don’t. This man views her in one way, that one in another.

Wendy Whelan and Alejandro Cerrudo in Cerrudo’s Ego et Tu. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Cerrudo’s Ego et Tu announces the stage as a place that belongs to him, simply because he begins alone there in a pool of light (lighting design by Joe Levasseur), reaching out into the surrounding darkness. His dancing is all flowing. It ripples along with the second of five selections of music that he has chosen, Max Richter’s “The Twins (Prague)” from the record Memoryhouse. I find myself wishing Cerrudo would stop for a second, or move at a different speed.

In view of what happens later, I can think back on this solo in relation to a sense of loss and a dark river. As Cerrudo exits through the center of the black curtain at the rear of the stage, Whelan enters through the same portal; he doesn’t look at her as they pass, nor does she at him. She dances introspectively—like him, mostly in one spot and with something of his sinuousness, but with more subtle dynamic shifts. When she swings one leg around in the air, the move seems almost lush.

Several moments stand out. Cerrudo and Whelan face each other, and, without actually touching him, she appears to bump him with her head. He falls backward. The two walk toward one downstage corner of the stage. She is behind him, pressed against him, reaching around with one hand to cover his eyes. In the end, they walk toward that portal at the back of the stage, arms around each other. I’m not surprised that one of the music selections is “Orphée’s Bedroom,” from the piano suite Philip Glass derived from his opera Orphée. In it, Orpheus and Eurydice are reunited.

Wendy Whelan and Joshua Beamish in Beamish’s Waltz Epoca. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Beamish’s Waltz Epoca follows after a pause. The front curtain, by the way, is open when the audience enters the theater and doesn’t close between pieces, enhancing the image of the stage as an arena where the protagonists will meet. Whelan enters from a downstage corner, walks away from us on a diagonal, and exits. A red cloth of some kind hangs over one arm. Seconds later, she reappears, wearing a unitard in two shades of gray, and assumes a position on half toe, her feet pressed together in fifth position, her body held proudly erect.

This duet, set to mostly un-waltz-like music by Slovenian guitarist-composer Borut Krĭzsnĭk, is as enigmatically tricky and eclectic as the score. Some of the movements veer toward ballet, without really employing ballet steps. The two dancers angle their elbows, cock their wrists. Sometimes Whelan regards the audience with a fashion model’s hauteur. Beamish seems to be copying her opening moves, but, no, not exactly. When they intersect, she looks as if she doesn’t know he’s there, but she must realize that he is when he picks her up and drops her in a new spot. Once there, she walks her fingers down one of her legs.

It’s hard to know what’s in Beamish’s mind, and it’s probably a mistake to try to make sense out of the numerous interesting events he creates for the two of them. In sepulchral light, he deposits Whelan, kneeling and bent over, in the center of the stage. Slowly, a very large and ominous black object descends from overhead; it’s a spotlight, pinning her in its glare. He retreats upstage and becomes feline and watchful. Then the light gets pulled up again. He comes forward, his hands held out as if he were a waiter carrying a tray. After a quick trip offstage, she returns; the red fabric we saw earlier turns out to be the skirt of a red satin ball gown. She looks wonderful, and—perhaps with new confidence—puts her hand on his head and presses him to his knees. But they do waltz together, and, at the end, she’s spinning a circle around him while he waits for. . .I don’t know. . .his destiny.

Kyle Abraham and Wendy Whelan in Abraham’s The Serpent and the Smoke. Photo: Christopher Duggan

In an interview, Abraham said that the title of his duet, The Serpent and the Smoke, refers to what he thought was a folk tale, although he has found no evidence of such a story. In his mind the serpent is entranced by the smoke, whose undulations suggest a mysteriously alluring female snake. It’s an interesting idea to think about as you contrast Abraham’s remarkable muscular fluidity with Whelan’s slightly lighter version of it. The music, two compelling collaborative pieces by the keyboard player Hauschka and the Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, is dark, deep-toned, eerie, and slow-moving.

Whelan is barely visible in the dark at the back of the stage when Abraham begins a solo downstage right. He is an amazing mover, fluid but particular; a small gesture may animate another located somewhere deep in another part of his body. He also has a command of dynamics. His slow undulations may be suddenly broken by a whiplash storm of small, quick moves. No wonder Whelan walks around him, as if trying to figure him out.

Abraham is equally interested in her—awed even. She wants to reach out a foot; he grasps it gently and helps it forward. She lifts a bent leg into a ballet passé; he, crouching beside her watchfully, puts a hand on her knee. But she is helpful too. They stand face to face; she holds his hips, and he, supported by that, arches backward, away from her. They do quite a lot of sinuous dancing, side by side, so that we can see how alike—yet how different—they are. In one curious moment, they skip, opposite each other, around in a circle. But the enigmatic ending is very satisfying. He retreats into near invisibility on the floor at the back of the stage, while she, in a beam of light, takes down her hair and shakes it out. After she has edged offstage, rippling her arms, he rises and assumes again the deep lunge in which he began.

Brian Brooks and Wendy Whelan in Brooks’s First Fall. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Brian Brooks’s mesmerizing First Fall is the only duet on the program that’s not brand new. The Vail International Dance Festival commissioned and presented it in 2012. If you thought Whelan’s arms were getting a workout earlier in this program, this piece goes beyond that. It’s also a powerful end to the evening. The music’s several short pieces by Philip Glass (including—again—“Orphée’s Bedroom”). Like Glass, Brooks is interested in repetition. The many complexities in the first half of the duet never seem fussy because you understand quite soon that they’re part of a large single idea. Maybe it’s a game, maybe a task, yet there’s no goal but the doing. (I think I glimpse a smile on Whelan’s face—a rarity in this program). She and Brooks function as equal partners in a constant wreathing and tangling of arms, and a turning of bodies to accommodate that action. Seldom does one of the two grasp the other and hang on; maybe there is a goal, and it’s never to fulfill a move and acknowledge that it has been fulfilled. In a later passage, I think I discern different intentions. The two stand side by side facing us, and the liquid gestures of their arms now suggest that he is reaching to her, and that she is evading or deflecting his movements.

The last part of First Fall slows down, simplifies, and intensifies the atmosphere. Watching it, I think how difficult learning this dance must have been for Whelan. She is accustomed to being held on balance by a partner who turns her as if she were a top, and who catches her when she runs at him and jumps. Imagine her doing for the first time what Brooks asks of her. She stands still, facing the audience, her arms at her sides; he, behind her and in profile, begins to bend over. Slowly she falls back, arrow-straight. When her body touches his, they continue the downward trajectory together; he ends lying prone, with her draped across him.

Wendy Whelan and Brian Brooks in Brooks’s First Fall. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Over and over, during this smooth, serene section, Brooks becomes Whelan’s fulcrum and cushion, offering his body so she can experience off-balance ways to travel. If she, lying on him turns on her side, he assembles himself and gradually rises to a crouch. Stretched in a cruciform shape and at a slant, she walks as he rotates. As he rises higher and higher, so does she. Then they can walk, side by side, until she feels like falling again. The several variations of this are performed calmly, carefully, trustingly, and tenderly. In the end the two reverse the spiraling walk and finish on the floor in darkness.

The dancers don’t take bows between pieces. On opening night, the four choreographer-performers appeared at the end of the program, acknowledging the audience’s cheers and joining the clapping for their brave, adventurous, and deeply beautiful partner, who kissed and applauded them all.

Wendy Whelan in Alejandro Cerrudo’s Ego et Tu. Photograph: Christopher Duggan

“Restless Creature” will tour in March and April of 2014 (with a run at the Joyce, April 2-7) and appear in London in July. (You can see part of Brooks’s dance on a short youtube documentary from the Vaill Festival, where it premiered.)

The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company celebrates its 45th anniversary.

Clifton Brown and Nicole Corea in the pose that opens Lar Lubovitch’s Vez. Photo: Phyllis McCabe

Permit me to be fanciful about why Lar Lubovitch chose to devote the first half of the first of two programs his company is presenting at the Joyce to three duets (not a decision I would have recommended). However, Lubovitch founded the group that bears his name 45 years ago, and ever since, he has been showing us how much—often intemperately— he is amorous of lush, sensuous movement. Compressed into a duet, his choreography announces his love affair with dancing the minute two performers appear onstage.

The men who perform the profoundly expressive duet from Lubovitch’s 1986 Concerto Six Twenty-Two (in this case, Attila Joey Csiki and Tobin Del Cuore) enter from opposite sides of the stage, walking slowly toward each other to the adagio movement of Mozart’s great clarinet concerto, K.622. What they feel for each other is muted, restrained, but hauntingly clear. The first image in the new Vez is of a man (Clifton Brown) holding his partner (Nicole Corea) upside down at a knife-straight slant, against a glowing red opening in the black curtains behind them. Even if a singer and guitarist weren’t stationed onstage, you’d guess that this relationship is a hot one and that tango will flirt its way into the choreography. When The Time Before the Time After (1971) begins, Katarzyna Skarpetowska and Reed Luplau are locked in an embrace. Her first move is to wilt within his grasp, slide down, let her head fall back, and reach up to him; his first move is to push her away. That’s when Igor Stravinsky’s Concertino for String Quartet gets rough too. Nearly every anguished complication the pair attempts cries out, “I hate you, but I can’t live without you.”

Attila Joey Csiki (L) and Tobin Del Cuore in Lar Lubovitch’s Concerto Six Twenty-Two. Photo: Phyllis McCabe

Within the confines of his chosen atmospheres, Lubovitch finds many eloquent ways of making movement reveal the charged relationships. Virtuosity serves to define both elation and struggle. Concerto Six Twenty-Two, choreographed in the thick of the AIDs crisis, reveals a tender male friendship that is both reticent and deep. The men walk forward, sculpting a pretzel-shaped vow with their curving arms. The next thing you know, Csiki is sitting on Del Cuore’s shoulder as if he’d gotten there in a single exultant bound; when Csiki, kneeling, stretches out one leg like a slanted bed, Del Cuore reclines against it. Each man dances for the other—Del Cuore devouring space with his long legs, Csiki more precise, more erect in his posture, both of them excellent.

Nicole Corea treads on Clifton Brown in Lar Lubovitch’s Vez

Vez is a remake of Lubovitch’s 1989 Fandango. Instead of being performed to Ravel’s ultra-famous Bolero, the reconfigured duet is accompanied by a commissioned score by Randall Woolf. Recorded elements subtly reinforce the live music, performed by singer Mellissa Hughes and guitarist Gyan Riley (for instance, more hands than theirs clap rhythms).  Jack Mehler’s lighting dramatizes the partnership of Brown and Corea, both of whom wear black velvet attire (her costume all but backless).

Even before Brown places his hand meaningfully on his partner’s nearest breast, the two have shown us what unusual connections they can slide their bodies into. He picks her up and folds her into a bundle; he bends deeply backward on a slant and she holds him just before he hits the floor by grasping his neck. He lies down, and she walks on him. The two dancers give the choreography a quiet intensity that’s more gripping than more overt expressions of passion would be; several times they nearly kiss, but decide to titillate each other and the audience by prolonging their foreplay.

Prolong is a key word in another sense. The love that Lubovitch has for rich movement occasionally verges on being out of control. He’s an expert and disciplined dancemaker, especially when it comes to working within prescribed limits (say, those of a Broadway show). But when he’s his only boss, he sometimes can’t stop. He’s like an attentive lover who becomes so extravagant with bouquets and boxes of chocolates that the choreography begins to feel surfeited.

Reed Luplau holds Katerzyna Skarpetowska in Lar Lubovitch’s The Time Before the Time After. Photo: Steven Schreiber

This is true, too, of The Time Before the Time After, even though, in this case, the constant fluctuation between rage and devotion expresses the stuck nature of this pair’s relationship. The duet is full of discomfort and downright nastiness. Luplau grabs Skarpetowska by the hair. He raises a hand, beckons to her, and points toward the floor; she kneels at his feet. Yet, suddenly they may be leaping together, side by side. Their anger erupts into real battles, but is also formalized into the striving, pressured dancing that both perform with bone-deep feeling. The day-in-their-life winds back to that embrace. This time Luplau keeps Skarpetowska in his arms.

It’s a joy to come back from intermission to one of Lubovitch’s finest works, Men’s Stories. I first saw the piece in 2000 in that eerily beautiful former synagogue, the Angel Orensanz Center, then again in 2011 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Fortunately, the Joyce, even though it’s a proscenium set-up, is fairly intimate. Despite the swirling patterns formed by the nine superb performers, Lubovitch wants you to see these men as individuals with their own agendas and needs. Anthony Bocconi, Jonathan E. Alsberry, Csiki, and Luplau all express themselves in solos (Alsberry’s is especially fascinating and not a little weird). Some of them join in duets.

The dance’s subtitle, A Concerto in Ruins, is illuminating. Scott Marshall’s “audio collage” contains all manner of music, speech, and noises—both violent and sweet—but persisting deep within the score, and sometimes surfacing full-voiced, is Beethoven’s fifth and last piano concerto, the “Emperor.”  The composer wrote it in Vienna in 1809, when Napoleon’s army was entering the city, shattering it with artillery fire and explosions.

Lar Lubovitch’s Men’s Stories. Foreground (L to R): Oliver Greene-Cramer, Attila Joey Csiki, Anthony Bocconi, Milan Misko, Clifton Brown. At back: John Michael Schert (L), Reed Luplau, and (top) Jonathan E. Alsberry. Missing: Brian McGinnis. Photo: Steven Schreiber

The nine man in their nearly all-black attire by Ann Hould Ward (trousers, shirts, vests, tailcoats, and shoes) show us their solidarity in unison dance, stare at us as if we’re their mirror, bow, shake imaginary dice, and make courtly gestures (“no, after you”).  Brian McGinnis and Oliver Greene Cramer seal a more than comradely duet with a handshake. But all is not love and brotherhood. Amid the tide of dancing, little tensions surface. Brown makes haughty assertions. The men crowd in on Alsberry to force him offstage.

In service to culture more recent than the 19^th century, Marshall’s composition treats Beethoven’s masterwork roughly—braiding into it or squelching it with what sounds like a jazz singer in a bottle, a lame 1950s (?) sex-education talk between a father and son, a poem, a carousel’s music box, a soprano warbling “Ciribiribin,” as well as explicitly abrasive noises such as broken glass, voices yelling, gunfire. During the last part of Men’s Stories, the dancers remove their coats and roll up their sleeves to fight one another fiercely. It’s amazing how only nine men (Milan Misko and Michael Schert round out the cast), plus Clifton Taylor’s brilliant atmospheric lighting, can convey the messy ferocity of a battlefield. Lubovitch also, briefly, presses the dancers into the kinds of sculptural groupings that represent soldiers struggling toward victory, dying, slogging on.

Beethoven’s concerto—which has continued throughout Men’s Stories, whether heard or not—finally comes to its triumphant end. The men put their coats back on and are resting, when—surprise!— Alsberry appears, manipulating a marionette that’s about two feet tall. Carefully, man and the mannequin walk to various of the dancers, and Alsberry makes his puppet shake a hand, bow, pat a shoulder. This is the first time that I’ve thought of this big-headed little figure in the black suit as Beethoven—come to say, “Thanks, gentlemen. I understand.”

Note: The company’s Program B begins at the Joyce on October 15 and runs through the 20th.

William Forsythe brings his 2011 Sider to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

William Forsythe’s Sider. (L to R): Yasutake Shimaji, Cyril Baldy, Josh Johnson. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

When you watch a recent work by William Forsythe, you may find yourself responding to it on two levels. Sitting in the Brooklyn Academy of Music to watch his 2011 Sider (part of BAM’s 2013 Next Wave Festival), you take in what the dancers are doing (say moving large rectangles of corrugated cardboard around), and you hear a pounding, atmospheric score by Thom Willems. But you also think about what you don’t see or hear—notably the elements that shape what the dancers (co-choreographers all) are doing. In other words, you may be fascinated or perplexed or irritated by the piece, which sometimes resembles a playground for smart, handsome, dysfunctional athletes, and at the same time wondering fitfully just what minute-by-minute commands and given structures are influencing the performance of Sider on any given night.

Forsythe, whose company is based in Dresden and Frankfurt am Main, has said that he keeps “trying to test the limits of what the word choreography means.”  You could see that even in his earlier cranky, ice-sharp ballets, such as In the Middle Somewhat Elevated, which grace the repertories of companies worldwide. His influence has been enormous, too, via projects that extend beyond his own choreography—for instance, his 1994 computer application, Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye. His company members—a few of whom have been working with him since the late 1980s, when he headed Ballett Frankfurt—are remarkably astute; brilliant mental and physical gymnasts. Imagine what it takes for a performer to cope with Forsythe’s practice in relation to Sider. This is his explanation: “We work here with very powerful formal systems, but I continually shatter their logic by inserting exceptions. But before they notice that, I also shatter that logic by inserting exceptions to that exception.”

Fabrice Mazliah alone with the building blocks of Forsythe’s Sider. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

No wonder the performers in Sider sometimes pause or freeze; perhaps they’re putting their brains back together. You can glean some of the elements they must cope with. All of them wear tiny earphones, through which they hear text from a late 16^th-century tragedy. They ignore the plot and move to the rhythms of a film’s soundtrack of the play, aligning with a character during dialogue passages (I’m thinking Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and the sweep of a blank-verse sentence). They also occasionally hear the voice of Forsythe commenting or giving instructions. In their heads, they carry city maps that they have designed; they may travel through these and/or semi-construct their contours with the cardboard slabs. Forsythe wants to promote an air of  “anxious anticipation,” and his tactics elicit just that.

This last bit of information helps to explain the first few moments of Sider. Frances Chiaverini and Fabrice Mazliah are moving in close proximity. She wields two of the cardboard sheets; he adjusts his own body in various thoughtful ways. At moments, you think that she might plan on scooping him up or building something with his cooperation, but you can’t discern a joint purpose or relationship. The two are following separate maps; because they’re working so near to each other, the maps overlap.

The environment in which this society works and plays is a cheerful one, despite the array of overhead fluorescent tubes that wink off and on at times (“light object” by Spencer Finch, lighting by Ulf Naumann and Tanja Rühl). On rare occasions, a sentence is projected above the stage. One says, “she is to them as they are to us;” another other says, “she is to that as this is to him.” Yes, these eighteen dancers have separate agendas; yes, they are both performers and spectators of others’ performing. Dorothee Merg has dressed them in vivid outfits that feature eccentric floral or camouflage prints, plus bright-colored jackets and hoods or ski masks. One of them (Riley Watts, as I recall) wears a huge white ruff and a dark suit that refer us to Elizabeth I’s reign). David Kern is a vision in pink as he crouches behind a panel, jabbering in a made-up language.  A couple of the panels bear words; his says “in disarray.”

The inhabitants of Forsythe’s Sider. (L to R): Dana Caspersen, Fabrice Mazliah, Frances Chiaverini. At back: Ander Zabala. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Never have you seen such elegant depictions of controlled disarray. Consensus appears out of nowhere. At one point, dancers start galloping around the stage, holding the panels in front of them horizontally. As they go they bang the panels ahead of them with their knees. The aural-visual image that pops into mind is of a bunch of Monte-Python knights riding into battle. Only occasionally does everyone agree on a single action—for instance, to form a tableau together or to face us, holding the boards in front of themselves, as if to wall off a jury box.

The controlled disarray applies to their bodies too, whenever anyone stops building something or wandering around listening to the voice in his/her ears and starts to dance. Forsythe is a master of the deconstructed body, of the sensual tug-of-war between, say, a dancer’s hips and head and shoulders (Mazliah is a marvel at this). The performers in Sider also have a way of disappearing behind the cardboard props; at one point, a few of them build their own little Tower of Babel to shelter in.

Although they may scamper around or drop into a bit of hopscotch or spar with one another, they don’t appear particularly playful. Nor do they often communicate verbally; Dana Caspersen and Kern do speak at each other (I can’t recall their words).  Kern, popping from one side of a panel to the other, speaks for two different characters in the play, suiting his gibberish to their dialogue.

(L to R): Brigel Gjoka, Ander Zabala, and David Kern in Sider. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

In the last few minutes of Sider, the piece winds back to its beginning. The same small, precarious arrangement of several panels stands where it stood when the curtain rose. Again, Chiaverini and Mazliah pursue their individual paths, although she appears to be having some trouble with her cardboard sheets. Kern is talking quietly.  All is as it was, only not.

We’ve been seeing and appreciating many of these multi-national Forsythe collaborators for a number of years.  Yoko Ando, Cyril Baldy, Esther Balfe, Caspersen, Anancio Gonzalez, Kern, Mazliah, Tilman O’Donnell, Nicole Peisl, Jone San Martin, and Ander Zabala are familiar faces (assuming we can see their faces under those hoods). Katja Cheraneva, Chiaverini, Brigel Gjoka, Josh Johnson, Natalia Rodina, Yasutake Shimaji, Ildikó Tóth, and Watts are comparative newcomers to the group (although Tóth has worked in the U.S. with Susan Marshall and others). I list their names not just because of their contributions to Sider as choreographers and on-the-spot improvisers, but because they are such vivid and daring performers in what I see as a puzzle that has no correct answers, a maze with a lot of dead-end streets, and a not too stressful vision of an adult recess in the school days of life.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas and graindelavoix perform in En Atendant and Cesena.

Members of Rosas and graindelavoix walk together in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cesena. Photo: Stephanie Berger

I wish that I had been in Avignon in July of 2010. Then I could have seen Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s En Atendant performed in the ancient Cloister of the Celestines, and, a week later, her companion piece, Cesena, in the Court of Honor, an amphitheater attached to the Papal Palace.  Both were performed in natural light—the first as dusk deepened into night; the second as the dark early morning hours gradually yielded to dawn. There would have been birds and winds and distant sounds from a slumbering city.

Moreover, the two astonishing works would have been cloaked in the history of the French city. The music for both pieces dates from the late 14^th century—a time when the plague killed thousands, and men were constantly riding into battle, or seeking to rape and pillage. Too, some of the songs from the Codex Chantilly that accompany Cesena have connections to the papal schism of 1378, which resulted in a pope in Avignon (where one had been quartered for some 70 years) and one back in the papacy’s original site: Rome. The Avignon pope installed at the time, Clement VII, was the cardinal who had previously ordered the slaughter of every man, woman, and child in the village of Cesena, just to show what happened to people who questioned the authority of the church.

De Keersmaeker’s En Atendant and Cesena, however, were astonishing enough on the Brooklyn Academy stage, with theatrical lighting conveying the passage of time, plus a slender band of sand across the stage to remind us of En Atendant’s outdoor origin and a circle of sand for Cesena. Audiences could see the first at 2:00 P.M. and/or the second at 7:30. Many people elected to see both on the same day.

These two pieces reveal what has been a constant in De Keersmaeker’s work: a poetic and expressive use of form. Roses danst Rosas (1983), one of the earliest works that her Belgium-based company performed here, was sometimes mentioned in relation to minimalism. But her choice of the simple moves and gestures performed by four women in carefully restricted space rendered the dance anything but minimal. Like Rosas, the fastidiously structured works she has created since then resonate with human feeling, despite the absence of any through-composed narrative. She has remarked that she doesn’t view dancers as inert, malleable materials, but rather as people who reveal their humanity in every move they make.

(L to R) Aron Blom and Marie Goudot in Cesena. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The process that De Keersmaeker and her dancers have gone through to create these two works—along with the collaborating musical director Björn Schmelzer and the seven singers who move with the dancers in Cesena—is one that digs deep into the music’s structures; into resonant spatial symbols, such as interlocking circles and a pentagon within a circle; into mathematics (the Fibonaci numbers, for example); into the I-Ching, into architectural principles; into history; and more. Unless you have delved into En Atendant & Cesena: A Choreographer’s Score, by De Keersmaeker and Bojana Cveljić (distributed by Yale University Press), you would not know all the details that gave birth to her choreographic ideas.

However—and this is difficult to explain—you nevertheless have a sense of deep matters shaping what you see—elements that you needn’t try to identify. The integral structures, so subtly alluded to in the dances, hold everything together and keep you alert. Both pieces shimmer with mysteries veiled, re-purposed, and dissected; watching the performances is like peering in a deep well; you intimate the water that seeps into it, imagine the faces it has reflected, and fear to think what may lie at its bottom.

(L to R) Carlos Garbin, Mark Lorimer, Chrysa Parkinson, Sue-Yeon Youn, and Sandy Williams in En Atendant. Photo: Stephanie Berger

You can be happily surprised when Mikael Marklund’s sudden burst of leaps in En Atendant roils a quiet moment; you needn’t know that he is temporarily personifying the gush of the fountain being sung of, being longed for. Also in En Atendant, Bošjian Antončič explodes into a remarkable, apparently unprovoked fit— vigorously slashing the air, twisting and turning, striking, recoiling. While others onstage stare, he calms down, then jolts into solitary battle again. The startled viewer will not know that Antončič, along with each of the seven other dancers in En Atendant, has internalized a brief description (provided by performer Chrysa Parkinson) of characters associated with the music’s own history, a number of them members of the powerful Visconti family. Antončič’s assumed persona was defined as “greedy, crafty, cruel and ferocious, given to paroxysms of rage and macabre humor,” and noted that “had a sense of formalized violence” was pent up inside him.”

Likewise, you will not understand why Carlos Garbin prowls around in the background, watching Antončič (and I will not tell you); the enigmatic tension between the two men is enough. And you will come to see that watchfulness is characteristic of the worlds shown in both dances. The performers are always staring at what is happening, making decisions, repositioning themselves, and looking at events from a new angle. The song “En Atendant” is heard three times in the course of the dance of that name. Waiting for what?  For death to come, whether from the plague or from the sword?  For a lover to return, or love to blossom?  For those in exile from Rome serving the antipope?  All of these, surely, and more.

De Keersmaeker also shows images of death or illness. These are very formally presented; dancers simply lie down, facing the ground or supine, and lie there for a few seconds or longer. There’s a moment in Cesena when Parkinson is prone, and Aron Blom kneels beside her, singing verses called “Corps femenin.” The words praise the body of a child queen dead at ten years old; Blom gently rearranges Parkinson’s head and limbs in small ways, making them “dance” again.

En Atendant begins with an uncanny musical prelude. Michael Schmid advances to the front of the stage, where he slowly, ceremoniously raises the flute he is carrying and begins to play. No, not at first playing, simply breathing. Finally a high, thin note emerges, then a soft, deeper one joins it. The high note never stops; the low, intermittent one becomes growly or flutters. Schmid, practicing circular breathing, doesn’t sway his body the way some flautists do; he stands almost motionless. I say “almost” because, at times, his white shirt palpitates as if stirred by a rapid, delicate panting. Seldom has breath been so directly offered as a subject in a dance.

(L to R): Mark Lorimer, Cynthia Loemij, Carlos Garbin, Chrysa Parkinson, Mikael Marklund, Sue-Yeon Youn, Sandy Williams, Bart Coen, Annelies Van Gramberen, and Thomas Baeté in En Atendant. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The music that impels and accompanies En Atendant is performed by the ensemble Cour et Coeur: its music director and recorder player, Bart Coen; Thomas Baeté, who performs on the antique fiddle known as a vielle; and Annelies Van Gramberen, she of the crystal-clear soprano, undisturbed by vibrato. When the black-clad dancers (costumes by Anne-Catherine Kunz) walk from one side of the stage to the other and back again a number of times, there’s a logic you can’t quite fathom. Individuals gradually join the group to step at a measured pace, sometimes pausing at various times. With the musicians silent, you can see that there are three walking patterns, which the music later brings out. (It turns out that subgroups have been walking the rhythms, phrase shapes, and durations of three differently pitched strands in the music: the conductus (low), the contratenor (high), and the tenor (between the two). Once the musicians join, the dancers’ contrapuntal patterns in relation to those three elements become more complex, their steps more strenuous, their pace swifter. People touch one another, form chains, appear to consult.

(L to R): Mark Lorimer, Carlos Garbin, Chrysa Parkinson, Mikael Marklund, Cynthia Loemij, and Sandy Williams in En Atendant. Photo: Stephanie Berger

What you see in all this is a community that wavers between decision and indecision—one that tries different strategies within limits and may be concerned about external forces. Sometimes you discern the structures. Early in En Atendant, Parkinson performs a solo in silence; she explores its changes of direction, dynamics, and body designs with an everyday energy and a certain care, as if these sophisticated moves were a familiar household task. You find that you recognize elements of this solo when they appear later, performed by other dancers, perhaps in differing order, perhaps in retrograde.

Much remains enigmatic. Sandy Williams crashes to the floor from a jump. Sue-Yeon Youn dances in a gentle questioning manner, shifting her gaze in different directions, and whenever she wants to sink into a squat, Parkinson and then Cynthia Loemij take her hand to steady her, but their touch is extremely light, as if she were too fragile to be grasped. Occasionally one person whispers a secret to another. In one sequence, the performers create tableaux and hold their poses for a few seconds; these images have the air of stills from a cinematic battlefield. The performers also begin to alter their attire—adding or removing various items of clothing, or exchanging them for others. Mark Lorimer sheds his jeans and Loemij puts them on.

Sue-Yeon Youn in En Atendant, watched by Chrysa Parkinson, Cynthia Loemij, Mikael Marklund and Sandy Williams. Photo: Stephanie Berger

It takes a while to realize that a major element of the lighting and Michel François’ design, a suspended panel of lights, is gradually eliminating the small lamps two by two. By the time Lorimer performs the final solo, the stage is quite dark, but he is naked, and, especially when he dances in the foreground, his pale body seems luminescent. He keeps disappearing into blackness at the back of the space, and then re-appearing. Finally it’s too dark to see him.

I haven’t said how remarkable the performers are—both in executing choreographed sequences and in improvising on them. Their skills become even more varied in Cesena, as do those of the additional dancers and the singers who join them to make a cast of 19. In this part of the diptych, the music is all vocal, belonging to the style termed ars subtilior, the refinement of ars nova that flourished between 1470 and 1490.  The seven singers are members of graindelavoix, the ensemble directed by Schmeltzer. They move with the dancers, and the dancers sing with them. Many of the ravishing musical selections are four-part motets, and, like many motets may incorporate two diverse texts—in the case of Cesena, mingling religious ones with political ones.

En Atendant ends in darkness with a naked man alone on stage. Cesena begins in darkness, again with a naked man the only person there, and barely visible. But this man (it is Marklund) also refers back to Schmid’s flute playing at the beginning of En Atendant. He is not singing as much as he is yelling, albeit in controlled rhythms, and he is not motionless, as Schmid was. Between gusts of calling out on long notes (you imagine him a watchman alerting the town to coming danger or a Greek messenger recounting the horrors he has seen), he bends over to take a breath, and whistling sounds mix with his voice.

Running around the circle of sand inscribed in the middle of the stage floor, he, like Lorimer before him, shines in the darkness, The sounds of his galloping feet as he exits are echoed by unseen members of the cast. They gradually—dimly— appear  in a horizontal line as they walk forward. Holding on to one another to keep the same rhythm, they turn and retreat, turn and come forward again. As they continue this pattern, Marklund hits a stick against something at the side to create a pulse (and to refer to workmen building), and the performers begin to sing the first motet “ Pictagore per dogmata/O Terra supplica,” with three singers taking the cantus and contratenor lines, while the others sing and walk with the tenor one. As the music ends, we begin to hear more whistling and feet brushing the floor.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cesena. Foreground: Chrysa Parkinson and Matej Kejžar. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The dawn seems very slow in coming. It takes a while to discern that all the performers are men, with the exception of Parkinson, Marie Goudot, and singer Olalla Alemán. They could be soldiers on the march, monks, who knows?  Williams, hurling himself around, begins to scatter the sand in the circle; its outline will become blurrier as Cesena progresses.

The contrapuntal patterns that we see and hear create, in their own ways, images of resistance, destruction, rebuilding, injury, rescue, and death. As people move closer together, they touch, push, pull, and support one another. The very title aligns this work with the demolishing of Cesena and its citizenry, along with the role played in that action by the pope-in-waiting. We see, too, what might be illness or drunkenness; at one point, Albert Riera drags himself along as if crippled. At another, some people cluster and, holding on to one another, sneak along, bent over and walking on tiptoe. A hoped-for escape?

There’s a wonderful sequence in which Parkinson and Goudot, joined by several others, including Alemán singing “En attendant d’amer,” begin a phrase by Parkinson that incorporates gestures seen in En Atendant (one involves the performers crossing their arms to bury their hands in their armpits—soldiers hiding the black spots of the plague). The light is brightening, and in imitation of the mirror that was positioned on a rooftop in Avignon, smaller mirrors reflect light onto the faces of Parkinson and Goudot, so that they appear transfigured by the thought of love.

(Foreground, L to R): Aron Bolm, David Hernandez, Chrysa Parkinson, Sandy Williams, and Marius Peterson in Cesena. Photo: Stephanie Berger

During this two-hour spectacle, I wished again that I had been among the 2000 witnessing Cesena in Avignon. Sitting there, I could have looked up and seen the sky turning to lavender to pink to blue and heard birds beginning to stir. The spectators at BAM who became restless during the long, dark beginning would have been able to peer into shadows where 14^th-century people hid or exchanged secrets, and imagine this time of disasters. They could have likened the sun’s gradual ascent to the slow dawn of the Renaissance.

Cesena gives rise to another thought. De Keersmaeker is bringing to life in her own way an historical religious schism, the events and feelings associated with it, and the music of the time. At one point, the mingled ensemble of 12 dancers and seven singers separate in half and draw apart. Albert Riera on one side of the stage and Garbin on the other conduct the singing from within their groups. Rome faces Avignon. Sometimes, schisms even occur within the performers’ bodies—their feet walking one musical part while they chant another.

Yet over the course of the piece, singers travel, tangle, and collapse with the dancers, and dancers join their voices with those of the singers.  Matej Kejžar stops dancing for a moment and roughens his voice to sing—alone— a Slavic folk song. So it’s not just a new day dawning and, by analogy, the eventual end to the Avignon papacy that De Keersmaeker suggests in Cesena.  The musicians and dancers, working together, have built a joint structure and, in so doing, heal any schisms that one may have thought to exist between their two born-together artistic disciplines.

Garth Fagan Dance brings two new works to the Joyce Theater, November 12 through 17.

Classic Fagan dancers (L to R): Nicolette Depass, Steve Humphrey, and Norwood Pennewell, as seen  in
Garth Fagan’s 2010 Thanks Forty. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu.

Why is it that I always want to begin writing about Garth Fagan’s Rochester-based company by hymning the dancers? Maybe because he evidently feels the same way about them that I do. His Prelude (1981, revised 1983), which opens one of the group’s two programs at the Joyce, introduces them to us—old-timers and newcomers alike—as vibrant, dedicated members of a community, with killer physical skills. When the great Norwood Pennewell opens Prelude, you understand the piece’s subtitle: “Discipline is Freedom.”  Here are the huge bounding jumps and leaps that appear without evident preparation—as if springs coiled inside each of the dancer’s legs had suddenly been released. Here are the very fast spins that chain across the stage; the long balances on the ball of one foot, while the other leg hovers somewhere high in the air; the spurts of rapid footsteps and their slow, sensuous opposite.

Prelude is not only an introduction to the dancers; it demonstrates how they train, as well as compiling a catalogue of the steps that—varied and deployed in many ways—appear in all the pieces that Fagan has designed for the company and the three that Pennewell has created since 2010. Fagan is one of the few choreographers working today whose style is immediately recognizable; if I came across dancers in a remote village in the Caucasus, say, or in Mozambique, doing certain movements, I’d ask, “When was Garth here?”

That’s not to deny that elements of modern dance, jazz, Caribbean, and African styles reside in the sub-strata of his choreography. But he shapes them to his personal dynamic, his ideas about structure and the practice of dance. You’d never want to apply the ballet term glissade to the speedy, lightly airborne side-step with which his dancers zoom across the stage. Fagan’s works are also shaped by his vision of community and how individuals within it relate. Reading the casting information for GFD’s Program A at the Joyce after I got home, I had to laugh. Various names may identify the leaders of a particular section of a dance, followed by “and Company.”  But what you actually see goes beyond “stars” and “ensemble.”  Under the rubric of “company,” solos pop up, trios form, people join in couples, five dancers decide to get together. Fagan is that anxious to show you how leaders emerge and easily rejoin the supposed followers.

Natalie Rogers, costumed for Garth Fagan’s No Evidence of Failure. Photo: Greg Barrett

Fagan’s company regime (a daily morning technique class and an evening one followed by a rehearsal) carves and disciplines both bodies and spirits and enlivens minds wisely (Steve Humphrey, an original member of the company, still spins his 61-year-old self through Prelude and Lighthouse/Lightning Rod). One of the pieces premiering at the Joyce is titled No Evidence of Failure. It honors the astonishing powerful and beautiful Natalie Rogers, who joined the company in 1989, left it in 2004 to raise a child, and re-joined it seven years later. Fifty-one?  No sweat (not that we can see, anyway).  Arching backward in a spotlight, lashing her arms around body, balancing, spinning, she’s a mistress of controlled dynamics. She can hit positions suddenly and hold them without a quaver, before releasing herself into an intricate flurry of footsteps.  She can stand on one leg and rearrange her arms, torso, and head. She’s so sensitive to the phrasing of a selection from Monty Alexander’s Harlem-Kingston Express Live that the recorded applause might well be inspired by her.

When her partner, Vitolio Jeune, arrives on stage and starts running around, she’s standing where she ended her solo, one leg held waist-high in front of her, while she “sleeps,” one cheek on a lifted hand. Jeune comes up behind her and gently embraces her; she nestles against him, her leg still hung out to dry. Only when he lifts her, does her stance alter. As they back up toward a far corner to separate into separate but related passages of dancing, Rogers gives her partner a little kiss on the cheek. A sweet gesture and an acknowledgment of this terrific dancer, twenty years her junior.

Vitolio Jeune in Norwood Pennewell’s Gin. Photo: John Schlia

Pennewell didn’t mean his new Gin to refer to the juniper-spiced liquor, but to the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney in 1793. The machine, which winnowed out the seeds from the cotton, was labor-saving; on the other hand, the increased productivity also resulted in an expansion of slavery in the American South.  After I saw the piece, I read that Pennewell had embedded in the piece several “focal points” that draw on and distill elements from a preceding section. I can’t say that I perceived this cotton-gin-related structure in the choreography, but however Pennewell used the idea, the outcome was a finely made piece.

As is Fagan’s frequent practice, Pennewell chose different pieces of music to accompany each of Gin’s four sections. Alarm Will Sound started the work with Aphex Twin’s “Blue Calx and a steady beat that sounds more like a stick hitting wood than a drumstick on skin. Yo-Yo Ma and three colleagues contributed “Quarter Dark Chicken” (remix by Douala); the spiritual “Calvary” provided the base for Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Quartet No. 1; and Gin ended with Felix Laband’s “Donkey Rattle” (another Douala remix). Somehow they all work together.

What look somewhat like dark vines are intermittently projected across the back cyclorama, and at one point (for no reason that I can discern), Lutin Tanner’s lighting turns that background orange. Pennewell keeps the dancing at a controlled boil. Nearly all the nine dancers bubble out of it in fleeting solos, duets, and small groups. Rogers! Jeune! Roderick Calloway! Charity Metzger! Raven Jelks!  Shannon Castle! Rogers dances slowly and smoothly, coming close to the front of the stage and giving us a bold stare. Behind her, Nicolette Depass and Wynton Rice begin their own adventure to Perkinson’s stringed-instruments exploration. During an earlier trio to “A Quarter Dark Chicken,” Anjue David starts jittering happily around, trying to get Jeune and Rice to join him. They stand there looking tired and exasperated until he gives up.

Members of Garth Fagan Dance in Fagan’s Lighthouse/Lightning Rod. Photo: Brendan Bannon

Watching excerpts from Fagan’s 2012 Lighthouse/Lightning Rod, you can see how Pennewell inherited his mentor’s way of moving individuals in and out of the group, or segmenting an ensemble into, say, a slew of trios, without losing the image of community. Both also insert bits of everyday human drama into a formal structure. For instance, a couple of times in this Fagan work, set to a score by Wynton Marsalis, Rogers and Sade Bully whirl through, hanging onto each other, sudden girlfriends sharing a confidence. Fagan and Pennewell also share a view of women as mostly strong and independent. The first half of Lighthouse/Lightning Rod’s title is represented by the towering statue of a woman (by Alison Saar), whose bronzed head, chest, and arms emerge from a yards-long skirt. People kneel down to this goddess, who presides over a blue-clad wave of dancers.

In one sequence of the work, the performers bend low and unfurl one arm, elbow first, to the sky. These marvelous dancers are Fagan’s lightning rods, pulling down inspiration into the rich soil of his work.

Gina Gibney Dance premieres Dividing Line at Florence Gould Hall. November 14-16.

Zachary Leigh Denison holds Amy Miller in Gina Gibney’s Dividing Line. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Gina Gibney is a force on the New York dance scene. The force behind Gibney Dance Community Action, a program that stages workshops (over 500 annually) for survivors of domestic violence . The force behind the Gibney Dance Center at 19^th Street and Broadway, where Barbara Matera’s immense theatrical costume shop, one large studio, three (?) smaller ones, and Gibney’s office have been transformed into seven handsome rental studios of various dimensions, from soloist-size to Broadway-musical-size, plus amenities (a lunchroom for instance).  As a choreographer, she knows what dance can achieve in the world and what creators need to be able to reach their goals.

How she finds time to make dances herself is a wonder. She’s not prolific—her newest work, Dividing Line, developed over the course of a year, in collaboration with its dancers.  Still, she’s been choreographing for over two decades, using her humanistic vision and her interest in dancers as individuals to make thoughtful, powerfully physical works.

Dividing Line, which premiered in the French Alliance:Alliance Française’s Florence Gould Hall, is a handsome production, with lighting by Kathy Kaufmann, sleek costumes by David C. Woolard, and a tailor-made score by Son Lux (Ryan Lott). Lott’s excellent music is played on stage by members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME): Clarice Jensen, cello; Ben Russell and Caroline Shaw, violins; and (at the performance I saw) Caleb Burns, viola.

Gina Gibney’s Dividing Line. (L to R, front to back): Zachary Leigh Denison, Amy Miller, Javier Baca, Natsuki Arai, Jennifer McQuiston Lott, Jake Bone. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Gibney’s title spawns numerous possibilities: divisions in space; personal moral quandaries; and divisions that separate humans—whether by age, gender, or beliefs, or just by quarrels over dinner. Dividing Line’s initial expression of this theme is a spatial one. The six dancers are lined up across the front of the stage, their backs to us. (Oh, right, there’s that fence too: the one between spectators and performers.)  Amy Miller takes the first adventurous steps out of the line, making us sense that the terrain between her and the black curtain at the back of the stage is a slightly dangerous one; Natsuki Arai starts after her. Before long, the others—Javier Baca, Jake Bone, Zachary Leigh Denison, and Jennifer McQuiston Lott—have broken ranks and are showing themselves as individuals, sharing the space in their own ways.

Before long, Gibney has shown us other imaginary lines. Partners lean together, braced shoulder to shoulder, in a line of couples that stretches from the front to the back of the stage. Then they break away from that stressful but tidy structure. Two people grab hands and pull against each other. If someone or something were to sever the point of contact, the formation would topple. Other lines are less obvious. How many things can separate people from other people? One duet ends in an embrace, another in separation, another in a questioning look.

In Dividing Line’s many short sections, Gibney shows a predilection for strong, expansive movement, plus what almost amounts to a love affair with the floor. The dancers seem to spend almost as much time anchored to it in various inventive ways as a hip-hop dancer might. Miller, lying down, rolls and twists her way around a perfect circle. (There was a point, maybe in an encounter between Baca and Denison, when I wished that they’d get to their feet, but perhaps Gibney was thinking of creatures—whether human or animal—slinking laboriously around as they size each other up.)

Center: Natsuki Arai lifts Jennifer McQuiston Lott in Dividing Line. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

But not every move is a whole-bodied one. The choreography can make you focus on a raised foot that a dancer, prone on the floor, is slowly lowering. In one duet, Miller and Denison reach behind themselves and use one hand to prick the other palm, as if sending a covert message in Morse Code. Gibney is adept at breaking unison into counterpoint. She also stitches rhythmic, dynamic, and spatial variations into her phrases of movement, so there’s almost always something compelling— and sometimes surprising—to look at, such as some hunky, spraddle-legged walks amid the smoother dancing.

The dancers are very fine. Miller has the most to do, and she is a powerful performer—lean and strong, capable of giving expressive nuances to her dancing. Bone, who only came into the process a month ago, has the least time onstage. Arai, Baca, and Denison emerge as prominent, while Lott (whom I admired very much) is less so. This slight inequality among the five puzzles me slightly (I find myself thinking of Miller as a leader, a “heroine,” and then having to suppress that feeling because the choreography doesn’t pursue this as a possible thread).

Foreground: Zachary Leigh Fermor and Amy Miller in Gibney’s Dividing Line. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

I admire Baca’s ease onstage and the way he looks interested in whomever he’s dancing with. When he and Miller move to plucked strings and what sounds close to musical meows coming from the instruments, he brings out the playfulness in her (they exit on opposite sides of the stage, however).

Midway through the piece, the black curtains open, and Kaufmann’s lighting opens up the space—tinting the back wall lavender or giving it an orange glow. Midway, too, I ask myself what is everything leading to?  Or, considering Dividing Line as variations on a theme, is it meant to lead to anything?  The ending sends an unexpectedly strong, yet enigmatic message. After some lively dancing to very perky music, the dancers shed their onstage manners and walk toward the front of the stage—not in lockstep, but informally, as if the show were over. The lights turn them into silhouettes, as they reach their hands out to one another. But there’s enough illumination for us to see Miller turn and start toward the rear of the stage; suddenly she freezes and looks back over her shoulder at the others, who remain facing the audience. Has she changed her mind about leaving this warm and spirited little community?  Blackout.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premieres Aszure Barton’s Lift at City Center.

(L to R): Jacqueline Green, Linda Celeste Sims, Kelly Robotham, and Belen Pereyra of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Aszure Barton’s Lift. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Any choreographer invited to make a piece for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater must come to the first rehearsal with both elation and trepidation. The Ailey dancers are like racehorses—sleek, swift, eager, ablaze with temperament.  What can you feed them?  How do you groom them?  Are you up to the job?

Robert Battle, who took over as artistic director of AAADC in 2011, is the first “outsider” to lead the company. His predecessor, Judith Jamison, had danced in it for 15 years and headed it for 21. Battle has made some smart decisions—such as acquiring Ohad Naharin’s Opus 16 and Paul Taylor’s Arden Court and commissioning new work from Rennie Harris and Kyle Abraham.

The current City Center season shows off the dancers in Wayne McGregor’s Chroma and Bill T. Jones’s D-Man in the Waters (Part I); the commissioned premieres are Ronald K. Brown’s Four Corners and Aszure Barton’s Lift. So far, Lift is the only one I’ve been able to see.

Barton puzzles me. I found the first small works of hers that I saw bold, original, and fascinating, wasn’t crazy about her One of Three for American Ballet Theatre, but enjoyed how she employed Juilliard students in her wild-west Happy Little Things (Waiting on a Gruff Cloud of Wanting). What surprises me about her Lift is a kind of inconsistency—of trails pondered but not taken. There are dramatic lighting effects by Burke Brown (including smoke), a dozen or so men,  and six women. The men are bare-chested above their dark gray pants, except for slim gold necklaces. The women wear dresses by Fritz Masten that pair halter tops with feathery layered skirts.

Jamar Roberts in Aszure Barton’s Lift. Photo: Paul Kolnik

We seem to have stumbled into a ritual from some undetermined African country. At the outset, tall powerful  Jamar Roberts is flanked by Renaldo Gardner and Daniel Harder. Close together, facing front, they hunker down into the emphatic rhythms in Curtis Macdonald’s score. When they turn away from us, they face the other men, ranged along the dark back of the stage. In lines, all retreat and advance, shaking their shoulders, stepping hard, sometimes jumping straight up. At one point, only Roberts and his two companions are lit, but—and this is revealing—the two  are now Antonio Douthit-Boyd and Kirven Douthit-Boyd. Revealing because I wouldn’t have noticed the change had I not been told of it. So is Barton making a point about replacement and cycles of life?  If so, what with all the great-looking, identically garbed men forming patterns and showing their virility and dedication in unison steps, who focuses on individual faces?

Most of the steps have a tribal look to them (Roberts is wonderful at all of them—supple, strong, focused, charismatic). The performers move into wide-legged, bent-kneed stances; they bring their hips and shoulders into play. And, over and over, they slap their thighs. They also, however, lift their straight legs high, toes pointed, and turn in balletic attitudes—as if steps from some other works in the Ailey repertory have sneaked in. Sometimes, an interesting group pattern will emerge—such as the three men doing their thing amid— and semi-screened by—lines of others doing different steps. But Barton seems committed to having a lot of people onstage most of the time. The texture of the piece is thick and unchanging, the stage often filled with evenly spaced-out dancers.

Matthew Rushing advances toward the women in Barton’s Lift. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Occasionally people open their mouths in silent yells; at least once, the yells are audible. In a moment of prominence, Ghrai deVore and Marcus Jarrell Willis laugh out loud while they dance. The principal variations in tone appear in a solo for Matthew Rushing and a duet for Linda Celeste Sims and Roberts. Both these vignettes come out of the blue and remain enigmatic. Rushing, now a guest artist with the company, as well as a rehearsal director, enters the action like a visiting shaman, first backed by the women. Or maybe he’s our host. Rippling his arms, strutting a bit, he takes over the stage. Who he is and why another man writhes introspectively in the background during his solo are mysteries. Rushing is, of course, marvelous—weaving every step that the choreographer gives him into a fluent, eloquent statement. He, too, turns his back to the audience, and trudges toward the dark rear of the stage, shoulders shuddering.

Linda Celeste Sims devours Jamar Roberts in Lift. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Since Roberts performs the duet with this beautiful woman who just dropped out of the female ensemble, should we assume that he is entering a new phase in his life, or a new role in this busy society?  What’s intriguing and original about the duet is also what’s weird about it. As the two travel together across the front of the stage, Sims pushes her head into Roberts’ midriff; his spine curves as he shrinks away from the impact, then expands again.  As she travels toward the wings—he following— the process repeats and varies. She could be kissing his open, receptive chest or inhaling his manliness or sucking out his soul. Who can be sure in this strangely constructed world?

Rennie Harris’s Home, which opened the December 7^th matinee, offers a different vision of community. The lively, beautifully designed piece premiered on December 1, 2011,  World AIDs Day and the 22^nd anniversary of Ailey’s death, but you might not guess from looking at the work that the solo figure represents a man isolated from the group because of the virus. What you see is a vibrant bunch of people—14 counting the wonderfully expressive Harder, who is exiled but, in the end, returns to the fold. He could be anyone who is seen as “different” but then embraced despite that.

In the meantime, the dancers come and go—now in hordes, now in threesomes, in quartets, two at a time. Harris keeps the stage atmosphere as changeable as that of a good party, except that everyone is expert at the steps drawn from hip-hop, and in tune with everyone else. Harris doesn’t present any of the moves as grandstanding and weaves everything into foot-lively, body-shaking, going-somewhere patterns. This choreographed community maintains its identity and reveals the dancers who make it up as the bright, gifted individuals that they are.

The original cast in Rennie Harris’s 2011 Home (Alicia Graf Mack center). Photo; Paul Kolnik

The program concluded with Ailey’s iconic Revelations; I regret that, for once, I couldn’t stay to see unfamiliar dancers in roles I practically know by heart.

Juilliard students appear in premieres by Takehiro Ueyama, Brian Brooks, and Darrell Grand Moultrie, plus a reconstruction of a work by Pina Bausch.

Fourth-year Juilliard students Kristina Bentz and Bynh Ho in Pina Bausch’s Wind von West. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Every winter, the Juilliard School presents its dance students in four new works. All its dance students.  Although—since some pieces are double cast—you might have to attend two performances to see every single talented dancer on stage. This year, from December 11 through 15, Takehiro Ueyama displayed the dance department’s first-year students in his Nakamura; Brian Brooks took on the second-year dancers in Torrent; and the third-year students performed Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Seeds of Endurance. The 2013 edition of New Dances, however, had to be titled New Dances PLUS, because the 2014 graduating class is performing a revival, and a very important one: Pina Bausch’s Wind von West.

Tanztheater Wuppertal, Bausch’s company, premiered Wind von West (Wind from the West) on December 3, 1975, along with her great Rite of Spring and a smaller-scale dance, Der zweite Frühling (The Second Spring)—all set to music by Igor Stravinsky. The entire program was revived in Wupptertal and presented this past November to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the company that the late choreographer founded.

The revival also marked a coming together of Juilliard’s senior class and students at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen (Bausch herself studied at both institutions), as part of the TANZFONDS ERBE Project directed by Bausch veteran Dominique Mercy. Both groups were meticulously coached in Wind von West by Josephine Ann Endicott, who danced its leading role in 1975; Mari DiLena, who understudied her; and John Giffin, another former member of Tanztheater Wuppertal, who performed in it later. Eight Juilliard dancers traveled to Wuppertal to appear in the revival, and seven Folkwang dancers joined the New York cast.

Wind von West is set to Stravinsky’s Cantata (1952), written for soprano, tenor, a female chorus of four, two flutes, oboe, English horn, and cello. At Juilliard—oh joy!—it was played live by Juilliard students and graduates under the baton of Yuga Cohler.  The text is composed of anonymous early English songs, with verses of a dirge that warn of purgatory threading through it. Stravinsky made the familiar, tuneful “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day” (Jesus is the speaker) simmer with bitter or questioning dissonances. And the heart-breakingly succinct poem “Westron Wind” becomes a fierce contrapuntal duet for tenor and soprano above galloping eighth notes (in its entirety: “Western wind, when wilt thou blow, [that] the small rain down may rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms and I in my bed again!”).

Kristina Bentz in Pina Bausch’s Wind von West. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

In 1975, Bausch had not yet ventured into the speaking and singing that infused her later works. Wind von West (on which she was assisted by Hans Pop) is a beautiful and mysterious choric dance that could be a woman’s dream or a journey through layers of memory. The set by Rolf Borzik (Bausch’s collaborator and partner until his death in 1980) consists of two scrims that divide the stage horizontally into three “rooms.” To go from one room to another, performers open doors (also made of scrim) on either edge of the stage. Several times, the ensemble of 19 fills all three areas (the cast includes three Folkwang dancers and one or two from Juilliard’s class of 2015).

In this haunting and haunted world, we see a woman (Kristina Bentz on opening night) in a long, unadorned silk gown and construe her as the dreamer or heroine.  In the middle “room,” there is a bed; high and white-sheeted, it resembles a hospital gurney.  Although the woman lies down on it later, while two men seem to mourn or comfort her, and although at the end of the piece, she is curled up on it, when the curtain opens, the bed is empty, and she is on the floor near the audience, sitting with her legs stuck out in front of her like a doll. Yet other women, also dressed in long gowns, surround the bed—now bending low, now stretching up their arms, as if in grief.

Two women could represent a mother and child. The taller of the pair (Taylor Drury), reclining on the floor, makes her body into a cradle for the smaller woman (Tsai-Wei Tien)—rocking her quietly, folding her into an embrace, then stretching out with her again. For a few seconds, Bentz breaks off her dancing to insert herself into their hug, as if she were—or had been–part of this family. Two men figure importantly in the elusive scenario. One, dressed in back, (Bynh Ho) is grave and almost stoic; holding her, manipulating her, seeking her out, he could be a lover or a father or both. The other man (Shan Gao) wears only briefs and spends a number of minutes at the beginning and end of Wind von West standing in a glowing pool of light in the most distant zone, his back to the audience. Gao (one of the Folkwang guests) is as flexible and as ardent in his dancing as Bentz, and a lyrical, almost unearthly presence. Another woman (Linda Pilar Brodhag) intermittently touches the lives of the others in unobtrusive ways.

(L to R): Taylor Drury, Tsai-Wei Tien, Kristina Bentz, and Bynh Ho in Wind von West. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

You sense the importance of certain details without understanding what they mean. Early on, standing by the bed, Bentz (a beautiful and expressive dancer) takes down her hair, and, as she dances, it lashes about her, often obscuring her face. At one point, the men of the ensemble enter and shake the women in the group. Gestures associated with prayer appear and ones in which each dancer raises a curled hand to her cheek, perhaps to blot a tear.

In this strange, dream-like atmosphere, the performers often wait, holding a pose, as the voices of Avery Amereau and/or Miles Mykkanen or the four women flow on, telling of love and death. Sometimes the ensemble dancers rush onto the stage as if coming to a gathering, but instead become a kind of angelic chorus; spreading their arms like wings and gazing upward, bending fluidly like a field of wheat in the wind, they also absorb some of the heroine’s gestures.

The ensemble in Wind von West: (Foreground, L to R): Magdalyn Segale and Linda Pilar Brodhag. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

The dancers are marvelous in their sensitivity to this dark, veiled, but luminous world they travel through. The choreography requires them to be fluid yet precise, gentle yet extravagant, and all of them—from ensemble members to leading dancers—enter it with full commitment. The solo that Bentz performs (as do Daphne Fernberger and Folkwang guest Luiza Braz Batista at other performances) is reminiscent of what Bausch herself did in her 1978 Café Mueller. This woman arches her back, opening her body to whatever fate may bring, but she also wreathes her arms around her head and torso, as if to protect or comfort herself. Sometimes her movements seem to be a visualization of weeping—her lifted arms falling softly and helplessly. Like tears.

Wind von West, however, is not lugubrious. Both Stravinsky’s music and Bausch’s choreography are full of questions and possibilities. The dissonances are more wistful than aggressive. Not all members of the class of 2014 got to show off their physical virtuosity in Wind von West, but they played a vital part in the miraculous resurrection of an almost forgotten masterwork.

Wind von West ended the programs (ordered as usual with the youngest students on view first). It’s interesting to see how they develop over their four years at Juilliard, but all are gifted—some astonishingly so. It’s not so much that they gain in technical chops as they go, but how they learn to modulate and shape their dancing. Too, the artistic director of Juilliard Dance, Lawrence Rhodes, is usually astute in picking out choreographers who will both challenge and showcase them appropriately.

Riley O’Flynn in Takehiro Ueyama’s Nakamura. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Ueyama, who danced with Paul Taylor’s company for eight years and founded his own group, TAKE, in 2005, created Nakamuraya in honor of his favorite Kabuki star, Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII. This homage gave him permission to create a patchwork quilt of images relating to aspects of the performer’s life and to use a variety of recorded music that includes a fast movement from a Mozart Divertimento, Japanese selections, and Lou Reed singing “Perfect Day.”  At first, Nathan Carter, wearing a long skirt, is idolized by a motley group of fans with cell-phone cameras; they peek under his costume, jump on him, and hoist him like a doll. Spotlit Evan Fisk makes his hand flutter while fireflies of light respond (lighting by Nicole Pearce); his “perfect day” is made by the arrival of Eliza Lanham.  There are banging drums, flashing lights, stomping women, leaping men, some very handsome (if not intensely musical) movement, and lots of running around.

Jessie Obremski (foreground) and Nobel Lakaev in Brian Brooks’s Torrent. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

In Torrent, Brooks presents the 24 second-year students in a more formally composed piece; it’s both astringent and sensual, as befits a dance set to music by Max Richter that channels Vivaldi. For a while Brooks plays with lines. Dancers assemble shoulder to shoulder, then peel off one by one and run back into the wings. A major line includes all the dancers, and they make it turn like a giant wheel; its circumference fills the stage. At a later point, lines become porous, and the performers do more than make linear designs. In small units, they turn, duck under, and reach around one another, giving the impression of evolving microcosms. When not engaging in Brooks’s fluid, springy athletics, dancers pair up to engage in scalloping, scooping arm gestures that move evasively around like slippery conversations. Accumulating and de-accumulating personnel, Torrent does indeed swell richly from the modest stream of its beginning before receding into darkness.

Costume designer Fritz Masten, like lighting designer Pearce, does triple duty on the program. And he outdoes himself for Moultrie’s Seeds of Endurance. The women in the cast of 27 wear long, full-skirted, flesh-colored dresses (darker-skinned dancers wear a subtly darker hue—a thoughtful idea); these are split in front to reveal red underskirts. When the women dance vigorously together, the effect is almost distracting, but the flashing, thrashing glimpses of red make the dancers look like bright birds showing their mating readiness. I’m not sure what the title of the piece means, but the performers tear around, have near collisions, and, when some of them sit down, others drag them away.

(L to R): Jeremy Coachman, Jordan Lefton, and Solana Temple in Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Seeds of Endurance. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

At time they stop in their kicking and leaping and stare at us. They let us hear them breathe—faster and faster. The music, as in Ueyama’s piece is eclectic—selections by Ezio Boss and Kenji Bunch. Toward the end, one woman crawls on, and a few of the others back away. They feel their own bodies and those of others. Are they coming down with something?  Or have they endured something?  Moultrie is a Juilliard graduate and a busy choreographer, but I’m not sure what to make of this work. The dancers gave it their considerable all.