Pam Tanowitz makes her Joyce debut February 4-5 with two premieres.

The cast of Pam Tanowitz’s Heaven On One’s Head. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

If Pam Tanowitz had been baptized into dance as an infant, Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine would surely have been standing on either side of the font, ready to serve as godfathers. Tanowitz’s choreographic works, like those shown on her recent program at the Joyce Theater, tell no stories. Nor do they seethe with emotion. The dancers do not fling themselves about, letting an impulse trail off or ignite some new loose-edged maneuver. “Rebound” is a minor word in their movement vocabulary.

Instead, they stand tall; flash long, straight legs; stride out, often on tiptoe; and bound into the air They keep their feet busy printing out rhythms. Their arms carve and slice the space with precision. They bend and angle their bodies. If this sounds dry, it isn’t really; within the territory Tanowitz has mapped out for herself, vivid images and surprises crop up in the elegant structures. She is a very accomplished choreographer, shaping movement for contrasts in scale, speed, and spatial design that never appear arbitrary or tricky.

The opening work on the program is an introduction to her style. It’s a new duet, Passagen, for Maggie Cloud and Melissa Toogood, set to a composition of the same name by John Zorn. Three music stands are stationed in different places on the stage but out of the way; guest artist Pauline Kim Harris, moves among them to play Zorn’s tempestuously virtuosic solo for violin. Reid Bartelme has costumed Harris in a long, dark gray skirt and a vest that relates to the short, halter-topped tunics that Cloud and Toogood wear above their gray tights.

Melissa Toogood (front) and Maggie Cloud in Pam Tanowitz’s Passagen. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Against the Joyce’s brick rear wall, which responds warmly to Davison Scandrett’s lighting, the two expert women engage in individual patterns that may turn out to be the same pattern slid into canon. When Cloud and Toogood advance in unison, they make me think of well-disciplined cadets embarking on an unusually attractive march. You could attach ballet terms to many of their movements, but they don’t really look balletic in this context.  And during a passage when the two touch each other, their moments of contact are understated—a bracing hand here, a grip that’s not a grip. It’s during Passagen that I become aware of how adept Tanowitz is at making dancing look fully three-dimensional—turning and angling the movements so that you see the performers as the multi-faceted people that they are, and the space as full of possibilities.

The Joyce program lasts less than an hour, so no intermission. Instead, Tanowitz fills the necessary pause between Passagen and the other premiere, Heaven on One’s Head, with Pause Dance. The red front curtain is raised a little above the floor and Sarah Haarmann appears on a small, specially rigged platform in front of it stage left, studiously moving her limbs within the confined space, while Dylan Crossman (like Toogood, a onetime dancer with Cunningham’s company) watches her. Behind her, the stage gradually fills with dancers, and the curtain lifts a little further. As Crossman takes Haarmann’s place on the platform and inherits her movements, the members of the FLUX Quartet come down an aisle to take their places in a corner of the house.

(L to R): Max King, Vincent McCloskey, Melissa Toogood, and Andrew Champlin in Tanowitz’s Heaven On One’s Head. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The transition concludes smoothly. The dancers begin to dance; others arrive and wait to join. The musicians (Tom Chui, violin; Conrad Harris, violin; Max Mandel, viola; and Felix Fan, cello) start to play Conlon Nancarrow’s String Quartet No. 1, the curtain continues its ascent, and here we are in Heaven on One’s Head. Tanowitz doesn’t follow the music (Nancarrow’s String Quartet No. 3 is also played) note for note, or even phrase for phrase, but the choreography alludes to its changes of quality and mood—now a sprightly, melodic 6/8 rhythm, now a slow, spare passage, now a jolt of pizzicato playing, now turbulence, etc.

In this dance for eight, Tanowitz plays around with symmetry and how it may be tugged into something else. The dancers are almost identically clad in trim, red velour outfits: shorts and sleeveless tops (the women’s are bolero-length). You might see the cast as an apolitical red army, with individuals coming and going at will, sometimes hanging out near the wings and watching. Once a dancer (Crossman as I remember), falls halfway in from offstage, retreats, does it again, retreats. . . .

Tanowitz pairs her dancers into male-female couples, with each pair doing something different. She lines everyone up vertically close to the wings or in the middle of the space, as if they might be considering a Virginia Reel. The four women (Cloud, Toogood, Haarmann, and Lindsey Jones) rip into a display of watch-my-feet! speed. At times, the men too assemble: Crossman, Andrew Champlin, Jason Collins, Vincent McCloskey, and Max King. But this is an egalitarian society. Everyone’s a jumper and a zesty one. Everyone gets a moment or two to stand out.

(Foreground): Melissa Toogood observing her clan in Heaven On One’s Head. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

In the middle of Heaven on One’s Head, Tanowitz provides an interlude that echoes Pause Dance. The curtain starts to lower, and Toogood moves onto the little platform. While a few high notes sound, she watches the others’ feet walk onto the stage and start jumping—assemblés, chassés, you name it. Then they lie supine. Toogood twitches her arms around and kneels. The curtain goes up again on a red-lit stage. (Could this episode be a reference to Toogood’s role as rehearsal director?)

In one of Tanowitz’s most fascinating passages, each pair of dancers has its own phrase of movement, but every individual has his or her own spatial pattern and facing. And they’re separated, so that, for instance, one member of a couple may be downstage left facing upstage, while the partner is located upstage right facing downstage. The resulting image is a wonderfully complex one—both symmetrical and askew, orderly yet buzzing with activity, always shifting within the framework of the stage.

Tanowitz doesn’t give Heaven on One’s Head a big, conclusive ending. The last thing you see is Crossman taking off in a big, almost unruly pas de chat into the wings, just as the curtain finally makes up its mind to come down.

The Martha Graham Dance Company celebrates Appalachian Spring‘s 70th with a new work by Nacho Duato.

Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring. Foreground: Abdiel Jacobsen and Blakely White-McGuire. At back (L to R): Katherine Crockett. Charlotte Landreau, Xiaochuan Xie, Tamisha Guy, Ying Xin. Photo: Costas

Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring was first performed in October of 1944 in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress on a not very large stage intended for chamber music concerts. Its back and side walls with working doors would have made it awkward for the eight dancers to make many exits and entrances. Maybe that’s why, once they have walked onto the stage, none of them leaves until the piece is ending.

It seems all the more miraculous then that this incomparably beautiful dance—celebrating its 70^th birthday this year—should tell of the open, untamed spaces that governed life in the long, green, sparsely settled valleys of Appalachia at the end of the 19^th century.  Seeing Appalachian Spring during the Martha Graham Dance Company’s recent City Center season, I’m reminded yet again of certain sentences that Edwin Denby wrote after he saw the piece in 1944: “The separateness of the still figures from one another, which their poses emphasize, suggests that people who live in these hills are accustomed to spending much of their time alone. Their outlines don’t blend like those of townsmen.”

Denby was referring to the fact that when one of the characters performs a solo or two embark on a duet, the others remain motionless in specific places onstage. The Pioneering Woman may sit in her rocking chair, the Bride on the porch steps of her new home; the Husbandman surveys his land across a split-rail fence; the Preacher stands on a little slanted wooden platform that no one else uses; and his four female Followers sit demurely along a bench. Removed from the action, they  wait, frozen in time, staring into space, when one of them expresses feelings—apprehensive or optimistic or tormenting—best kept private. After which outbursts, the wedding celebration that has brought them together resumes.

The dancers often seem to stare into the distance, and both the setting and the music emphasize great space. Isamu Noguchi’s small house wall and slender beams make survival in the wilderness seem a fragile endeavor. Aaron Copland’s magnificent music abounds in open intervals; you can almost hear the wind blow through it. To convey on a little concert stage human beings’ sense of their own smallness and isolation in a surrounding wilderness, you have to be a genius.

Another cast in Graham’s Appalachian Spring: Lloyd Mayor and Mariya Dashkina Maddux as the Husbandman and the Bride. Photo: Costas

At City Center, Appalachian Spring opened a program that announced a theme: the spring that should be coming any day now. The other two works shown took a darker view of seasonal renewal: Nacho Duato’s new Depak Ine, created for the Graham company, and Graham’s 1984 Rite of Spring.

I know Appalachian Spring too well and love it too much not to want to believe every moment of it. I wince when small, telling details or meaningful movements appear to have eroded. For instance, Graham, as seen in Nathan Kroll’s 1958 film, skips fleetingly (perhaps in memory of the girlhood that she is leaving, perhaps in joy), while all the others, their backs to us, kneel in prayer, hands folded. She turns and moves toward them as if to join in, but once close to them she stops and quietly and decisively (with a great actor’s perfect timing) clasps her hands behind her. No, she, Martha, will not be praying like that. I miss that clear statement in Blakely White-McGuire’s performance. She is, however, a warm and lively Bride—believable in her joy and her playfulness, but aware of the responsibilities that she must assume. She swishes her pink taffeta skirt as if she were sweeping away any too-dark thoughts that might cloud this day.

Lloyd Knight, a dancer I admire, plays the itinerant Preacher with a good sense of both the character’s righteousness and his torment over the sins that he shares with his small flock. But sometimes he pushes these so hard that they blur or distort the movement. The brief passage when the dignified Preacher scuttles crabwise forward on his hands and feet, chest to the sky has become a clumsy token of itself. His bow to his girl followers is so deep that it loses the additional significance of “you will please sit now” and the carefully time wit of the leader’s last nod to the follower who hesitates.

Abdiel Jacobsen imbues the Husbandman with warmth and strength, especially when dancing with his wife-to-be, although he often adopts a puffed-up stance, with his gaze slightly above the horizon line. I think that he, an excellent dancer, means to convey strength and masculinity, but that choice works against his character as a good, simple, happy man with a woman to marry and land to till.

Katherine Crockett’s Pioneering Woman is gentle, open, and refreshingly without affectation. This time, I found her a little under energy, which is surprising. When she has a turn meeting each of the four followers in a circle, they don’t show us the lusty elbow swings that match the big swing of Copland’s music at that point, but barely take hold, as if they’re all too delicate for such carrying on. Knight and the women, in a similar festive circle, make their folk-dancey hand-claps in passing look more like high-fives. Graham’s choreography for those four women is a marvel of wit. Tamisha Guy, Charlotte Landreau, Xiochuan Xie, and Ying Xin show us with conviction their angelic solidarity, their bounding energy, and their slightly sacrilegious devotion to their Preacher.

(L to R): Lloyd Knight, Blakely White-McGuire, Natasha Diamond-Walker, Lorenzo Pagano, Ying Xin in Nacho Duato’s Depak Ine. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu.

For members of the MGDC, keeping Graham’s masterworks fresh is an ongoing challenge, but they rise with gusto to new dance that dare them in other ways. When the cast of Depak Ine managed to get Nacho Duato onstage for a bow after the curtain came down on the work he made for them, they applauded him almost as enthusiastically as the audience applauded them.

Depak Ine, choreographed for the Graham company by Nacho Duato, is one of two premieres this season (I was unable to see Andonis Fondianakis’s Echo). Depak Ine is named after a cut on John Talabot’s album Fin. I have no idea what the two words mean (Talabot is a Spanish dj, producer, and composer-musician). The other piece of music that accompanies the dance is Athos-Montana Sacra by Serbian composer Arsenije Jvanovic. The dance too is as mysterious and as haunted as the music. Perhaps to get us thinking along evolutionary lines, the company’s artistic director, Janet Eilber, mentioned in her introductory speech that Duato had been reading the work of Charles Darwin.

As Depak Ine begins in dim light (by Bradley Fields), a woman is lying prone in a downstage corner; slim and pale in a flesh-colored leotard, she could be very young. She looks discarded, dead. A man (Knight) scrabbles rapidly along on his back in her direction. When he stands, Natasha Diamond-Walker rushes, drops to the floor, reaches between his legs, and grabs his crotch. A distant knocking sound is heard and what could be a humming voice. By some extraordinary maneuvering Diamond-Walker and Knight tangle together until they look like a large ball with two cheek-to-cheek faces staring out of it toward the unmoving woman beside them.

(L to R): Lloyd Knight, Lorenzo Pagano, and Ying Xin in Depak Ine. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

When people of this tribe or species appear, they do so out of blackness at the rear of the stage, and they leave as if sucked back there. Lorenzo Pagano appears in that way to hover over the initial pair. Jacobsen materializes commandingly; he’s wearing a loose black robe of some kind that makes him appear priestly (costumes by Angelina Atlagic). White-McGuire and Xin also drift from the dark. As the music swells and deeper voices well up within it, the performers break from a brief cluster and begin to couple and combine in fascinating, repellent, extremely unusual ways. You see elbows and knees as crooks in which elbows and knees and necks belonging to others get caught. Often someone’s neck is trapped by someone else’s flexed ankle. Pagano, reptilian, humps his way across the stage on his belly. When he thrashes, Jacobsen grabs his head (to calm him?), and White-McGuire wraps herself around one of his legs. Xin pulls a hank of her long black hair across her face. People get dragged, lifted.  The dancers appear both angular and boneless (how is this possible?). Legs are spread, crotches displayed.

(L to R): Ben Schultz, Tadej Brdnik, and Lloyd Mayor hoist PeiJu Chien-Pott. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

What have we been expecting to come of this?  Me, not exactly what ensues. After some of the creatures peer one last time at the prone figure and disappear, she begins to twitch and kick and undulate. She wraps her legs around themselves in strange, hobbled ways. Now we can see her face; it is PeiJu Chien-Pott.  The music changes; bird song is heard; a martial beat thuds up underneath. Three men stroll in—just serious ordinary-looking men; they could be traffic cops arriving on the job. These men (Tadej Brdnik, Lloyd Mayor, and Ben Schultz) lift and twist and drag the woman-creature (all in a day’s work).  In one startling image, all three hoist her huddled form by one of her slim arms. She’s awkward then not. She lashes them with her hair and becomes beastly. When the men drop into a pile, she climbs onto them and stares at the sky.. What is happening?  After what seems like a very long time of gibbering dementedly with her body (Chien-Pott is terrifying), this creature makes her way back to her spot and lies down in her original position. The birds’ chirping starts up again. Jacobsen, near her, puts a gray cloth over his face and staggers backward into darkness.

PeiJu Chien-Pott and her three captors in Depak Ine. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Did spring just come? I don’t think so. Darwinian evolution?  Not so much. Chien-Pott might have been resurrected to take on all the evil in the community. If so, you want to wish its citizens good luck. Poor saps. That is, poor saps, but extraordinary dancers. With immense skill and ferocious concentration, they hurl themselves into the punishing, eye-catching contortions and relationships that Duato has devised. I’m guessing Martha would have been amazed, appalled, and very proud of them.

The program ended with Graham’s Rite of Spring, set to the magisterial and controversial 1913 score by Igor Stravinsky. Graham was 90 when she choreographed it. The cast I saw at City Center was the same one I wrote about when the company performed at Jacob’s Pillow last summer: (http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2013/08/another-rite/). Watching Xie convey terror, exhaustion, resignation, and despair most eloquently, I thought again how interesting it was that Graham did not have the maiden dance herself to death, as Nijinsky’s victim-heroine did in 1913 and Massine’s did in 1921. Graham herself appeared in the role when Massine revived his version in New York in 1930, and those who took part in it remember the many, many jumps she did in a row (“like knives,” Bessie Schönberg said). Graham taking to the air was unusual at that point. But in her Rite, the woman to be sacrificed doesn’t die dancing; she’s just a poor frightened thing. That’s something to ponder.

Wayne McGregor/Random Dance brings Atomos to Peak Performances at Montclair State’s Alexander Kasser Theater.

Alvaro Dule and Anna Nowak in Wayne McGregor’s Atomos. Photo: Ravi Deepres

Wayne McGregor wants it both ways, and I don’t blame him. This virtuoso dancemaker— resident choreographer at Britain’s Royal Ballet, the director of Wayne McGregor/Random Dance, and a been-around whose works grace the repertories of numerous companies—wants us to look at his dances and not worry about how they were made, but he also want to tell us, via published interviews, how they were made. So, naturally the complexities of his processes haunt us, but obviously, they haunt the work too.

This feeling was generated by his Atomos, which received its American premiere at Montclair State University as part of the terrific Peak Performances series. I am, of course, interested in cognition and biometrics and robots programmed to generate movement material. (Sometimes, too, I ponder my own unknowable atoms that fight and hook up and die while the entity known to me as “I” goes about its business.) But much current science is outside my ken, and McGregor’s statement re Atomos to Robert Johnson of The Star-Ledger gives me a helpful image with which to coordinate my impressions: “The whole piece is about pixelating a world.”

The details of McGregor’s research and processes do, however, reinforce my impression of him as a serious experimenter in movement and movement systems, and not simply a man who wants to deconstruct the dancerly body and its body of received knowledge for the hell of it—to see what fantastic and thrilling contortions he and the members of Random Dance can come up with. In his seriousness and his explorations with the body, inside and out, he can be grouped with Ohad Naharin and William Forsythe (although the three have very unlike aesthetics). The pathways of the digital world, its speed, and its intricacies, and developments in the field of microsurgery make such investigations very relevant. (As I write these words, hostile bots have invaded the website on which I expect to post this review, and it is proving difficult to track and immobilize them).

However you choose to view Atomos, it’s a spectacle produced by ten uncannily flexible dancers, handsomely colored lighting by Lucy Carter, a dazzling media component by Ravi Deepres, and a wonderfully variegated score by A Winged Victory for the Sullen: Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie (piano, guitar, electronics) and played live by them plus members of the American Music Ensemble; Laura Luzke (violin), Keats Dieffenbach (violin), Neil Leiter (viola), Clarice Jensen (cello), and Brian Snow (cello).

Alvaro Dule of Wayne McGregor/Random Dance in Atomos: Photo: Ravi Deepres

Those of us sitting in Montclair State’s Alexander Kasser Theater during Random Dance’s March season there get our first glimpse of McGregor’s company members as a fluctuating horde, clustered under a spotlight. Within the clump, individuals bend or straighten, lean, undulate their spines, perhaps lift one another—all conveying seemingly spontaneous impulses. As the beam of light widens, and green rays strike them from the sides of the stage, the dancers’ skills become apparent. Their backs are super-flexible; you’d think them either boneless or harboring a smidgen of snake DNA. Both men and women are crotch-sprung, able to lift their legs unnaturally high. Sometimes their resilient muscularity has a simian quality; sometimes, they crook every joint and make you think of grasshoppers.

What’s intriguing is that their virtuosity (despite the jumps of all kinds that they whip off and the occasional near-balletic pirouette) is predicated on rippling and tangling themselves into positions and maneuvers that derange human physicality as we’re used to seeing it, while at the same time, McGregor organizes them into elegantly tidy patterns. For instance, at one point, the dancers form two chains, one facing the audience, one facing away from it. Partners moving in perfect synchrony cross the stage; other couples, entering from different sides, follow suit, one pair at a time. McGregor is skillful at contrasting diversity and uniformity, fluidity and stop-action.

Fukiko Takase and Travis Clausen-Knight in Atomos. Photo: Ravi Deepres

This community encourages coupling. Some of its members watch while Fukiko Takase and Travis Clausen-Knight do things to each other, angling into knotty positions, creating interstices for the partner’s limbs to poke through. None of this seems erotic or even intimate. The duet has the air of an investigation. In fact, all the movement does. When the marvelous Alvaro Dule explores a set of extreme maneuvers, he does so without appearing to show off or win our applause. He lifts his leg improbably high with the concentration of a worker calibrating a difficult balance of elements.

In the middle of the work, seven screens of various sizes descend from above into what is now an all-red room. This is our cue to don the 3-D spectacles we were given on entering the theater. Dule is dancing with Anna Nowak, but who can watch them closely? Although the choreography continues—by them and by others—the décor comes to life and dominates the stage. While a burst of drastic noise and what sounds like a volcanic eruption ensues, the screens absorb and dislodge patterns. Because of the glasses, we see little red squares breaking free and coming toward us; then, before we instinctively duck, they retreat into the big red rectangle that they were part of.

I was lying; we do see the dancers; at one point, the screens even show their images. Five couples dance simultaneously, each with its own agenda. Catarina Carvalho and Michael-John Harper overlap Dule’s solo with a jittery duet. But the live performers have eye-catching accomplices during this section of Atomos. Green writing that advances and retreats. Sequences of numbers appear. Huge green bugs crawl over each screen; as they multiply, they diminish in size, until the screens show what looks like dense, throbbing hedgery. A bank of red lights descends, stays a while, and lifts. Jessica Wright and Louis McMiller communicate their extravagant corporeal messages beneath what look like giant, luminous, red chrysanthemums, hanging like chandeliers.

Jessica Wright and Louis McMiller in Wayne McGregor’s Atomos. Photo: Ravi Deepres

In the end, the seductive media blitz ends its pixelating and reassembling of images, and we concentrate again on these the phenomenal, dispassionate dancers (not mentioned yet: Daniele Neugenbauer and James Pett). The fine music, whose intermittent melodies help remind us of their humanity, dies away. And what are we left with? Beauty and strangeness and ideas that still whirl in fragments within our unknowable brains.

Juilliard Dance presents works by Tharp, Lubovitch, and Feld. Suzanne Beahrs Dance performs at Danspace.

Juilliard students Leiland Charles and Brittany Hill in Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

I count Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen among the world’s great dances. When I saw it in 1979, performed by her marvelous company, I thought I’d die of pleasure. How could I not hustle uptown to see Juilliard Dance’s annual challenge to its super-talented students, when Baker’s Dozen was opening a program that included Lar Lubovitch’s Concerto Six Twenty-Two (1986) and Eliot Feld’s The Jig Is Up (1984)?

Every spring, Lawrence Rhodes, the artistic director of the Juilliard Dance Division, gives the students the opportunity to fit themselves into important, already established works. Former Tharpie (or is it Tharpist?) Shelley Washington staged Baker’s Dozen, which must have helping the performers to get the wonderful piano pieces of Willie “The Lion” Smith (arranged by Dick Hyman) wriggling and jittering and slinking through their bodies and making their feet jab the floor and slide over it. That pianist Christopher Ziemba played the music brilliantly added tremendously to the pleasure of seeing this work brought to life by the terrific young dancers. No, they couldn’t surpass Sara Rudner, Richard Colton, Rose Marie Wright, and all those in Tharp’s company during its heyday, but the cast I saw (there were two) danced with style, wit, and understanding.

Tharp shows us the twelve performers in Baker’s Dozen as if they were facets of a prism that’s turning in various ways to refract and reflect the sun’s rays. It’s not just Jennifer Tipton’s clear, beautiful light that reveals the dancers; the sunny music, as it ripples along or pounces on a tango rhythm, further illumines the men in their white pants and shirts and the women in their suavely draped dresses (costumes by Santo Loquasto.

Evan Schwarz and (in air) Taylor Drury in Baker’s Dozen. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

In tune with the piece’s title, the choreography plays with numbers. And with the delights of pairing in a boy-for-every-girl world. Six couples fly onto the stage one by one. Each set of partners dallies long enough to engage in unheard conversations with their mobile bodies, swinging arms, and busy feet. The movement is tricky, sly, rich in its variety of rhythms and dynamics. A lot of choreography today doesn’t make you think, “Oh boy, dancing!” Tharp’s does. We could never rise from our seats and do what they do, but we feel hints of that movement sneaking into us.

From couples, Tharp moves into coming-and-going trios. A hint of unserious jealousy may crop up, but really, three can play more intriguing games than two. The pianist moves into “Tango à la Caprice.” A new man leaps in to disrupt a trio, and, lo, quartets multiply all over the place. One is thrillingly fast, another more lyrical. Unison is a rarity. Not so in the ensuing sextets; sometimes squads of six dancers cross the stage in perfect synchrony; at another moment, six go crazy.

People keep popping out of the wings, then change their minds and disappear again. One woman, held high out of sight, literally falls for the partner who has been waiting for her. Another woman starts to enter, and invisible hands yank her back offstage by one leg. As Baker’s Dozen accumulates, it also re-introduces us to individuals. All twelve dancers snake around the stage in a procession that resembles an unbuttoned polonaise: a couple of steps and a third in which they stretch one leg forward and sink into the rhythm. As they go, they keep disgorging individuals who drop into brief solos. In the end, we’re back to just two people, who take hands and saunter out smiling.

Daphne Fernberger (L) and Lorrin Brubaker in Lar Lubovitch’s Concerto Six Twenty-Two. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

Lubovitch’s Concerto Six Twenty-Two also employs twelve dancers dressed in summery white clothes (these by Anne de Velder), and Craig Miller’s lighting suggests the outdoors. But these people dance to Mozart’s ravishing Concerto for Clarinet, K. 622, played by the Juilliard Orchestra under the excellent leadership of Karina Canellakis, with Weixiong Wang as the soloist.

Lubovitch starts the “Allegro” with eight of them dancing buoyantly in a circle, as if this were a fete in a village populated by uncommonly nimble and buoyant folks.  The mood is celebratory. Two women have a brief moment of dancing, two men show off for them, then those four stand by and watch while the other two women show what they can do. The remaining two men arrive, swing those women in the air, then set them down and dance for them. The circle pulls them in again. The movement is fluid, springy, earthy yet windblown; it exudes joyousness. I like seeing these Juilliard dancers perform this opening movement of Mozart’s concerto almost more than when dancers in Lubovitch’s company performed it. Perhaps that’s because they’re so young and fresh that the occasional perky, edging-toward-cute moves suit them, and, in staging Concerto Six Twenty-Two, Katarzyna Scarpetowska has coached them to make everything look easy and unaffected.

The heart of this major work of Lubovitch’s is its duet for two men, set to Mozart’s profoundly beautiful Adagio. The dancers that I saw, Robert Moore and Dean Biosca, performed wonderfully, with all the gravity and calm that the choreography demands. This section is often programmed by itself, and at the height of the AIDs epidemic, it eloquently expressed the resignation and the live-for-the-moment tenderness that we saw all around us in the 1980s. Whether we take the men to be lovers or simply close friends, it’s possible to feel deeply what their dancing for each other or together conveys.

In the last movement, Lubovich, like Tharp in Baker’s Dozen but in a different manner, creates a traveling group structure in Concerto Six Twenty-Two, out of which individuals drop to dance happily alone for a few seconds before being swept up again into a line that stretches from the front of the stage to the back and keeps passing back and forth from one side to the other. It’s a comforting image.

Jeffery Duffy and Amanda Mortimore in Eliot Feld’s The Jig Is Up. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

If Tharp’s work and Lubovitch’s keep the dancers tracing big, fluid patterns on the space. Feld creates intricate phrases of movement in which a lot of action happens while not much ground is covered. The Jig Is Up, like many of the pieces that Feld began to make in the 1980s, is grounded in repetition. If the dancers perform a step you really like, don’t worry, you’ll get to see it many, many times. And when the steps are unusual—as they most often are— I can get interested in them all over again. Feld disbanded his last company some time ago, and I’m glad that Rhodes has several times programmed his work.

Willa Kim’s costumes are a little bit too raggle-taggle-gypsyish for me, but they do tell us that this group is rustic rather than elegant. The recorded music by the Bothy Band and John Cunningham turns Irish music into something that, although lusty, also falls in with Feld’s passion for repetition. When the fourteen dancers enter in a line that zig-zags through the space until it brings them into a circle, you can memorize the way they lean into a forward step, pushing with their hands, and turn to slant into a backward walk, fluttering their hands behind them.

Juilliard’s Kristina Bentz in The Jig Is Up. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor

As restaged by Feld, Patrice Hemsworth, and Jaquelyn Scafidi, the piece is a challenging showcase for these up-for-anything dancers. Amanda Mortimore and  Jeffery Duffy face each other holding hands and turn their connected arms into a wheel as they heel-and-toe along. In their duet Corwin Barnette and Michele Carter show us over and over how he can hoist her periodically to sit pertly on this thigh as they travel together. Gemma Freitas, while treading softly, turns her feet in and out and crooks one leg around the other; she looks as if she were knitting the choreography. Kristina Bentz, her long hair loose and flying, stamps her feet as she circles her body around and around, priming a passionate motor before she can move out into space and kick up a leg. The men roister together, and Corey John Snide and Nobel Lakaev wend their way toward stage right tossing Taylor Hansen high and catching her between them in a way that makes me wince. Finally, Feld re-introduces almost everything we’ve seen since the dance began and has it happen all at once. It’s an exhilarating collage of The Jig Is Up on fast rewind.

Suzanne Beahrs in her Amid. At back (L to R): Sarah Hillmon and Madeline Wilcox. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Dancers who are still students brings to mind three choreographers who were, a number of years ago, graduate students I knew at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Summation Dance Company, directed by Taryn Vander Hoop and Sumi Clements, gives its fourth season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space April 2 through 5, and  Suzanne Beahrs Dance appeared for the first time at St. Mark’s Church through Danspace Project’s DANCE: Access program, March 27 through 29.

Beahrs’s new Amid lasts just under an hour and floats on what amounts to a musical patchwork quilt. Would anyone imagine a progression from the gorgeous Andante from Bach’s Italian Concerto, through Dominco Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater, a song by Caetano Veloso, Tuvan throat singing, a Keith Jarrett ramble, and Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel?  These must be selections that mean a great deal to the choreographer, and, for the most part, one segues pretty smoothly into the other, with the helpful addition of the sound of waves and other natural phenomena.

One of the most impressive things about this group of five women is how beautifully and sensitively they perform together—aware of the space around them and attentive to the details and nuances of the movement. In a press release Beahrs revealed that she loves breaking out in dance whenever she’s alone in an elevator. That playfulness and zest for movement infuse her opening solo in Amid. We hear waves lashing the shore as she begins. Her personal style juxtaposes small, sharp moves to bigger, more sensuous ones. She performs as if thoughts were passing through her; she may skitter rapidly, then pause, pull herself together, and change course. The air around her and the floor draw her attention. Designer Brittany Spencer situates her for most of this in light from only two instruments two light, so she is often in shadow.

(L to R): Celine Syslo holding Madeline Wilcox , Julia Jurgilewicz holding Sarah Hillmon. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Beguiling though it is, the solo seems slightly long, because its interplay of dynamics proceeds with few changes in its overall structure. The four women who enter from each corner of the nave  (Sarah Hillmon, Julia Jurgilewicz, Celine Syslo, and Madeline Wilcox) adapt the movement in Beahrs’s solo to their own double duets, unison passages, and one versus three images. They too follow rapid steps and gestures with slower ones. Eventually all five women are dancing—now to the Stabat Mater; they fall to the floor, crouch, and roll. Coming together, separating, and reuniting become the ingredients of obvious theme. Jurgilewicz performs a solo in silence; she’s riveting. No wonder it takes the others a while to copy her steps, and they do so gradually.

There are hints of moods. When Hillmon’s colleagues copy her sweeping steps, they do so with what appears to be trepidation. Wilcox and Jurglewicz huddle and press their cheeks together. When, after sounds that could be those of sleet and thunder die away, Syslo, lying on the floor, performs by herself in a spotlight, Hillmon, Jurgilewicz, and Wilcox  stand grouped on one of the church’s carpeted platforms and stare down at her. She lifts her head off the floor and gazes at them, then rises slowly to join them, as a guitar announces the beginning of Veloso’s “Cucurrucucu Paloma.”

Madeline Wilcox (L) and Julia Jurgilewicz in Suzanne Beahrs’s Amid. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Beahrs, a gifted up-and-coming artist, has appended a note to Amid’s program. It says: “Amid is a celebration of the exquisite power in our broken, impermanent selves.” As the women go through their impeccable, meticulously rehearsed patterns, they show us many generous, finely shaped steps—flinging these through space, springing up, scooping up air, raising their arms high. But as Amid, progresses, I realize what we’re not seeing. Except for one in-passing moment, we don’t see diversity in action. We see finely engineered synchrony and counterpoint, stillness and motion. But we do not ever see five individuals performing different phrases at the same time. We do not ever see the five collaborating closely on an effort that brings them into close contact. In other words, it’s difficult for us to understand, however fleetingly, what they overcame in order to celebrate.

Julia Jurgilewicz in Amid. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The Trisha Brown Dance Company and the Stephen Petronio Company give their New York seasons the same week.

(L to R): Nicholas Sciscione, Natalie Mackessy, Jaqlin Medlock, and Davalois Fearon in Stephen Petronio’s Strange Attractors I. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Sitting in the Joyce Theater during the Stephen Petronio Company’s 30^th Anniversary Season, the word “highflyer” suddenly pushes it way into my mind. This is not just because Petronio is ambitious and successful, but because he takes risks and succeeds when you might expect him to founder. When I dig into his invigorating, just-published memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict, I marvel that he survived and continued to perform and choreograph through the years when he was indulging in amounts of booze, drugs, and sex that would have downed almost anyone else in the dance world.

More to the point, I watch his 1999 Strange Attractors I and his new Locomotor and am amazed all over again by the movement he creates and how he patterns his dances. High flying doesn’t figure as giant, poised leaps (although these do appear), but his superb dancers often seem to be aloft in high winds, buffeted off balance, swinging their arms and legs around to maintain a semblance of equilibrium and taking off again. Yet however much they wrench their bodies around, tilt, or topple, they reveal no sense of struggle. They seem to take pleasure in what they’re doing with their bodies—not in any self-indulgent way, just making the dancing course richly through them as they cut through space.

Barrington Hinds in Petronio’s Strange Attractors I. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The opening solo of Strange Attractors I shows just how perversely beautiful Petronio’s movement palette can be. To luscious music for string quartet by Michael Nyman, Barrington Hinds subverts balletic maneuvers such as pirouettes and beats and all manner of jumps—canting them, blocking them, diverting the movement impulse elsewhere, and plunging them into a stew of wholly unconventional ingredients. When one of the performers—man or woman— tosses a leg into the air, the action seems effortless, as if oiling the hip joint were something everyone in the company did before going onstage. The nine dancers’ gray silk pajamas or black and gray slips (by Ghost) ripple as they pass onto the stage and off, fall into synchrony or embraces, attract and repel (sometimes at the same time). Josh D. Green and Julian De Leon, Davalois Fearon and Natalie Mackessy, Jaqlin Medlock and Nicholas Sciscione find their own ways of developing bodily conversations. The other three tirelessly wonderful dancers in Strange Attractor’s I are Joshua Tuason and Gino Grenek (now Petronio’s assistant). Medlock, marginally the smallest of the women, eats up as much space as Hinds, the marginally tallest man.

Joshua Tuason and Melissa Toogood match leaps in Stephen Petronio’s Locomotor. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Petronio’s Locomotor, receiving its world premiere at the Joyce, explores images of past and future, forward and back, and their meeting places in the present. Narciso Rodgriguez has costumed the nine dancers (minus Grenek and plus Emily Stone and guest artist Melissa Toogood) in white leotards with sleeves and side patches gray or black (not, to my mind, very attractive, but they emphasize the point about duality).

Toogood opens Locomotor alone onstage. This past year, the onetime member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has been seen all over town in choreography by divers others (talk about an addiction to motion!).  Petronio has profited from her alertness, from the way she inhabits pauses, and the subtle nuances with which she grooms the movement, never relinquishing its essential wildness. Establishing one element of Locomotor’s  structure, she begins her long phrase on the front right half of the stage, which Tabachnik has lit for her. Minutes later, she begins the same phrase at the left rear of the area, facing back.

Once the others join in, the title is further explained. In expert changeable lighting by Ken Tabachnik and to a variegated electronic score by Michael Volpe (aka Clams Casino), the dancers run along invisible tracks as steadily as trains. However, a number of these tracks are shaped like horseshoes. For instance, three dancers, lined up out of sight in the wings, may run backward onto the stage, loop around—still close to the side of the area—make a move or two, and rush away facing the way they’re going. Or they may leap backward (not an easy maneuver) in a larger circle, even  exiting backward. Unlike in Strange Attractors, the performers don’t line up at the edges of the stage, watching until deciding to join the dance; they barrel in and out, which suggests that those tracks continue out of our sight before making a U turn.

Amid the score’s flutters, flaps, crashes, roars rhythmic thudding, and sweet bits of melody, the dancers  burst and ooze and slash their way into motion, now stopping dead and waiting a while, now pairing up in intimate encounters. Sometime, you see them at work through a few motionless others. Twice a dancer reappears in a red outfit, for no obvious reason. In the end, Stone is anchored while the others line up at the rear of the stage, dance forward, turn to face the other way, return to the rear, and face us again, before surging into the final moments of dancing.

There was a time when I found Petronio’s works relentless—sensual fits of movement, the goal of which was to keep on going. They still have that ongoing quality but it has gentled. He turned 58 a couple of weeks before his company’s 30^th anniversary season, and, like his memoir, these performances at the Joyce look back—not so much to his large, big-hearted Italian family, but to the family of dancers he has worked with over three decades. Some have departed, some are more recent recruits, but their bodies and their sensibilities inhabit his work.

Stephen Petronio in his solo Stripped. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The passing of time and the reminiscences bared in his book seem to me to inform his new solo Stripped. He begins it wearing trousers with a shirt, tie, and jacket and standing in spectral light. But. . . what is wrong with him?  His head looks like a gray pumpkin. To Philip Glass’s Etude No. 5, he takes off the jacket and begins to move, carefully placing a foot, changing his facing, bowing down. I later read in the program that Janine Antoni, a visual artist he has collaborated before, has designed what’s termed a “costume intervention.”

I’ll say. Petronio must be able to see a bit, and breathe, but the loose, swinging movements he develops have a certain edginess and awkwardness. He strokes his body, puts his hands over his invisible face and feels it. Is he stripping down or being born?  Perhaps both. After a while, he breaches the Joyce’s “fourth wall” by unwinding a strip of cloth from his head mask and passing one end to a woman in the front row. Now he begins to spin his way out that and the two additional strands that make up the bulbous covering. He gives the beginning of the second to an invisible person offstage and the third to another on the opposite side of the stage. Oh, lovely! The last strip of cloth is abloom with bits of color. (I read that it’s made of neckties.) And finally, amid the slim fabric fences, Petronio is free, fully revealed—bald as a newborn and almost as bemused.

(L to R): Tamara Riewe, Nicholas Strafaccia, and Elena Demyanenko in Trisha Brown’s Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

How’s this for a coincidence?  The same April week that the Stephen Petronio Company opened at the Joyce, the Trisha Brown Dance Company performed one block east on 19^th Street at New York Live Arts. On the program was Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503; made in 1980, it marked Petronio’s debut as a dancer in Brown’s company, the first man to join it. He appeared a year later in her Son of Gone Fishin’, which was also revived for the NYLA programs. You can understand where Petronio learned to make his body a terrain for detours and interruptions, along which movement nevertheless traveled like water. He took that fluidity into his own less gentle, less playful work.

Brown, now ailing and no longer at the helm of her company, left a mother lode of rich beautiful works, three of which the company’s associate artist directors, Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden, re-staged for this season.  The third is Solo Olos from Brown’s 1976 Lineup. Brown’s final work, Rogues, a duet for two men that she created in 2011 in collaboration with Lucas, plus dancers Lee Serle and Neal Beasley opens the program.

Trisha Brown’s Rogues. In this cast: Neal Beasley (L) and Nicholas Strafaccia. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

I marvel all over again at the ingenious structures that Brown devised, either to generate movement (in her earliest works) or to mold it. Rogues, with its clean, straightforward (but definitely Brownian) moves was inspired by a phrase from Brown’s Foray Forêt and danced to an excerpt from Alvin Curran’s Toss and Find, which had accompanied the earlier work. The complicated and brainy process of breaking up a long phrase and interchanging parts of it is hard to explain, but what you see are two intent men (in this case, Stuart Shugg and Nicholas Strafaccia) apparently dancing side-by-side in unison, but every now and then diverging. One might arrive at a common goal split seconds later than the other, who might in turn pause for his colleague to catch up. In the final section, accompanied by a harmonica, the dancing get faster and bigger, with more kicks and jumps, without traveling a lot around the space. The stitchery is too close for that.

One cast in Trisha Brown’s Solo Olos. (L to R): Stuart Shugg, Jamie Scott, Neal Beasley, and Cecily Campbell. Photo: Ian Douglas

If you didn’t already know that dancers are often extremely smart people, watching Solo Olos, the third work on the program, would definitely convince you of that fact. Here’s the task for (in the cast I saw) Tara Lorenzen, Megan Madorin, Shugg, and Strafaccia. They can all perform a phrase of Brown’s nicknamed “Main” forward and in retrograde. They can do the same with “Branch” and “Spill”—contrasting phrases individually constructed from descriptions that Brown wrote for the purpose. The dancers move from one to another of these three strands with ease. Beasley begins with the other cast members, then sits in the front row with a mike and calls out instructions.

So we watch a soft slew of dancing and delight in how the choreography evolves. Beasley calls out things like “Meg, spill,” “Nick, branch” “Stuart and Nick, reverse.”  Sometimes he’ll ask a dancer to reverse twice or three times without a pause. As a result, two people may drop almost miraculously into unison and then later diverge. Perhaps even three fall into line. No one stops. Everyone is fiercely concentrated. In the end. . .a miracle!  Beasley brings them into unison, and we cheer.

(L to R): Nick Strafaccia, Elena Demyanenko, Tamara Riewe, and Samuel Wentz in Brown’s Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The two works from the early 1980s are part of a series that Brown termed “Unstable Molecular Structures.” For them, she followed the example set by her 1979 Glacial Decoy in terms of collaborating with visual artists.  For Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503, Fujiko Nakaya designed and constructed a fog machine. Like the sea fog that rolls in from the Pacific in Washington State where Brown grew up, mist rises along the back of the stage, at times foaming over the low barricades to envelop the dancers. In 1980, the narrow space of a semi-basement on Crosby street where Opal Loop appeared as a work-in-progress, four dancers had to take a long phrase of movement and loop it back to the center of the space, starting and stopping when they chose to. What you see suggests a canonic structure gone slightly berserk and occasionally resulting in sweet-tempered near collisions. What may be coincidences look like unspoken agreements (“Mind if I join you?”  “Go right ahead.”).

“Opal” may refer to Brown’s iridescent, green-purple silk outfit, now worn by Elena Demyanenko. Judith Shea’s diverse costumes catch, reflect, or absorb Beverly Emmons’s magical lighting differently: Samuel Wentz wears the shiny gold unitard made for Lisa Kraus, Tamara Riewe is in billowing white, and Strafaccia in black. There’s no sound but that of water and the hiss of steam. Now fog creeps up on the performers; now it retreats to leave them in sunny clarity. Brown, growing up in the forest and near the sea, loves nature’s game of now-you-see-it-now-you-almost-don’t.

The original cast of Brown’s Son of Gone Fishin’. (L to R): Eva Karzsag, Stephen Petronio, Vicky Shick, Randy Warshaw, and (hidden) Diane Madden and Lisa Kraus. Photo: Lois Greenfield

The sea figures in Son of Gone Fishin’ too, especially as it was originally performed in front of Donald Judd’s different-sized backdrops (dark blue, light blue, and green), which moved up and down at certain intervals like occasional well-behaved waves. Shea’s costumes followed the same color scheme. But that version of the piece can’t be performed in a theater that has no fly space overhead for the backdrops to disappear into and descend from. The current cast performs without Judd’s set and in trim, shimmering gold, silver, and bronze outfits that Shea had initially designed for the piece and abandoned after Judd contributed his designs. John Torres has provided new lighting.

Brown’s Son of Gone Fishin’ in 2014. (L to R): Samuel Wentz, Jamie Scott, Tara Lorenzen, Nicholas Strafaccia, and Stuart Shugg. Photo: Ian Douglas

In Son of Gone Fishin’, as in Solo Olos, Brown had fun advancing and rewinding phrases of movement but in considerably more complex ways. Against a black backdrop, to variegated pieces of music composed for the dance by Robert Ashley, and possibly with some choreographic adjustments, the dance winds its way through the seven marvelous performers, binding and releasing them. They nudge into one another and rebound, they cling. Sometimes they arrive, as if by accident, to form a clump in one corner or another. An unstable molecular structure indeed.

What always thrills me about this dance is the way Brown took usually staid unison on a flying trip. A person off to one side may be in perfect synchrony with one quite far away, while others swirl and muddle silkily around. Now that pairing dissolves and your eye is drawn to two different dancers who’ve slipped into long-distance alignment. Two others, maybe closer, fling out a leg at the same time. The result is uncanny; it’s almost as if the dance steps had minds of their own and simply flew around, alighting where they wished, staying a while, and moving on.

Brown found climactic endings corny in the 1980s. Both Opal Loop and Gone Fishin’  just end when they end. The dancers stop, and without even a fraction of a pause, the lights go out. We don’t leave with a picture in our heads; for all we know, there’s more of the dance lurking somewhere, still in heavenly motion.

Shen Wei Dance Arts presents Map at Judson Church, April 29 through May 4

A quiet moment in Shen Wei’s Map in Judson Church. Photo: Juan Vargas

In Judson Church’s open, lofty space, Shen Wei’s restaging of his 2005 Map looks and feels far more three-dimensional than the version that premiered at Lincoln Center on a proscenium stage. The Judson spectators sit on four sides of the large arena, some of them on the small, high stage made to hold the altar. The dancing is almost palpable. You imagine that you could reach out and touch one of the performers; you could, perhaps, join them as they swirl over the gray floor, forming waves and whirlpools that wash no one up and suck no one down.

Shen, a master of visual arts as well as choreography, has altered his original set (in effect, a backdrop) to suit the audience’s four-sided view. Seven immense balloons hover together in the center of the space, anchored to the floor by their strings. Four are round and white; three are black and cuboid. All are covered with markings that can be read as maps of the dance’s choreographic process—notes and diagrams and lines to indicate paths. In the darkness before the piece starts, the balloons are released and float up.

When the music, excerpts from Steve Reich’s formidable The Desert Music, begins its rich opening selection, dancers are lying on the floor as if slumbering. Scott Bolman’s fine lighting is initially dim and, like the floor, the people are gray—costumed in outfits that are semi-transparent in places with heavier contrasting fabric elsewhere (the ingenious designs are by Shen and Elena Comendador). They spend the entire first “map” (titled “Rotate”) on the floor: rolling and uncurling; swinging one leg across the other; pressing up, butts first, and smoothly twisting down again. They travel like semi-ambulatory sea creatures covering ground very gradually yet sinuously active. Others join, and they form squads that, at one point, shape the repeating movement phrase into four-part counterpoint.

Dress rehearsal of Shen Wei’s Map at Judson Church. (foreground: Guanglei Hui). Photo: Juan Vargas

Map is a feast of complex fluidity. The sixteen members of Shen Wei’s Dance Arts are adroit at letting a movement impulse animate a shoulder, slip to an elbow, glide to a hip, be received by a foot. Sometimes these impulses begin in the center of the body and travel circuitously outward. Often the dancers seem to be spiraling around themselves, crossing one foot over the other and letting it pull them into twist. Sharpness also figures in their dance vocabulary. In one section, they jut their hips bouncily forward and back and let their arms swing loosely around their bodies. In another, a couple of them persist in moving in mechanical increments, while more and more of the others join a smoother, more expansive phrase.

Reich’s music provides a strong rhythmic base, but this can drop deep into a landscape animated by, say, high, ringing sounds and chorusing voices (the words, taken from poems by William Carlos Williams, are not always understandable). The forces that animate this terrain conjure up images of wind as well as watery ones. Wearing socks that mute the sounds of their feet, the dancers rush smoothly here and there in groups, curving and leaning in response to variations in the breeze. In one sequence, some of them dance clustered, while Janice Lancaster Larsen rushes around them in circles, revolving and leaping as she goes, as if blown by a storm in the making.

(L to R): Kate Jewett and Chelsea Retzloff at the dress rehearsal for Map. Photo: Juan Vargas

Shen’s choreography for Map encompasses boldness but not harshness, softness but not indolence, vigor without muscular display. Its tone suggests an aim to explore and purify rather than to entertain or create dramas. Others have described it as occasionally witty, although I don’t notice that. Once a dancer reaches up, grasps a balloon’s string, and pulls it down a little, holding it there while others begin a new section. Like Map as a whole, the still person and the obedient balloon suggest buoyancy under control and a playful compliance with gravity.

Evan Copeland, Kate Jewett, Cynthia Koppe, Ricardo Zayas, and Lancaster Larsen have been performing with Shen Wei Dance Artists the longest, but all of the dancers enter wonderfully into the spirit of choreography that is tidal yet allows individuals to float and spurt to the surface.

Shen Wei in his new Variations. Photo: Juan Vargas

Dancing alone in his new Variations, Shen eschews the stunning visual imagery that characterizes his work. He’s alone in the space, dressed in white, and accompanied on the piano by Steven Gosling playing Arvo Pärt’s spare 1977 Variations for the Healing of Arinushka (Arinushka was a folk music ensemble in the composer’s native Estonia). The music begins with a simple single-note melody that climbs, falls a little, climbs again, and so on until it settles back down. Gradually the variations thicken it, but not much.

Shen, too, builds from a simple base. Watching him, you might say to yourself, “he comes in peace.” His very appearance is centered, meditative, almost neutral. He could be twenty years old or fifty. With a slim, compact body, a long neck, and supple arms, he dances as if communicating with the particularities of his body, the air around him, and the ground under his feet. His background in Chinese painting and calligraphy still traces its way through his contemporary vision.

The Lyon Opera Ballet brings Christian Rizzo’s ni fleurs, ni ford-mustang to BAM.

Julia Carnicer and Franck Laizet of the Lyon Opera Ballet in Christian Rizzo’s ni fleurs, ni ford-mustang. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The stage lights are dimming slowly— so slowly that we spectators can barely pin down the moment when we can no longer see the clump of seven dancers, covered head to toe in gleaming black outfits, wriggling and jouncing around. Nor can we be sure when the lights are truly out. There’s a nervous pause before people start to applaud, and in the moment before the clapping and the cheers achieve full volume, a voice from the audience calls out, “LET’S SEE YOU DANCE!”

Please forgive this brave person. After all, he (I believe it was a man) came to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House to see a company called The Lyon Opera Ballet, and he may not have known that its director, Yorgos Loukos, has a reputation for presenting works by choreographers such as Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, William Forsythe, and Ohad Naharin, as well as obstreperous French postmodernists the likes of Jérôme Bel, Alain Buffard, and Christian Rizzo, whose ni fleurs, ni ford-mustang occasioned the outburst.

The work was one of the offerings in DANSE: A French-American Festival of Performances and Ideas, which continues in various theaters through May 18^th. And not everyone in the audience may have boned up on “non-danse,” a phenomenon that appeared in France in the mid-1990s. bolstered by ideas drawn from philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze. The choreographers espousing non-danse didn’t not exactly follow Yvonne Rainer’s famous 1965 “No” Manifesto, except, for sure, her “No to virtuosity.” But “No to spectacle” and “No to transformations and magic and make-believe?” Instead, a resounding “Oui!”

Rizzo did not grow up in dance. He jumped into choreography from careers as a rock musician, a fashion designer,and a visual artist. ni fleurs, ni ford-mustang (2004) is an installation of sorts, in which seven human beings function as moving parts. The other parts include pairs of red high-heeled shoes scattered about; a hairy lump (what-is-it?) off to one side; a bar of large lights hanging at the back of the stage and aimed toward the audience; a gilded skeleton that descends from above, hangs above the non-dancing for a while, and eventually touches the floor and collapses. There are no flowers or Ford Mustangs in sight. The piece has been labeled “highly conceptual,” and words like “surreal” and “dream” have been attached to it.

Randy Castillo (L) and Julia Carnicer of the Lyon Opera Ballet in ni fleurs, ni ford-mustang. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Rizzo’s work has not gone un-attacked in France. A familiar metaphor has been seen in print: Hans Christan Anderson’s tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It takes a child calling out that the ruler on parade is naked for him and his anxious-to-seem-trendy subjects to acknowledge that his fine clothes are an illusion. The faces of some BAM spectators, as they rose from their seats and pulled on their coats, seemed to me to show as much bafflement as delight.

Minimalism started out being. . .well, minimal. Simple materials and few of them. Works of art that could be mistaken for ordinary objects, music that repeated the same brief motifs. Dances built of everyday movements. But this work of Rizzo’s suggests a desert island through which the dazed and shipwrecked wander, discovering offstage the odd, gaudy detritus that some long-ago theatrical company had discarded before dying of starvation.

It is not a friendly environment. The lighting (by Caty Olive ) tells us that. So does Gerome Nox’s electronic score that starts out as a barely heard industrial rumble and builds to almost ear-splitting volume before dying away, to return intermittently in new guises. A man walks onto the stage at a leisurely pace, picks a spot, and lies down. Seconds pass. A second person enters and lies down. After a while, seven bodies—some prone, some supine, one curled on its side—have joined the shoes as décor. More seconds pass. (What is that hairy lump?) One person rises, makes a decision, goes to a new place on the floor, and lies down. Another picks up on this idea. Finally all have chosen other locales. These are their names: Julia Carnicer, Randy Castillo, Simon Feltz, Franck Laizet, Elsa Monguillot de Mirman, Julian Nicosia, Ashley Wright.

(L to R): Elsa Monguillot de Mirman,, Randy Castillo, and Franck Laizet in Christian Rizzo’s 2004 work for the Lyon Opera Ballet. Photo: Stephanie Berger

As the piece progresses, various of them periodically leave the stage and return wearing bizarre outfits or half-outfits—a red tutu, a bird-head mask, a long white skirt, what could be a dusty, epauletted, 19^th-century military jacket, etc. They also make wan contact with one another. Laizet, who has been lying on his face, stretches his butt up off the floor; Carnicer walks up to him and drapes herself over this small mountain peak; they collapse together. Two people rest their heads on a recumbent third person and take a little time out. A man drags a woman along the floor. Castillo carefully removes the seated Monguillot de Mirman’s bird-head. Sometimes, randomly, they point their fingers. Sometimes they all lie on their backs and stick their legs up. Behold: a little forest, small flags.

In this slow-moving dreamscape, just when I needed to be paying close attention in order to monitor changes, I fear that, for a few dangerous seconds, I entered a dream world of my own. As a result of this gaffe, I began to think that although Rizzo created ni fleurs, ni Ford-Mustang for an opera-house stage, I would like to see it from a closer vantage point—one that would make me feel like a not-so-spunky Alice-in-Wonderland, gazing here and there, deciding it best not to move if someone slithered across her foot. Maybe then I’d know what I discovered days later: the hairy lump represents a dead deer.

Members of the Lyon Opera Ballet at the climax of Christian Rizzo’s ni fleurs, ni ford-mustang. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Rizzo builds the stage picture savvily in terms of design, speed, and density, but in this deliberately paced work, speed doesn’t mean fast. The most sudden move I saw was the skeleton’s final crumple. That, and the taking away of the shoes come near the end of ni fleur, ni ford-mustang’s 50-minute duration. The climax builds gradually, with just one performer re-entering in one of the ghoulish black outfits that manage to be both form-fitting and slightly baggy. Little sparkly bits on them catch the light. Pretty soon there are two performers dressed like this, then three, then all.

The dance party they’ve come for happens upstage in dim light. Milling around, thrashing, picking up their feet, kicking out, they’ve arrived too late. If this is a party, the food and drinks have run out, and the musicians are packing up. Never mind, these gifted performers in heavy disguise keep dancing as their shred of a world goes dark.

Jacqulyn Buglisi, Elisa Monte, and Jennifer Muller share a program at New York Live Arts, June 18-21.

The cast of Jennifer Muller’s Miserere Nobis in Monte/Buglisi/Muller Live.  (Left foreground: Seiko Fujita and Shiho Tanaka. Photo: Carol Rosegg

If you’re wondering about people who have had long, productive careers in dance, you might want to consider Jacqulyn Buglisi, Elisa Monte, and Jennifer Muller (note the alphabetical order). First came their years as marvelous dancers—Muller in José Limón’s company and then in Louis Falco’s, Monte and Buglisi with Martha Graham. All have maintained their own groups for several decades, toured them extensively worldwide, and choreographed pieces for other companies. They have developed their own voices; that is, you can’t call their work Grahamesque or Limónish in terms of movement style.

Their success is understandable. They all employ strong, handsome dancers, and all create works in which contemporary or universal concerns mate with large-scale virtuosic dancing and dramatic expression. Whoever first thought of bringing these three artists together in a program at New York Live Arts should be congratulated.

It seems to me that the dances made by these women are finest when the movements spring from the emotional or societal base that motivates each. By this reasoning, the pieces threaten to become unstable when dance moves aren’t anchored firmly to the idea behind them—when, say, a person wishing to get close to another on stage takes the time to lift a leg in an arabesque or some other step that calls attention to itself. In one of Muller’s favorite moves, a dancer lifts a slightly bent leg high to the side by putting one arm under his or her knee; it’s great-looking move but not always relevant.

Occasionally, too, passages can be confusing or misleading. For instance, at one point in Monte’s Lonely Planet, the eight dancers start to follow one another in curving patterns; as they snake around in their line, they pump their hips forward with every deep forward step, and inevitably individual quirks call to mind a fashion show parade. You think, “what’s that about?” in a piece that concerns the loss of human connections in a technological world.

Jennifer Muller’s Miserere Nobis. Photo: Carol Rosegg

One of the most pungent works on the program is Muller’s brand new Miserere Nobis, set to Samuel Barber’s arrangement of his famous Adagio for Strings to include voices singing the “Agnus Dei” of the Mass. For this, Muller uses a spare vocabulary, in which each gesture and movement is clearly designed and sustained long enough to become embedded in the viewers’ memories. As it begins, seven identically dressed women cluster in a far corner facing an implied diagonal path; their arms are folded across their chests. The costumes by Sachi Masuda and the Stageworks contribute mightily to the piece’s affect: the women wear long, trim black skirts; black bands held across their breasts by slim cords; and black caps that completely cover their hair. They look like members of a priestly sect, but also—given the amount of muscular flesh on view— both powerful and seductive.

Muller makes shrewd use of counterpoint within the prevailing unanimity. Once the dancers—first Seiko Fujita, then Shiho Tanaka, then Caroline Kehoe, followed gradually by the others—detach themselves from the corner, they travel very little in space. Instead, they break open their opening theme’s powerful unison gestures, so that their community is fragmented in orderly ways, with everyone momentarily different from everyone else. Nor do they always embark on a new passage of movement all at once. In repetition, variation, and counterpoint, they find strength.

Jennifer Muller’s Whew! (L to R): Michael Tomlinson, Caroline Kehoe, and Shiho Tanaka. Photo: Carol Rosegg

Muller’s also new Whew! set to jazzy music by Peter Muller provides the up-beat closer that a traditional dance program requires. Although the dance is very lively, it feels long—perhaps because it is purposefully frenetic, with dancing itself a voluptuous stand-in for the frantic disconnectedness of contemporary life.

The dancers begin with entrances and exits, criss-crossing the stage by walking briskly, sauntering, or running, Whew!, we are reminded at times, is akin to a race and demands time-outs for a runner to bend over and catch his/her breath. In the last seconds, Michael Tomlinson plops down on the floor, mouthing the work’s title. Although there’s little indication of an actual race, certain encounters suggest a bit of competition, with gestures indicating, “Back off, will you?” and other similar sentiments, even though the performers cooperate in various intricate maneuvers.

One of the virtues of Whew! is that it gives each of the seven powerhouse dancers a moment to be seen as an individual before he or she is swept up in the momentum of the day’s “work” (dancing to beat the band). Especially compelling is Gen Hashimoto, who can go from racing around or pausing to “argue” with a colleague into dancing so silkily and easily that the choreography has the air of a garment he has just slipped into.

Elisa Monte’s Lonely Planet reveals her proficiency in terms of movement invention. There’s one quite amazing moment when the four men in the cast pair up tightly, each pair carrying two women, whose legs stick out on either side of the linked men. When the two four-person constructions turn, they briefly resemble giant bees or unidentifiable machines. Suddenly the men split apart and spread out, each holding one woman (I, for one, gasped).

Elisa Monte’s Lonely Planet. (L to R): Lisa Peluso, Justin Lynch, Mindy Lai, two dancers from a previous cast, and Clymene Baugher. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Often, however, it’s difficult to discern the relationship between the movements that Monte has designed and her themes of environmental and economic instability. Fadi Khoury is a latecomer, and although he fits into the swaying, reaching motions the others are making, he’s different in some way—perhaps, at times, a catalyst or the last survivor. It’s he who begins to press his palms against the air around him, as if he’s in a glass cage, and the others pick up on this image of isolation. Yet these people in their marble-patterned leotards with red slashes (by Keiko Voltaire) do cooperate—for example, in passing cartwheeling individuals, one by one, down a line, or, in the final moment, lifting Mindy Lai high.

When Lonely Planet begins, the eight dancers are all facing the backcloth that receives Paul Lieber’s projections. And these moving images, coupled with Clifton Taylor’s lighting, are sensational, especially at the outset, when a single glowing point explodes in a starburst of light, followed by other luminous, irregular shapes traveling in one direction. David Van Tieghem’s score provides intermittent cataclysms.

Watching this shared performance, I’m reminded all over again how difficult it can be to make choreography express the complexities of relationships if you also want it to look like vivid, eye-catching dancing. Jacqulyn Buglisi’s We Are All. . .Our Father’s Sons is set to pre-existing music by Norman Dello Joio and a composition by his son, Justin Dello Joio—an ingenious idea, although the juxtaposition is more symbolic than influential. In her duet for two impressive men, Ari Mayzick and Juan Rodriguez, Buglisi has abstracted the father-son relationship to the degree that it could it well be interpreted as other strong relationships between two men. The taller Rodriguez sometimes seems to be a leader, and he and Mayzik keep their eyes on each other much of the time—although they come and go, enabling us to see each in a solo. They also shake hands or pull against each other. But the few moments that express urgent closeness, such as Mayzick dragging himself along holding Rodriguez’s foot, evaporate. The dynamic of the piece doesn’t clearly reflect a complex, shifting relationship; it shows two interesting, allied men who are dancing together with big, impressive steps that they both know. The last moment of the duet reveals very finely what wasn’t obvious earlier: Mayzick stands alone, isolated in Jack Mehler’s lighting; he balances on one leg, the other held out low behind him. His arms are raised. Rodriguez assesses him for a moment or two, then turns and walks offstage.

Jacqulyn Buglisi’s Butterfiies and Demons. Photo: Paul B. Goode

Buglisi’s 2013 Butterflies and Demons is also perplexing, despite its many arresting moments. If I hadn’t learned in advance that it was inspired by human trafficking, especially that of women, I doubt if I would have guessed Buglisi’s source. Perhaps the beginning should have clued me in. Mehler has projected squares of light on the floor, imprisoning each of the eleven dancers. All are swaying, their arms up, but then red lights beam on from stage right, and all the women fall, while the men remain standing and continue to sway, eventually travelling away from the patches of light (which disappear until near the end of the piece).

These people exist in a state of panic that is accentuated by Daniel Bernard Roumain’s hectic score. They rush across the stage, fleeing some unseen enemy, and running figures appear throughout the piece, behind whatever is happening in the foreground, giving a consistency to an atmosphere that is otherwise changeable. At least twice, all the performers hasten to form a line that stretches from the front of the stage to the back; they struggle to pull free in different ways and succeed.

I can appreciate that Buglisi didn’t wish to approach her devastating topic in any literal or realistic way, but neither has she shaped Butterflies and Demons to express it forcefully. Perhaps she is saying any person can represent either aspect of this strange duality. So the piece is often exciting but also puzzling. The performers are usually in control of their dancing in the midst of unspecified disconnectedness. They encounter each other in ways that seem tender or contentious. Mayzick scrabbles after Stephanie van Dooren, and they move together in uncomfortable ways. The relationship between So Young An and Darion Smith is gentler, but full of sadness. Conditions don’t seem to get better or worse, until, just before the end, van Dooren suddenly becomes a victim, collapsed on the floor with others standing over her, staring down. As she lies there, Smith carries An across the stage. He doesn’t touch her with his hands; she balances on his shoulders as if in a mid-air swan-dive, her long black hair falling forward. It’s a beautiful image; she looks more like an angel than a burden. Perhaps she is free at last. Or maybe she’s the soul of the fallen one. Or a butterfly. I wish I knew.

Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion premieres new works at New York Live Arts.

Catherine Ellis Kirk and Jeremy “Jae” Neal in Kyle Abraham’s The Gettin’. Drummer Otis Brown III visible at back. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

You can’t really call Kyle Abraham’s rise to fame meteoric. He has been working persistently and imaginatively for around eight years. Yet few young choreographers have garnered as many awards, residencies, fellowships, and commissions as he has in the last five years. The works that Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion is showing at New York Live Arts from September 23 through October 4 were developed during his two years there as a Resident Commissioned Artist.

His choreography is a striking blend of powerful political awareness and postmodern strategies. His childhood, his family, his growing up as a gay African American man, the aspects of racism in contemporary America and elsewhere all feed into his dances—sometimes at gale force, sometimes so obliquely that you may not be sure you saw what you saw or heard what you heard.

Abraham himself is a remarkable dancer—expansive, sinuous, yet able to convey small gestural shifts that convey uncertainty, nervousness, and a host of other emotions and attitudes. In the two programs of new pieces performed at NYLA, his eight vibrant dancers cover space with big, springing, slashing steps and shifts of direction, their legs most often wide apart, reaching out. This dancing—sometimes not only big but rough—is not so much expressive in terms of the tumult surrounding and enhancing it, as it is a life-force powering the dancers along, a way of working in the world. When indecision or uncertainty or thought overtakes them, however, they most often stay rooted to a spot, a myriad of small impulses passing through their limbs and bodies. Sometimes a rhythm develops in which big and creamy moves yield to small and jittery ones and then reset to the larger scale.

(L) Tanisha Guy and Jeremy “Jae” Neal in Kyle Abraham’s The Watershed. At back: Winston Dynamite Brown. Onscreen: Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The Watershed, the 70-minute work that constitutes Progam A, announces some of its topics from the get-go. Three couples dance simultaneously; their themes are similar, but they are not in unison. Two women, Catherine Ellis Kirk and Penda N’diaye, partner each other; Tanisha Guy and Connie Shiau dance with men (Jeremy “Jae” Neal and Matthew Baker, as I recall). Behind them, off to the side, stands a “tree” made of white PVC pipe. Some of its branches bear wads that look like crude approximations of Spanish moss. Or stranger fruit. Film clips are projected on Glenn Ligon’s wall of variously textured wood panels. One, a sequence from the 1935 The Littlest Rebel, shows Shirley Temple as the six-year-old daughter of a plantation owner happily and expertly tapping in unison with a family slave (Bill Robinson). In another Civil-War-era scenario, Mandingo (1975), a dissolute white woman, demanding sex, slowly peels the clothes off a muscular family slave. Over and over, traffic races by a grainy image of a white cop viciously assaulting a fallen black person.

The music for The Watershed, interestingly, veers from Otis Redding to Frederick Chopin, plus Christopher Tignor, the Icelandic Band Stilluppsteypa, the Swedish BJ Nilsen, and Icelandic cellist-composer Hildur Gudnadóttir.

Occasionally Abraham inserts a vignette or a spoken or projected sentence that’s almost a cliché of racism in America. Jordan Morley hacks into pieces a watermelon that’s brought in by Winston Dynamite Brown, who wiggles his hips in anticipation. One message: don’t waste money on education for Blacks: “Can’t you see that thinking only gives them a headache?”

Kyle Abraham and Jordan Morley in Abraham’s The Watershed. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

One powerful scene digs deeper and implies more. Abraham enters in drag— cottony white wig, white gloves, a nice dress, heels—and sits on a bench some distance from a lounging, blank-faced white man (Morley). Expertly, Abraham applies pale makeup to his face. “Please let me sit there beside you,” sings a voice. The guy attempts to lift the transvestite’s skirt; his hand is slapped away. He puts his arm around her and is rebuffed. Playing the gentleman, he kisses her gloved hand and slowly pulls the glove off. That brown male hand is more shocking than any disrobing could be. Abraham, shuddering, collapses; Morley walks away.

Images recur of people being downed and dragged away, people running. Baker chases Ellis Kirk with a lasso. Yet he also engages in a tender, athletic duet with Neal. And in the marvelous dancing by Tanisha Guy that ends the first half of The Watershed, you see resolution, bravery, and hyper-awareness of the lurking dangers, along with softness and an ease that amounts to generosity. She lets us follow the current of feeling as it flows through her dancing body.

Kyle Abraham. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

After the intermission, the “tree” is bare, Dan Scully’s terrifically effective lighting lays beams that lie from the front to the back of the stage like the bars of a transfigured jail-cell. The dancers have shed Karen Young’s imaginative takes on plantation clothes for more stylish draped ones in grays and black. But it is to the chanting and hammer blows of a chain gang that Abraham (now in pants, but still with a pale face), dances as if he’s smoothly and evasively shifting his body inside its skin. When he finishes, a small chain falls from above. Elements from the first part of the work are repeated and varied; new ones appear (Al Jolsen onscreen in blackface but silent, the dancers ripping their costumes open to bare their backs To the lash? To reveal themselves in other ways?). At the end, Guy is still standing, while the others lie under the all-white tree.

In his “director’s note” for the program, Abraham mentions that his new works “draw inspiration” from the 1960 album Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite. Freedom is a theme that runs through them all in various ways and alludes to various places where the Civil Rights movement was gathering force. Ligon’s blurry black-and-white projections on the back wall as Program B begins show peaked shapes that could almost be taken for Klan headdresses. Nico Muhly’s score for When the Wolves Come in at times references a church organ and becomes hymn-like in its sonorities. Drums rolls also ring out.

Catherine Ellis Kirk and Jordan Morley in Kyle Abraham’s When the Wolves Came In. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

If that dance seems to be the most stylized in terms of  statements about race relations, that may be due in part to Reid Bartelme’s costumes. Guy, Ellis Kirk, and N’diaye wear wigs shaped like curly towers that match their skimpy outfits in black, brown, or bronze. Shiau and Brown wear blond wigs. Baker and Morley dance bare-headed. But neither the presence, nor the absence, nor the color of the wigs seems to dictate behavior; Ellis Kirk and Morley sit together on the floor to rock Guy, while the music quietens. Although the significance of the headgear isn’t always clear, when Guy removes Brown’s wig, and he appears downcast, we can posit a futile and perhaps degrading futile attempt on his part to “pass for white.”

Guy is the first performer to strike a certain pose; on her hands and knees, she raises one arm, crooked like a paw—like a dog’s mutely proffered handshake. The others watch. Intermittently, over the course of the dance, they, too, assume that posture, then move on. Ellis Kirk enters crawling, led by Morley; he lets her rise to dance, then lays her out. Then she becomes a “wolf” again. In this shifting relationship, she carries him in her arms, he scrabbles on the floor, they go head to head as if to begin a fight, and, finally, he turns her upside down and drags her offstage.

Kyle Abraham’s Hallowed. (L to R) Jeremy “Jae” Neal, Tanisha Guy, and Catherine Ellis Kirk. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Hallowed follows When the Wolves Came In without a pause, marked only by Neal’s first entrance of the evening. In silence, Guy and Ellis Kirk undress him and re-clothe him in black. Three lamps drop from overhead and hang, swinging slightly, from their cords. Clouds form over the hooded figures on the back wall. The profoundly simple, beautiful a capella voice of Bertha Gober fills the silence. “I told Jesus it would be all right if he changed my name,” she sings. And Neal begins to dance. Wonderfully. With those complexities that make Abraham’s movement style so arresting. Neal’s body is an unstable edifice, strong but adjusting to winds both internal and external. A hint of the wolf’s lifted paw reappears, as if in passing.

When the two women reappear, that animal motif becomes more prominent. We hear a pastor exhorting his responding flock, a woman (Cleo Kennedy) singing gospel. Strangely, toward the end the murmuring voices turn artificially high and hysterical, as if wolves had indeed “come in” yipping frantically. The dancers’ lift their “paws,” one after the other, as if slowly climbing invisible ladders to heaven.

There has been terrific dancing all along, but The Getting’ offers it to us on a golden platter. The members of the Robert Glasper Trio take their places upstage—Glasper on piano, Vicente Archer on bass, Otis Brown III on drums, and singer Charenee Wade. They start out with whacks, like the fall of a hammer, or of a whip, then start up some fine, easy jazz. Wade sings of slave days. But Glasper’s vibrant composition goes on to accent uneasiness and strife whenever those surface in the Abraham’s choreography.

Kyle Abraham’s The Gettin’. (L to R): Tanisha Guy Connie Shiau, Winston Dynamite Brown, Catherine Ellis Kirk, Jeremy “Jae” Neal, Matthew Baker. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The dancers wear individualized outfits by Young—the women’s printed cotton dresses evoking the 1950s, the men in pants and casual tops. Some of the images that appear, superimposed on Ligon’s blurred back wall, are “White area” signs from South Africa in English and Afrikaans. So, yes, Abraham is still evoking the fights for freedom worldwide. While grainy shots of police incidents flash by, Wade yells, and Baker and Neal pull down their shirts to show their bare backs. Small, valiant Guy is wrestled offstage.

But the dancing itself is a tornado. It swirls around, touches down, blows away, and returns with renewed vigor. Six spirited, powerhouse dancers (Baker, Brown, Guy, Ellis Kirk, Neal, and Shiau) meet, mingle, hustle off). The duet for Baker and Neal is a high point. The music and the images on the wall may rage, but the men keep dancing as long as they can—first a little suspicious of each other, then in harmony, determined to stay in synch and to succor each other. Shiau performs a wonderful, richly variegated solo, filling more than just the space around her. The end is strangely jolting. Drums sound alone, red lights cool down while Guy jitters then gets with the beat. A voice speaks: “I am my own nigger joke,” as the curtains slowly close, and the music gradually ends.

Jeremy “Jae” Neal (L) and Matthew Baker in Kyle Abraham’s The Gettin’. Photo Yi-Chun Wu

Abraham attempts to accomplish so much in these dances. He spreads a banquet of ideas through music, visual effects, words, and, above all, dancing that contains a rich supply of information about how humans convey strife, heroism, vitality, and persistence. As a director, he wants, I think, to deconstruct the grim realities—to pin them to the wall without enacting them, to scatter vivid scraps of narrative, deprived (in most cases) of follow-up. I suspect he’s afraid of being too obvious in how he presents his volatile subject matter. I’m for that, but it means that weak connections crop up here and there, keeping us in a mental spin. I drink it all in anyway, acknowledging that Abraham has dared to tackle a huge, explosive issue and admiring all that he has achieved.

The L.A. Dance Project comes to BAM with works by Justin Peck, William Forsythe, and company founder-director Benjamin Millepied.

Anthony Bryant and Rachelle Rafailedes of the L.A. Dance Project in Justin Peck’s Murder Ballads. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

What is it about Los Angeles that attracts artists? Even before the 1940s, many European musicians and writers fleeing the Nazis zipped right through culturally confident New York and joined the émigré filmmakers who settled on the west coast. Maybe it was the plethora of sunny days, the scent of eucalyptus and gardenia, the boisterous Pacific Ocean, the possibility of a backyard with an orange tree and a swimming pool. Despite the noisome traffic, those alluring qualities still exist and still draw artists westward.

Climate, of course, may be only one of the factors that drew Benjamin Millepied to found a small dance company in Los Angeles. Nevertheless the kind of company he created fits well into the sprawling city, and he has attracted local funding and support to fuel his desire to collaborate with visual artists and composers in building his group’s rather surprising profile. When Millepied retired from the New York City Ballet in 2011, he had performed major roles in the Balanchine repertory and been a protégé of Jerome Robbins. He had already been choreographing for ten years. But his Los Angeles venture, L.A. Dance Project, is not a ballet company, Although its dancers have all had extensive training in ballet, they are more well-rounded in terms of their backgrounds. Seven of the nine company members are Juilliard graduates, one has a degree from SUNY-Purchase, and all have considerable prior experience onstage. They’re up for choreographic collaboration and creative input.

The two new works that the L.A. Dance Project brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House show off their versatility, their dancing prowess, their ease on stage, and their closeness as a group—a closeness that seems to have influenced the choreography of Millepied’s Reflections and Justin Peck’s Murder Ballads.

L.A. Dance Project members (L to R): Rachelle Rafailedes, Stephanie Amauro, Randy Castillo, Morgan Lugo, and (hidden) Aaron Carr and Anthony Bryant in Murder Ballads. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Peck’s piece is surprising, and these dancers, along with the nature of Millepied’s vision (and, maybe, all those sunny days) may have had something to do with his venturing in a new direction. Hitherto, Peck’s choreography (at least, those dances of his that I’ve seen) has fitted comfortably into the realm of contemporary ballet; he’s still a soloist in the New York City Ballet, as well as a Resident Choreographer there. Murder Ballads is not in the least balletic, unless you count a well-placed arabesque or two, but these are tossed off. It’s a dance with a great deal of loose, springy, athletic movement and impulsive behavior—all cleverly organized and put together.

Contrary to its title, Murder Ballads does not recycle Frankie-and-Johnny scenarios, although you can hear traces of folk songs or a fiddle tune coloring Bryce Dessner’s vivid, sometimes tumultuous score (played live at BAM by the members of eighth blackbird: Tim Munro, flutes; Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets; Yvonne Lam, violin and viola; Nicholas Photinos, cello; Matthew Duvall, percussion; and Lisa Kaplan, piano). The dance’s visual component by Sterling Ruby is ambiguous, but gorgeous: a variously patterned patchwork of broad horizontal stripes bordered by vertical ones that is reminiscent of certain works by Rauschenberg. Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting occasionally heats up one or another of the bands

In this setting, two dancers, Rachelle Rafailledes and Anthony Bryant, race onto the stage, dressed for sport (by Peck) and sliding on sockleted feet. One of the first things they do is sit down and put on the sneakers waiting for them onstage. Sneakers for all will be donned and taken off as the dance progresses—perhaps in some highly abstracted reference to leaving no tracks. Here’s another flash-by referral to ballad narratives: Aaron Carr, Morgan Lugo, Randy Castillo, and Stephanie Amauro) bend down and encircle Rafailledes in a kind of human stockade, and, when two strokes on a wood block sound, Bryant knocks sharply twice on the air and then pulls Rafailledes out of the clump. Later, he knocks again near a clump of dancers, but no sound reinforces the act this time, and it has no obvious result.

Anthony Bryant and Rachelle Rafailledes on Justin Peck’s Murder Ballads. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The six form lines, chase one another into them, peel out from them, pass movements down them. They form arches for others to pass under, and some briefly lie down to be used as structures for stepping on in passing. They form pairs to dance energetically—two male-female ones and a male-male one (no heterosexual ballet conventions here).

They keep their eyes open to what’s going on. Castillo has a terrific solo, in which his legs cross and uncross in some lickety-split ways; Bryant enters and yanks him offstage. Rafailledes catapults Lugo into the wings and shortly thereafter performs a crazy, collapsing, slumping-around passage (shot in the OK corral, maybe). The sometimes argumentative interplay between Peck’s formal structure and interloping flashes of disorder and drama are intriguing. I like the fact that when Bryant and Rafailledes finish a duet, they just pick up the shoes they’ve removed and walk cozily away together, as if they’ve come to an understanding, and it’s time to go home.

Julia Eichten and Morgan Lugo in Benjamin Millepied’s Reflections. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Millepied plans to make his Reflections the first part of a tryptich entitled Gems (it was commissioned by Van Cleef andf Arpels). A latter-day echo of George Balanchine’s Jewels? Hmm. The dance as is fills around forty minutes, and its first section is as long as the others put together. Is there such a thing as a West Coast sense of time? You can also feel a kind of leisureliness in the music: selections from Davis Lang’s This was written by hand/memory pieces that Lang and Millepied chose together. For a long time, pianist Andrew Zolinsky plays single notes, spaced out so that they could be drops of water plinking into a pond. Then he settles into a repetitive pattern for a while and builds in complexity from there. The music coincides with the dance, rather than working intimately with it, as does Barbara Kruger’s striking set. Her projected design fills both the backdrop and the floor. Huge red letters loom above the stage, saying either STAY or GO. The message that continues along the floor in smaller letters: THINK OF ME THINKING OF YOU.

The process of mounting a revival of Merce Cunningham’s astonishing 1959 Winterbranch for the L.A. Dance Project a couple of years ago may have expanded Millepied’s ideas about collaboration. Perhaps the music, dance, and visual components of Reflections are to be understood as separate strands, resonating sympathetically with one another. Too, Millepied choreographed the piece in collaboration with its original cast: Lugo, Julia Eichten, Charlie Hodges, Nathan Makolandra, and Amanda Wells.

L.A. Dance Project members in Benjamin Millepied’s Reflections. (L to R, foreground): Morgan Lugo, Rachelle Rafailedes, and Nathan Makolandra. (At back): Julia Eichten and Aaron Carr. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Millepied’s early ballets were fastidiously constructed but stuffed with steps; he was bursting with ideas and youthful vigor. Reflections is hardly minimal, but it does allow the spectator time to ponder what’s happening onstage, even dares to tax his/her attention span. Another development in his work, I think, is the tenderness that crops up in this piece. The long duet between Eichten and Lugo seems to be one of discovery. They pull on each other, draw close together, watch each other try things out. He scrabbles for a while on the floor while she stares. She runs and jumps onto him. Things like this occur and recur in various ways. But what’s striking is the flow of tenderness and physical closeness that permeates this relationship. The two are fond equals, with more than a bit of sexual heat.

What you notice as the dance progresses is that the men are not presented as macho or even as stalwart partners. They are as silky in their dancing as the women—even, at times, more so. The section with the swiftest pace and sharpest edges is a solo tailored to the inimitable muscular crispness that characterizes Charlie Hodges’ personal style (Hodges is recuperating from an operation and did not appear at BAM); even danced by the more wiry, loose-limbed Carr, the solo is a virtuosic display of spins, jumps, and fast footwork. But after this, Carr and Lugo (who has an easy fluidity, an unselfconscious lyricism) dance companionably, even affectionately together. And in the last section of comings and goings—after a fairly sharp, fast-moving, conversational duet for Rafailledes and Makolandra in shifting areas of light—Lugo and Makolandra enter, bending forward slightly and making flowery gestures with their spread fingers, then back out, continuing the flourish.

There’s a quite a bit of jumping in this last group section, but also embracing and collaborating on joint structures or games. In the end, only the two women are left onstage, sitting on the floor and nestling together.

An earlier L.A. Dance Project cast in William Forsythe’s Quintett. (Foreground): Nathan Makolandra and Julia Eichten.  (At back): Charlie Hodges

I wrote in some detail about L.A. Dance Project’s production of William Forsythe’s 1993 Quintett, when the company was featured on the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University (http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2012/10/east-to-west-to-east/). It was presented then on the same program as Cunningham’s Winterbranch and Millepied’s Moving Parts. This is the dance that Forsythe created as a tribute to his wife, dancer Tracy-Kai Meier-Forsythe, who was dying of cancer (her life ended in February, 1994). It honors their love, her strength and courage, and the sometime fierceness of grief. The strange black object that sits onstage might represent all the paraphernalia of hospital machines (it is supposed to create clouds at the end, but I didn’t see that happen this time).

The five dancers (Rafailedes, Eichten, Makolandra, Lugo, and Castillo) come and go in a harshly lit black void, while composer Gavin Bryars’ loop of a derelict man singing in his frail, hoarse voice, “Jesus’ love never failed me yet. . .” gradually moves from being barely audible to full volume. In the choreography, as is always true of Forsythe, beauty and power dispute with awkwardness; non sequiturs; and strange, mannered encounters. There are beasts prowling in these people’s bodies, pouncing without warning. You wonder why Rafailedes wears a very short, floating shift over skin-colored tights, so that she appears, disquietingly, to be partially naked. But there’s no point questioning why people enter the action and leave it seemingly arbitrarily. Nor why, when some people are watching others, they crouch and swing along like monkeys. Perhaps we are seeing into nightmares or the phantoms of disease.

When Makolandra performs—magnificently—a long, ribbon of complex motions, his long limbs stirring the space for what seems like miles around him, spectators want to, start to, applaud. But Quintett is not that sort of dance. You see people fall, lie still for a long time. Rafailedes moves as if hobbled, then dances beautifully, collapsing and rising.

This November, Millepied goes to Paris to take up a new position, director of the Paris Opera Ballet, a very different sort of organization. Even though he will be often absent from Los Angeles, he affirms that the L.A. Dance Project will continue—strong in its direction, its adventurous choices, and its band of magnificent dancers. Rooted in California soil.

Batsheva Dance Company celebrates its 50th anniversary.

(Foreground, L to R): Batsheva’s Oscar Ramos, Iyar Alezra, and Shamel Pitts in Ohad Naharin’s Sadeh21. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Fifty years ago in Israel, Baroness Bethsabée (aka Batsheva) de Rothschild (1914-1999) founded the Batsheva Dance Company. Enamored of dance, she had, during her years in New York, studied with Martha Graham and become a patron of her work. Choreography by Graham was initially a part of Batsheva’s repertory and the training of its dancers. Fast forward over changes in the company’s directorship and mission to 1990; that’s when Ohad Naharin—who trained both with Batsheva and in New York at Juilliard during the 1970s and formed his own small New York group in the 1980s—took over the company and became its principal choreographer.

Given that 2014 is the 50^th anniversary of the company’s founding, it seems appropriate that Naharin chose to present Sadeh21, a piece that premiered in 2011, for its season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Why appropriate? Because even more than others of his works that I have seen, Sadeh21 celebrates the prowess, the beauty, and the humanity of the Batsheva dancers. It’s as if Naharin were saying in his choreography, “This is what this company is most fundamentally about: human spirit, humor, integrity, and valor.”

And individuality. Sadeh21 begins by startling the chatting audience with a tremendous crash and a thud. After we’re cowed into silence, a woman (Iyar Alezra) enters the white-walled space created by Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi). Now we can take in the astonishingly nuanced movements that are rooted in Gaga, now widespread technique that Naharin designed to render dancers more sensitive to the changes—both minute and cataclysmic—that happen every moment within the labyrinth of muscles, joints, and nerves that make up the human body and its multiple intelligences.

Watching Alezra and the nine (I think) other dancers who, one by one, succeed her onstage, I’m aware of their preternaturally flexible spines, their articulation of the differences between small, tight jerks and large smooth moves, and their bold, sensual muscularity. They can jump high, but often they’re low to the ground—whipping themselves into such big, straddle-legged steps that their centers of gravity have to descend. Nothing about them is loose. Every twist, every swing, every cantilevered balance has its carefully (often fiercely) calibrated force and destination. Rarely does any dancer seem unready, even if readiness includes being prepared to take a fall.

Sadeh21 is made up of 21 sections of varying lengths—all of them having arisen out of collaborative work between Naharin and the 18 dancers. Although Bambi’s lighting alters the stage atmosphere from time to time (cooling it to afternoon bluish, warming it midday sun), and the musical selections that form part of Maxim Waratt’s score (“Waratt” is a Naharin alter ego) vary from David Darling and Brian Eno to Autechre and Jun Miyake, there are few dead, begin-again stops in Sadeh21.

Ohad Naharin’s Sadeh21. (L to R): Omni Drumlevich, Bobbi Smith, Adi Zlatkin, and Ian Robinson. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The speed and overlap of the initial solo appearances quicken, and alliances form and dissolve. Occasionally those people onstage—or some of them—freeze, creating a landscape with figures. (“Sadeh” may be translated as “field,” and can be taken both as a fertile place and as a domain of activity.) Shortly after “Sadeh 2” is projected on the back wall, Ian Robinson enters with Adi Zlatin slung over his shoulder and puts her down front and center. While these two wrangle and explore each other in a conscribed space to a sweetish melodic passage of music, other things are happening behind and around them. Occasionally William Barry waves one arm in an unemphatic way; occasionally Brett Easterling, hunkered down, explodes into a bent-kneed jump, lands, and freezes again. Three women, their backs to the audience, link arms overhead and, swaying their hips from side to side, move slowly upstage. There’s more going on in this vignette than I’ve described.

At one point Zlatin slaps Robinson When he falls and others scrabble over him, she begins a curious solitary passage around the perimeter of the stage. She’s marching with small steps and at the same time, thrusting one hip out, creating a hobbled gait. Eventually she stops at the front of the stage and, staring in our direction, says combinations of numbers, such as “5!” Then, after a pause, “2,1,1,1.” Four other dancers start rushing around, grouping and separating, as if in response to her words. I get the idea that she could be ordering them to, say, form a pair, or go it alone, or become a seconds-long trio. As the pace of her commands pick up speed, so do their dashings-about. Alone and together, they work fiercely, crazy with trying to do whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing.

Zina Zinchenko (L) and Bobbi Smith in Sadeh21. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Some of the images appear only briefly—as tender as one person leaning over a fallen comrade or as violent as a small group of packed-together people exploding into pushes, pulls, lifts, and drops. Unexplained jokes crop up. Nitzan Ressler stands facing us as if she has something to convey; then her pants fall down, displaying her red-and-white striped briefs. She doesn’t react, just pulls them up as she moves into her next pattern. Omri Drumlevich plants himself at the center front of the stage. Seconds pass. Then he opens his mouth and starts talking gibberish to us in a high falsetto. He’s endearing and infuriating—both uncertain and unstoppable. Rachael Osborne starts advancing on him by inching along on her coccyx, her legs and arms in the air—a living letter V (!). Once beside him, she clamps her legs around one of his and clambers up him. Eventually she forces him—still telling his story—to move along and shut up.

In their own way, such incidents—like the passages of out-and-out marvelous dancing—are expressive but enigmatic. Yet neither induces us, the viewers, to feel a need to interpret them. We can watch Zina Zinchenko and Bobbi Smith, equally matched in a head-to-head dispute that include touching profiles and rubbing along their contours, and not query a possible relationship between them and the surrounding company members who behave as if they’re pounding nails into the floor in slow motion.

Why do the men suddenly accumulate onstage wearing mid-length, bouffant black tutus , leaping and turning in off-kilter ways, while the women, planted in front of them whirl one arm with ferocious strength and concentration, and Smith (now in hot pink) performs smooth acrobatic feats and uncanny stretches. Let’s not take the time for deep musings about gender, or ballet, or circuses. Whiffs of thought are enough.

Or how’s this for a resonant image? All eight men stand facing us with their arms across one another’s shoulders. Slowly and in unison, each lifts a bent leg, pauses, sets it down, and lifts the other. Sometimes they separated and move back or forward, gesturing, but always they return to their line. They’re quite silent and often still, but a constant harder pace is provided by Maayan Sheinfeld. She, lying on her back to one side of them, “marches” her heels noisily on the floor, without traveling from her spot on the floor. Do you think about snapshots of a folk dance? Of an army? Neither?

Shamel Pitts and Iyar Alezra in Ohad Naharin’s Sadeh21. Photo: Stephanie Berger

For all their virtuosity and their gazes at the audience, Batsheva’s dancers don’t “perform” for us. They’re bent on their tasks and on one another, sometimes introspective—sensing the air on their skins, and deeper matters. I like the moment when, one by one, they leave off what they’re doing and just walk in a circle that gets larger and larger. All the superb dancers—including Mario Bermudez Gil, Rani Lebzelter, Oscar Ramos, Nitzab Ressler, Or Meir Schraiber, and Eri Nakamura (she of the long miraculous balances on one leg)—walk quietly, holding hands, as if a folk dance could begin any moment. But it doesn’t.

Naharin doesn’t disallow the value of theatrical effects. Finally, after a slew of shorter selections (the projected “Sadeh 7-18” gets a laugh from the audience), the stage empties, and a single dancer appears on the top of the rear “wall,” stares at us for a second or two, and then falls backward into oblivion. The piece ends with all the performers clambering onto the wall and falling out of sight as if shot, or flying into swan dives and other bold shapes on the way down. Over and over, in rapid succession, they climb and take off, exulting in challenging gravity, counting on a soft landing. This is what they do—in their dreams, in their lives—every day.

Doug Varone and Dancers premieres two works at the Joyce Theater.

Doug Varone’s Dome. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

What strikes me first about Doug Varone’s new Dome is the amount of stillness in it. This most musical of choreographers is at home with maelstroms. In his 2004 Castles, which opened his company’s program at the Joyce Theater, architectural and social structures form and dissolve and re-form like elaborate sand castles washed over by waves. Arches, bridges, chains, towers, melées, clusters, games surge and vanish in the swirl and fanfares of Prokofiev’s Waltz Suite, Op. 110 (music drawn from the ballet Cinderella, the opera War and Peace, and the film Lermontov).

Dome is bleaker and harsher. The sputter and blare and crash and drum rolls of much of its accompanying music—Christopher Rouse’s startling Trombone Concerto—suggests a post-apocalyptic world in which sweet melodies live short lives. Jane Cox’s splendid lighting backs the dancers for much of the time with a glowing, orange sky that hints at distant fires. The dancers enter the stage gradually, like survivors returning to a demolished home. But Varone is not telling a story, only showing a society crumbling and rising, in response to dangers they don’t fully understand.

Doug Varone’s Dome. (L to R): Hsiao-Jou Tang, Hollis Bartlett, and Julia Burrer. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

These people wear an assortment of layered, rough-textured garments in beige, brown, and black (by Reid Barthelme and Harriet Jung). They are: Hollis Bartlett, Xan Burley, Julia Burrer, Casey Loomis, Alex Springer, Eddie Taketa, Hsiao-Jou Tang, and Brandon Welch. As in Castles, they are superb in their ability to move like silk in the wind one moment and turn twitchy and gawky the next. They can hurtle across the floor or crash to it, as Springer does in one startling entrance into a world where everyone else, at the moment, is curling and uncurling in slow motion.

In response to an outburst by the trombone and cymbals, those on stage erupt into a frenzy, then freeze momentarily. Whatever is driving these people beside the music does so in jolts. Their athleticism and loose-limbed grace keep hitting an invisible wall. They set each other off too; one explosion or its response travel through whoever’s around. Once, they all drop to their knees with an audible thud. Often they collapse to the floor. After one such collapse, they grope into motion, each in his/her own way, while Burley, on her knees, remains motionless amid them; Springer falls beside her like a boat bumping a pier.

Alex Springer and, in the background, Hollis Bartlett in Dome. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

They recover as an ensemble, stand and raise their arms, while Cox returns the backdrop—which has become gray—to its orange glow. The front curtain rises extremely slowly at the beginning of the piece, revealing performers’ feet and legs moments before we know who they are. Now, at the end, it descends equally slowly on this world of heat and ice. Going. Going. Gone.

The disastrous dramas that Rouse’s music suggests and the pent-up, then released rhythms of the dancing give Dome some of the tensions of a thriller. Varone’s own new solo, The Fabulist, is more of an ongoing flow, even though it intersperses springy, expansive steps with small jerks, shudders, and gestures that suggest he’s pushing heavy curtains out of the way and bolting through them. Sometimes he seems to be shaking the dance off himself like a dog come from the river. At other times, his surroundings press against him, make him cave in. Varone, a brilliantly distinctive dancer is no longer a young one, and The Fabulist is not a young man’s dance, however powerful he is as a performer. The title is apt; he might be telling his own history—or making one up.

Doug Varone in his solo, The Fabulist. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

He dances with only occasional pauses for thought. His musical accompaniment is a long song by David Lang called “Death Speaks.” I regret very much that the recorded female singer rarely enunciates the words clearly enough. Varone himself knows by heart such passages as this: “I will protect you/ from the hunter, from the forest/ from the flowers, from your dreams/ from the wicked girl, from her shadow/ I will keep your eyes covered/ I will protect you.” We only grasp a few words here and there.

As deeply expressive as Varone’s performing is and however moving are the struggles and visions and sudden changes of mind and climate that beset him, the solo several times seems about to end, and then doesn’t. Understanding the text more fully might propel The Fabulist more strongly forward for us.

Varone in The Fabulist. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Ben Stanton’s lighting is a crucial accomplice. In the beginning, it pins Varone in beams from either side of the stage and imprisons him in a tent of light. This tent is almost palpable; Varone’s gestures stop exactly where the light ends, although he makes no drama out of this. Pools of light in different sizes appear and disappear along the center line of the stage; a diagonal ray from above creates a momentary lozenge of light that he seems to beckon toward himself. He may be pinned in an illuminated crack that appears between two slightly open black curtains at the ear of the stage, or in a glowing shrunken column with barely enough room for him to move.

Castles, ornate and intricate as it is, most vividly displays the dancers as they swerve between fine, nimble behavior and witty reactions. Given the Prokofiev music, you can imagine Bartlett and Springer—who vie like rivals, bounce off each other like buddies, and are often at a loss—as suitors for an invisible princess. Could it be sprightly blonde Loomis? Three women (Burley, Burrer, and Tang) flop like rag dolls and haul Welch around. In Taketa, Tang finds her nimble prince, and Burley, hair awry, swans about like a heroine abandoned by her story.

The above are mind games I’m playing, based on fleeting images, but there’s another story here. Taketa, who has danced in the company since 1994 with undiminished agility and sensitivity, is leaving it after this season. I wish him well. Varone’s loss.

BODYTRAFFIC in Barak Marshall’s And at midnight, the green bride floated through the village square. . .Foreground: Tina Finkelman Berkett and Guzman Rosado. Photo: Christopher Duggan

In 2007, two women, Lilian Barbeito, a Juilliard graduate, and Tina Finkelman Berkett, an alumna of the Barnard College’s dance department, founded a contemporary dance ensemble in Los Angeles. What are the chances of that endeavor failing in a balmy city where it takes nerve, courage, and good business sense for a dance company to nose its way out of the prevailing motion picture culture? Iffy at best, but BODYTRAFFIC has flourished in Los Angeles and made itself known at festivals in the U.S. and Canada. In 2013, Dance Magazine included it in its “25 to Watch” lineup.

You can see why. The company’s ten dancers are wonders—lithe, flexible, powerful, daring. And Barbeito and Berkett have made some interesting choices in commissioning choreographers. The Jewish backgrounds that they have in common have inspired some of those choices. Barak Marshall, now the artistic director of Inbal Dance Theatre, is responsible for three works in BODYTRAFFIC’s repertory. Dust, a world premiere during the company’s January season at the Joyce Theater, is the work of Hofesh Shechter, who maintains his own company in the U.K.

BODYTRAFFIC appears alternately at the Joyce with Doug Elkins’s company during the hectic week of the APAP conference (Association of Performing Arts Presenters), when you can find showcases tucked into every available performing space from morning until late night. So there may have been some bleary eyes in the audience at the first performance, but the applause was as vociferous as could be hoped for.

That said, I admit to being not only engrossed, but also puzzled or restless during parts of the dances on the program: a substantial excerpt from Marshall’s And at midnight, the green bride floated through the village square. . ., Victor Quijada’s Once Again Before You Go, Richard Siegal’s The New 45, and Dust. At times, a choreographer would seem to be repeating himself or drawing out an idea to a point at which you could easily fall out of love with it. At other times, a dance ended and you might feel like saying, “huh?” As in, what just happened?

A scene from Barak Marshall’s And at midnight, the green bride floated through the village square. . .Foreground: Tina Finkelman Berkett. Photo: Christopher Duggan

The green bride excerpt begins with Berkett alone down center, clasping a bouquet and staring around. No groom announces himself and no wedding. At least, not exactly. Sequences of vehement dancing for the ensemble or the men or the women keep cropping up between scenes that portray dissent between the sexes or misogynistic behavior by the guys. All this is borne along by music that ranges from the Abaca String Band to the Barry Sisters’ “Chiribim Chiribom” to Zoltan and His Gypsy Ensemble to the singing of Margalit Oved (once herself the director of Inbal, its greatest performer, and Marshall’s mother).

The passages of dancing—usually performed facing front and in unison—are composed primarily of hand and arm gestures, executed with staccato precision, while the dancers’ step, turn, bend, and straighten, traveling only minimally from their appointed places. You’re aware of elbows jutting out, wrists flexing. A gutsy energy suffuses the movement; this could be a group soliloquy grafted onto a folk dance. Although the gestures fly by, you can read almost read some of them (“go away!” “oh my God!” “I don’t want to see it”); others pantomime acts such as taking a quick drink).

The intervening episodes call to mind Pina Bausch’s work. In one of several related scenes, Bynh Ho and Michele Carter stand at a mike, and he describes preparing a possible meal with a voluptuous greed that has her turning weak at the knees, before he calls a halt. In another vignette, a man sits on a bench, pretty much concealed behind the newspaper he’s reading. One by one, the women (Berkett, Carter, Melissa Bourkas, Merett Miller, and Gina Lewis) don high heels and snuggle up beside him, trying to charm him. After a few seconds, two men standing behind the bench tip each woman backward and lay her on the floor behind the bench; her open bent legs are in the air, and her crotch is toward the audience. By the time the sequence is over, there’s a row of women on display with bits of paper (or petals) scattered around them. A seconds-long travesty of a marriage repeated over and over, with each woman eager to take a turn.

This is all intriguing, but after a while, when the dancing returns several times with the same emphatic vocabulary, my interest wanes. I wish I could see the whole piece and understand more about that floating bride and the family or society she’s part of.

Miguel Perez and Melissa Bourkas of BODYTRAFFIC in Hofesh Shechter’s Dust. Photo: Guzmán Rosado

Shechter’s Dust is mystifying in a different way. I’m assuming the title refers to the biblical pronouncement, “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” and intermittently a robotic voice-of-God makes announcements (this voice sounds slowed down, but it maintains its creepiness even when it eventually speeds up into near intelligibility). The score (also by Shechter) often sounds punitive; at times, buried voices mutter inside it. In the beginning, a lone man, spotlit in darkness (Guzmán Rosado, I believe) writhes and jerks. Hunched-over and pinched-in, he looks as if his guts need protecting and as if he hurts, either from pain or guilt. Later, everyone will move like this for a while.

There are three men in Dust (Miguel Perez, Rosado, and Andrew Wojtal) and three women (Berkett, Carter, and Bourkas). The men wear dark suits, the jackets unbuttoned to reveal white shirts. The women wear red dresses (designed by Linda Chow and the company). Designer Chahine Yavroyan creates some stunning effects—pinning the dancers in pools of light, creating rays that cross transversely on diagonals, turning the backdrop blue.

The movement is big and bold. The dancers advance spraddled-legged, knees bent; they fling their legs like weapons. They move in squadrons—sometimes as one, once in antiphonal groups. Vigorous. Powerful. Together, yet isolated. “My life is a desert,” the voice says over and over at one point. Is this war? Is it indeed life? What kind of community do these well-dressed people belong to? “In the end there was. . .” says the voice. The lights go out. Is this what those images of self-involved struggle and fierce dancing led to? I guess by the time we’re dead, it’s too late to say “death” (or, if you prefer, “heaven”).

Tina Berkett in Hofesh Shechter’s Dust. Photo: Guzmán Rosado

Berkett appears in all of the four works shown at the Joyce, and you can’t blame the choreographers for wanting her to grace their dances. She’s remarkable—subtle in her command of dynamics and deeply committed to the moment. She’s the only woman in Quijada’s quartet Once Again, Before You Go (set to music by Jasper Gahunia), and the only woman in Siegal’s trio The New 45.

Quijada danced with several companies before founding his own RUBBERBANDance Group in 2002, but his earliest experience of dance was hip-hop, and the twisty athleticism of that style underlies his piece for BODYTRAFFIC. The title can (slyly) refer to another go at sex, another round of drinks, or one more scuffle. But eroticism doesn’t play much of a part. The men (Brandon Alley, Ho, Rosado, and Wojtal) saunter onto the stage, prepared to join in athletic duets that, in their complexity, look like tests of skill and cooperation rather than fights; a drop to the floor only means more tricky grappling. Berkett, coming and going, is not like West Side Story’s “Anybodys”—shunned by the boys she wants to join. She’s as acrobatic as they are and, apparently, as nonchalant.

The end comes as a shock. Suddenly, the stage goes dark, and a spotlight picks out Berkett; she’s off the ground (perhaps seated on someone’s shoulders) with the others clustered around her. Only her face and the upper part of her body are lit, as if in a beam from heaven. Did I miss something? How did she get to be queen of the neighborhood?

Siegal runs his own European company, The Bakery Paris-Berlin (2005), in addition to creating works for numerous other groups. The New 45 coasts and springs and wriggles along to a medley of ingratiating tunes. We get to hear Oscar Peterson, Clark Terry, Harry Belafonte, Marc Blitzstein, Harold Arlen, and a tricky, instrumental, jazzed-up version of the Berthold Brecht/Kurt Weill “Mack the Knife.”

No credit for costumes is given in the program, and the dancers’ attire is the only awkward element in this lively work for Berkett, Rosado, and Wojtal, with clever lighting by Mitchell Bogard. The men’s relationship veers from helpful to punitive, but all three performers are out for a good time, letting the jazzier musical numbers limber up their hips or send them bursting exuberantly into the air. Siegal has made an engaging duet to the Weill music for Berkett and Rosado, which is followed by vivid solos by each. Naturally, Wojtal arrives to horn in and toss off a bit of soft shoe. It’s nice that the three give the impression of showing off for themselves and each other, rather than trying to wow us. And the ending song by Arlen that most of us know so well urges everyone to “come on, get happy!” So we do.

BODYTRAFFIC will perform at Jacob’s Pillow in July. I look forward to seeing these terrific dancers again.

Douglas Dunn + Dancers premiere Aidos at BAM Fisher.

Doulas Dunn’s Aidos. Jules Bakshi, surrounded by (L to R of those visible): Timothy Ward, Alexandra Berger, Emily Pope-Blackman, and Jin Ju Song-Begin. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Aidos seems to have been a goddess slightly confused about her own identity. No wonder she is said to be the last of the Greek gods to leave earth after the Golden Age. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language calls her “the personification of conscience,” but she is also seen as representing shame and modesty. I see a connection to Australia’s “tall poppy syndrome,” in which it’s ill-bred to vaunt yourself as better than others, and others like to cut down those who do so.

I’m only bothering about this, because Aidos is the title of a beautiful dance that its choreographer, Douglas Dunn, has no reason to be ashamed of, although shame often figures in dancers’ training and careers. The goddess, anyway, is a fair-minded and conscientious one, as opposed to her companion, Nemesis, who is all for vengeance when she sniffs evil-doing.

It is perhaps the Aidos-Nemesis polarity that led Dunn to create so many symmetrically balanced designs in this new dance. But first, the enigmatic prologue that is going on when quite a few audience members are still shivering into BAM Fisher from the very cold streets. An immense, translucent white sheet covers some lumps in the performing arena, which is surrounded by seats on three sides. When eight of the nine dancers enter, dressed in white coveralls, and begin lifting and turning the fabric and settling it down again, Jules Bakshi is intermittently visible beneath it, rolling over and around two big, brown, padded objects (designed by Andrew Jordan) that roll on their own. As the handlers travel around the space, they have to keep kicking the things back under the fabric. Eventually, they make it billow like a parachute, and finally, Bakshi is on top of it, like a mermaid being loved by waves and eventually buried under them.

L to R: Jules Bakshi, Alexandra Berger, Emily Pope-Blackman, and Jake Szczypek in Douglas Dunn’s Aidos. Above them, cellist Ha-Yang Kim. Photo: Christopher Duggan

I think of the birth of Venus, but that might not be relevant. Although another kind of birth happens once the latecomers are settled. Up in the balcony, Ha-Yang Kim begins to play a sarabande, the first of the twelve pieces drawn from J.S. Bach’s six Suites for Cello that will accompany Aidos. The music resonates impressively in the cavernous black space that is gradually—barely—revealed by Carol Mullins’s expert lighting. The dancers are on the floor, waking up to something. They all know the same small vocabulary of moves and run through them slowly, each in his or her chosen order (lie down and stretch legs up, sit with legs straight in front, kneel and put both hands on the floor, lie prone, limbs akimbo—things like that).

Then the place brightens and symmetry is introduced by Alexandra Berger and Emily Pope-Blackman. As they dance in unison, they stay opposite each other and at some distance. The movement is leggy, the women’s feet active; a few times they make skirmishing gestures with their hands, but they also run, hop, turn, prance, and wiggle their hips subtly. Dunn is a master at giving all body parts an opportunity to be discreetly busy—not necessarily at the same time.

The women are attired in extraordinary costumes by Jordan. These are form-fitting patchworks of shiny black fabric and even shinier gold material, each outfit patterned differently. Under the lights, the dancers sometimes resemble warriors in strange armor or in carapaces like unholy beetles. Kim strikes up another sarabande, and three men—Paul Singh, Timothy Ward, and Dunn himself—replace the women. They wear similar costumes (although Dunn’s is topped by a more loosely cut shirt, and he has gold shoes). Their dancing defines a circle; although they don’t necessarily travel in one, they make you aware of the space they enclose, and it’s almost a shock when they start criss-crossing it.

(L to R): Timothy Ward, Douglas Dunn (not in costume), and Paul Singh in Dunn’s Aidos. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Similar allusions to equilibrium occur in a strenuous, quick-footed quartet for Pope-Blackman, Berger, Jules Bakshi, and Jake Szczypek. The dancing is wonderful to watch—a village celebration elevated to an Olympian rite—and equally interesting in a playful male-female duet by Ward and Bakshi and a subsequent dance for three couples (male-male, female-female, male-female).

The equilibrium of this little world begins to change. Awkwardness enters with cautious, tottery steps that still maintain a trace of grandeur. Two men swing Pope-Blackman, and the remaining three performers arrive in time to catch them as their effort disintegrates. The women crouch on the men’s backs and ride them. They promenade dreamily in pairs, staring upward this way and that. They creep in squirrely ways. What can be happening?

Dunn re-enters with Jessica Martineau and Jin Ju Song-Begin—two tall women costumed in unitards patterned in pinks and oranges. He walks them, drags them around, while the others rest and watch. Meet Aidos and Nemesis? The two stand back to back, joined at the hips and slide one after another foot out (walking but going nowhere), while the others rouse themselves to encircle them and wheel one arm around and around, as if urging them on, or winding them up.

I lose track of what occurs, but quite a lot does before the dancers separate and exit, the theater goes dark, and Kim—aloft in her spotlight—tunes her cello. Three pairs dance again; so does Dunn. He confessed in an interview with Gia Kourlas for Time Out, to being ashamed of being ashamed of dancing at his age (he is in his seventies, spry, quick of foot, a bit stiff, and a riveting performer). After he soloes, the three men scuttle around him and lift him in various ways. He remains hopeful.

Jessica Martineau (L) and Jin Ju Song Begin in Douglas Dunn’s Aidos (dress rehearsal). Photo: Christopher Duggan

Now comes a bigger change. Two chairs are set side by side at the back of the space. Their backs are shaped to indicate femaleness—beige heads without faces and busts. Enter the dual aspects of the goddesshood under scrutiny. Queens for sure. Dressed now in black and white, trailing long capes. Song-Begin’s crown is a wreath of up-pointing icicles; Martineau’s is made of equally agitated twigs. The capes and crowns they place on the chair-women and sit to watch and preside, smiling tolerantly and picking at invisible bits of stuff on their clothing. Everyone is up for a ritual.

Suddenly (or was it gradually?), formal statements about music and dancing and give-and-take yield to a battle. Song-Begin and Martineau confront each other in dance, embodying both the grandly gracious and the bestial, each with her attendants swinging with her. The symmetry approaches ink-blot clarity, but what happens is anything but clear. Squabbling and snarling silently, the goddesses are subdued and laid out, but only temporarily. Whew! No one will be allowed to escape this mad dance. Pope-Blackman hangs onto Song-Begin and Backshi grapples with Martineau. The last thing I wrote in my program before Kim stopped her bow, and Bach’s courante fell silent is, “I’ll bite you!”

Ronald K.Brown celebrates at the Joyce Theater the 30th anniversary of his Evidence: A Dance Company.

Coral Dolphin (L) and Keon Thoulouis in “Exotica” from Ronald K. Brown’s Lessons. Photo: Ayodele Casel

Sometimes I think of choreographer Ronald K. Brown, the artistic director of Evidence: A Dance Company, as akin to a spiritually inspired basket maker, weaving beautiful strands of dancing together with time-honed skill. These strands mesh in patterns formed by eight passionate, spirited dancers. Beguiling to look at, the designs nevertheless seldom clearly resolve into what for the creator of baskets would be bowls and boxes and screens. It’s often difficult to follow a path through the dance-filled terrain to understand the ideas that Brown is developing.

The most recent piece (2014) that I saw on Program A of his company’s 30^th anniversary season at the Joyce Theater is titled The Subtle One, a sobriquet attached to Al-Lateef, a manifestation of Allah. The program offers another vision of subtlety in the last stanza of a poem by Alan Harris: “So subtle are the wings of angels/That you may not realize/They’ve come and gone, except/That innerly remains a glowing/Which seems just as/good as knowing.”

Spirituality infuses almost every dance of Brown’s that I have seen. He choreographs community, and the dancing can easily stand for spiritual practice—committed, body and soul; laboring in its biblical sense—as in, laboring in the fields of the Lord. That community can also refer to African Americans, marching for equality on this earth.

(L to R): Keon Thoulouis, Brionna Edmundson, and Clarice Young in Ronald K. Brown’s The Subtle One. Photo: Ayodele Casel

The venturesome jazz score for The Subtle One, played live at the Joyce by Jason Moran and the Bandwagon (Moran on piano, Tarus Mateen on bass, and Nasheet Waits on drums), is by Moran (three pieces) and by Mateen (one piece). Clifton Taylor designed the lighting. In their white clothing by Keiko Voltaire, the dancers could pass for angels—touching the ground, delighting in it, passing on, returning for another day’s flight.

The vocabulary that Brown has developed over the years since his 19-year-old self founded Evidence in 1985 draws on his experiences in Africa and his work in American modern dance. It doesn’t look as eclectic as you might suppose because his take on the styles unites them. You wouldn’t call the turns that the dancers often sail into as “back attitude turns,” since though they lift one bent leg high behind them, the step doesn’t look anything like ballet. Nor does the way they fling one leg high in front of them look like a battement. And moves like these easily join getting-down steps—with the dancers wheeling their arms, lifting their knees, and scudding along rhythmically on bare feet. When they leap—often turning slightly in the air—they don’t cover much space, just explode upward as if temporarily ejected by the ground. It’s a rich, full-bodied style, and the dancers take to it with fervor.

In The Subtle One, these “angels” work their way into contrapuntal squads. To initially slow piano music and snarling sounds, Arcell Cabuag (who has been with the company for about ten years) enters along a diagonal path with Annique Roberts (a five-year Evidence veteran) and Shayla Alayre Caldwell. They’re dancing in unison—a big, juicy phrase, and they’re still working when Coral Dolphin and Randall Riley enter and embark on that phrase from its beginning. Then Keon Thoulouis and Brionna Edmundson (who joined Evidence in 2014) succeed them, and, finally Clarice Young. So we see a shifting weave of two-part counterpoint that resolves into, and drops out of, a shared passage, with the dancers leaving the stage and re-entering.

And we get introduced to the splendid performers in various ways, becoming interested in their individual gifts. In a later duet, Dolphin—an outstanding dancer, wonderful in the way she brings out contrasting dynamics—shows some steps while Riley watches her admiringly. Roberts dances alone, before Cabuag and Caldwell re-enter to cement their threesome and pit it against Dolphin and Riley’s moves. Whether the dancers drop to the floor or vault into the air, Brown arranges them in orderly patterns—usually facing the audience and in lines.

Annique Roberts (L) and Coral Dolphin in “March” from Ronald K. Brown’s Lesson. Photo: Ayodele Casel

In excerpts from the 1995 Lessons: Exotica & March, the performers wear black clothes for “March”, and later, velvet ones in jewel tones for “Exotica” (designs by Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya). The choreography expresses a solidarity that is social and political as well as spiritual. Strength of spirit guides the dance too, and God, at one point, is referred to as “She” in a rendition of the 23^rd Psalm. Before the gospel music of Charles H. Gabriel and Civilla D. Martin begins, though, and some time before the electronic work of the Ananda Project and DK MKL starts up, the dancers occasionally raise one arm in solidarity, and move to one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, in which he speaks of the need for peace, for brotherhood, and for equality with the scorching fervor of a preacher. As in many of his speeches, he quotes John Donne:

“No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main. . . .
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind. . . .”

It is to his sonorous voice that Roberts and Dolphin dance together as sisters or mother and child or comrades—moving in unison, looking at each other for guidance., cartwheeling with bent legs. Later, they with embrace, or one carries the other. Riley and Cabuag, too, lift each other. Caldwell dances with the company’s three men; she also lies on top of the fallen Young, perhaps shielding her, and then backs off the stage, gesturing as if to wash her hands. Thoulouis strides toward us on a path of light.

Clarice Young of Evidence: A Dance Company in Ronald K. Brown’s Grace. Photo: Rachel Papo

The program ends with Grace (made by Brown for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and revised for his own company in 2003). For this fine piece, the music is by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis, Jr., and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Ellington’s “Come Sunday” (“Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty, God of love, Please look down and see my people through.”) begins and ends Grace. Young, in white, appears through the opening in the back curtains, beyond which a bright sky can be seen (original lighting by William H. Grant recreated by Brenda Gray). This beautiful woman is the serene leader of this community, yet she can also lash her arms rapidly and jitter and sink into deep positions with the sweet freedom of one who’s at home in the body God gave her.

The dancers pay attention to her and to one another. For the first time in the evening, Brown joins his company members, and they watch while he dances in his inimitably loose, full-bodied style. Young marshals Roberts and Edmundson, Dolphin joins, Caldwell returns, and all five women dance. Now you start to wonder why Young and Caldwell wear white and the other three are dressed in red. There are those differences among the men too.

The color scheme is a clue to something that isn’t really evident in the dancing. Whatever the hue of their clothing, these people move alike. When Cabuag has finished performing (wonderfully) a solo, all return garbed in white, as if Brown wants us to see them as redeemed. But there are no “wicked ways” that we can see need redeeming (this has an upside: no melodramatic strayers acting out an aversion to righteousness). Just before the end, though,Young grabs Thoulounis and gives him a quick little lesson, as if he were in danger of backsliding. Enigmas like this make me feel that Brown is more gifted at creating detailed, lucid designs than clarifying the overall gist of his pieces. And, of course, he’s brilliant at making movement that attacks you as you watch it—pummels you, strokes you, elates you, and makes you want to get up onstage and sweat your way to glory with the dancers.

Ronald K. Brown in his Grace. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Compagnie CNDC d’Angers stages a Merce Cunningham Event in New York City.

L to R): Solene Herault, Clara Freschel, Adrien Mornet, Flora Rogeboz in an Event staged by Robert Swinston for Compagnie CNDC-Angers. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

When Merce Cunningham decided that his company should be disbanded two years after his death, it wasn’t entirely clear what he expected to happen to the nearly 200 dances that he had made over the course of five decades. Some, of course, had been lost along the way, but a good number had been filmed, and more were stored in the bodies of dancers who had performed them. The good news is that Cunningham’s remarkable dances are not all going to vanish from the town that nourished them. Beginning on March 25, this season’s “Juilliard Dances Repertory” pairs his Biped (1999) with Martha Graham’s Dark Meadow (1946). When the Stephen Petronio Company begins its season at the Joyce Theater on April 5, Cunningham’s RainForest (1968) will be performed alongside Petronio’s own works.

And this week, the Joyce has hosted a guest from abroad, Compagnie CNDC-Angers, in a Cunningham Event put together by Robert Swinston, the company’s artistic director and a stalwart of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1980 until its demise in 2011. Like all such Events, this one is an assemblage of excerpts drawn from Cunningham dances (joined together or layered), given uniform new costumes and décor, set to a new live score, and lasting about an uninterrupted 75 minutes.

Cunningham’s work has always been greatly admired in France, and it is intriguing to see it delivered with a slight French accent. The eight dancers’ light gray tights and mottled darker gray tunics are by Michelle Amet and the vividly colored, boldly patterned panels that flank the stage on three sides are by master kite designer Jackie Matisse (the painter’s granddaughter). The dancers were raised and trained in France. The expert and daring musicians, however, are Americans: John King (composer, guitarist, violist) and Gelsey Bell (singer, songwriter, scholar).

(L to R) Gianni Joseph, Clara Freschel, and Lucas Viallefond in the Cunningham Event at the Joyce Theater. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Merce Cunningham often spoke of the space in a dance as an open field. Although the term is one used in physics, I have often thought of his works in relation to actual fields. Sit gazing at one for a while, and you’ll see nature’s apparently random (athough rationally founded) arrangements. Stalks of mullein rising from a place where digging has been done, marsh mallows in a damp place, yellow mustard scattered, blue chickory blooming at the road’s edge. These are static images, of course, but sun’s angle and wind and birds and animals change the picture.

In a Cunningham dance, as in such a field, there’s no hierarchy of events like those that exist in classical ballet. Actions happen in corners, center stage is not the place to which your eye is guided, and often there’s more going on than you can easily take in. That said, despite the diverse individual qualities of the dancers, there’s only one kind of mammal in a Cunningham “field.”

The Angers dancers, like those before them, have preternaturally active feet and legs, often as turned out from the hips as any ballet dancer’s. Those feet can stitch dense textures into the floor with the quick down-up-up passage across it (a waltz without the swooniness) or cross-and-open steps in place. Their legs fly high and straight and crank into a bend like ballet’s passé. But on top of this busy base, their bodies can bend and twist and curve and arch, and their arms whip into various shapes. Standing meditatively on one leg, a dancer can modify his/her position as if deciding what sculptural image to form. Cunningham dancers can appear rash, even, at times, reckless (he certainly did, and often), but they are intrinsically Apollonian; few Dionysian storms interrupt their serenity or knock them off balance.

Compagnie NCDC-Angers (L to R): Solene Herault, Gianni Joseph, Anna Chirescu, Adrien Mornet, Clara Freschel, Lucas Viallefond, Flora Rogeboz, Alexandre Tondolo. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The Event that I saw on March 12, the second night of CNDC-Angers’ Joyce season, begins with a vista of the panels, blown gently by unseen fans. Into this already alive, unpredictable space, the dancers walk unhurriedly, one by one, into a diagonal line, and plant their feet wide apart: Gianni Joseph, Alexandre Tondolo, Anna Chirescu, Lucas Viallefond, Flora Rogeboz, Clara Freschel, Adrien Mornet, Solene Herault. Musical burps from King’s console precede them, and Bell begins to emit some of the many manipulated sounds she can initiate with her voice (later she lets us hear the untampered-with loveliness of her soprano). Suddenly, the dancers take hands to form a chain. The moment is a startling one; they have gauged their relative positions so accurately that no leaning out is necessary: from motionless separation to a collaborative formation by means of instant, accurate gestures by everyone’s arms.

As four dancers form a quartet and others exit, you notice a quality—or perhaps function is a better word—that will color the whole Event. When dancers are not alone onstage, they are prepared to serve others or to be used by them for support—always aware (whether they indicate this or not) that someone needs a hand to lean against or has provided an arch that invites someone else to duck through. This is their day-to-day business, and they enact it with full concentration but no emotional content. They do not intend to rouse narrative expectations among the audience members.

Anna Chirescu and Lucas Viallefond of Compagnie CNDC-Angers. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

This doesn’t mean that we don’t see “situations” in what these superbly strong, agile human beings do together. Early on, three people (Mornet, Tondolo, and Herault) hold hands, while Chirescu (the smallest of the four women) scurries around and between them. She clings to Mornet while he manipulates Herault, and Mornet somehow turns Chirescu while she’s piggybacked on Tondolo. The other dancers sit in corner pools of light and scrutinize this.

The music thickens and thins, becomes fiercely loud and suddenly sweetens, becoming for an instant almost tonal (Cunningham’s partner and radical music director, composer John Cage, could tolerate both din and quiet). For a moment, when Chirescu, Joseph, and Tondolo are dancing in leggy unison, I think I hear something like church bells in disguise, then Bell’s high voice. During a longer duet for Joseph and Herault, the musicians create clanking sounds, then crackling ones. Squawking comes out of the speaker to my right. The volume increases. But all this time, the dancers proceed calmly. Herault bends back, and Joseph raises his arms for her to lean on. It seems to matter that they return to a side-by-side position with their front legs lifted and bent slightly. He looks at her, rotates her, very gently presses her lifted arms down to her sides. The music becomes calm, but, in contrast, the two dancers erupt, wrenching themselves around, their limbs like quick knives, Joseph’s mop of curly hair flying.

Adrien Mornet in the air; Alexandre Tondolo holds Flora Rogeboz. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

There’s a wealth of things to look at as the Event progresses: two dissimilar duets coexisting; people passing through, quickly or at a leisurely pace; several dancers assembling to create a structure dependent on its individual parts; a sudden coalescing into quick-footed unison; two quartets playing at counterpoint. And throughout, all manner of vigorous arguments with gravity: leaps, hops, jumps, and small springy steps.

The duets are intriguing in the ways in which the two dancers express being together. In one of these pairings, you see an interplay of straight lines and angles; one of Freschel’s hands is on her hip, and Joseph sticks his straight arm through the opening as if that was a natural move like reaching into a cupboard to take out the jam. Bell sings very sweetly while the two compare angles and straight lines, but seldom curves. In a later duet between Rogeboz and Mornet, the performers’ arms are often straight, but he keeps worming his body around to nestle close to hers.

Flora Rogeboz and Adrien Mornet in the Cunningham Event staged by Robert Swinston. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

In one of the most reckless vignettes, Chirescu takes on all four men. They toss her in the air. When she crouches to pull back against their hands, she’s catapulted aloft. But when the men stand in a tight circle around her and yearn to jump, she holds each one’s hand as he does so. Herault replaces her for another big toss, and later, when she (Herault) is lifted she reaches for the remaining men’s raised hands the way you’d reach from a carousel to try for the golden ring that would grant you a free ride.

The excerpts included in the week’s Events were drawn and adapted by Swinston from eleven Cunningham dances dating from 1965 to 1990. A Cunningham expert could probably identify each one, but that’s not the way I wanted to watch the performance. I wanted to let my eyes ramble and to admire the individual dancers—their technical expertise, a certain unaffected elegance, and their commitment to choreography that requires stamina and intent focus. I think it’s not easy to perform every movement fully in the deepest sense of that adverb, while also refraining from overplaying it or layering an emotion onto it. Some of the Angers dancers, in trying to steer clear of the latter, don’t always find the sweet spot. I found my gaze often drawn to Chirescu because of the quality of her attention. She was there doing this at this moment with all the clarity of intention and openness of someone discovering and inhabiting these movements for the first time.

Cunningham is in town. Can Spring be far behind?

The Stephen Petronio Company performs a new Petronio work at the Joyce and remounts Merce Cunningham’s “RainForest.”

Merce Cunningham’s RainForest: Andy Warhol’s silver pillows share the stage with Davalois Fearon and Gino Grenek of the Stephen Petronio Company. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Decades ago, when Twyla Tharp was a feisty young choreographer, she said that maintaining and presenting dances from her repertory was just not something she wanted to do. It would be like chewing gum, she said, and who wanted to keep on chewing it after the initial flavor was gone? The brilliant upstarts of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960’s were also keen on the next thing to try, not interested in reviving last year’s creation.

Now thoughts of heritage and history are in the air. Preservation and innovation duke it out in the Martha Graham Dance Company. The José Limón Company searches for contemporary dancemakers whose works might fit the company profile, even as it revives Passacaglia by Limón’s mentor Doris Humphrey and performs it onstage alongside pieces by Paul Taylor during the Taylor company’s recent Lincoln Center season, as part of an entity titled Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance. In accord with Merce Cunningham’s wishes, his company dissolved two years after his death. Now his dances are being judiciously scattered among other companies. Just this spring, I have seen Compagnie CNDC-Anger, perform a Cunningham “Event,” directed by the French company’s director, Robert Swinston (http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2015/03/the-merce-resurrection/). Another former Cunningham dancer, Rashaun Mitchell, assembled an Event out of material from Cunningham pieces familiar to him for New York University-Tisch School of the Arts’ Second Avenue Dance Company. Still another, Jennifer Goggins, staged Biped for the spring performances of Juilliard Dance (http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2015/04/juilliard-dance-tackles-masterworks/).

And this week, at the Joyce, the Stephen Petronio Company is performing Cunningham’s RainForest, staged by Andrea Weber, with assistance from Meg Harper and Mitchell (all alumni of Cunningham’s company). What’s going on here? Petronio recently turned 59 and looks to be in excellent shape, so he can’t be thinking of his company’s future without him. Instead, the mounting of this 1968 Cunningham work is part of a project that he labels “Bloodlines,” and over the next five years, he plans to present work by Trisha Brown, in whose company he danced, as well ones by Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton (he already, in 2012, performed Paxton’s solo Intravenous Lecture). In other words, he’s generously acknowledging his own roots, along with the legacy of innovation in modern dance that Cunningham instigated.

Joshua Tuason and Melissa Toogood pass each other in the first part of Stephen Petronio’s Locomotor/Non Locomotor. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The RainForest revival ends a program that begins with Petronio’s Locomotor/Non Locomotor, a 55-minute pairing of the 2014 Locomotor with its world-premiere cousin, Non Locomotor, The earlier piece, which celebrated his company’s 30^th-anniversary season, has become richer and deeper during its year-long ageing process. Special guest artist Melissa Toogood (another former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company) is even more extraordinary in her opening solo than she was last year. She begins in low light (by Kenneth Tabachnick) and silence. She makes the complex movements that Petronio has cast onto her body look like daily-life activities in a concrete jungle. She bends her torso extravagantly, often in seeming opposition to her hips or her head; her legs whip smoothly about, and so do her arms. Yet, she makes everything cohere into a serious, fluent physical monologue and can rein herself instantly into watchful stillness before erupting into the next bout of dancing. Often she suspends a difficult moment, as if taking a breath before plunging on.

When I wrote about Locomotor last April, I used the word “tracks” to describe the eight dancers’ many forays onto the stage and off and back on again (http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2014/04/family-ties/). But that term suggests the straight lines of a railroad, and what we see are most often curving paths that suggest cyclical progressions. Petronio has mentioned the twinned ideas of looking backward to one’s history and forward to an unforeseeable future. As the score by Clams Casino (Michael Volpe) begins with an initially quiet jangling, Joshua Tuason walks onto the stage backward. By the time the sounds have escalated to something like tolling bells, the dance has established itself as an exacting but exhilarating voyage for a group of pilgrims who are strong of spirit, skill, and endurance. Scratch “pilgrims;” call them heroes—their bodies and souls firmed into beauty. The music may suggest a chuffing engine, cracking whips, slow chords, buried voices, rhythmic thuds, and more, but the dancers are unfazed; their wheels are greased.

Jaqlin Medlock and Barrington Hinds in Stephen Petronio’s Locomotor/Non Locomotor. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Toogood, Tuason, Davalois Fearon, Gino Grenek, Barrington Hinds, Jaqlin Medlock, Nicholas Sciscione, and Emily Stone, or small units of them, often enter not just walking backward, but running and leaping backward. They carve out a small, half-formed circle and keep going until they exit a few feet upstage of where they entered. You get the impression that they’re reeling a forward adventure back to its beginning. Of course they travel forward too (Toogood and Fearon are terrific leapers), as well as forming pairs, trios, quartets. Often they simply walk onto the stage, are absorbed onto the ongoing dancing, and leave at will. I wonder whether retrograding their way through a passage of movement is part of the game.

There’s a lot of stillness in Locomotor, as well as variety in terms of speed. Maybe a bit of Cunningham’s artistic DNA has gotten into Petronio: fast movements sputter out but yield to moments of calm deliberation. Currents of dancing flow past temporary immobile islands.

Sometimes Tabachnick’s illumination is like harsh sunlight, but it’s softer, as I remember, at the end, when the dancers move into lines facing the audience, or turning away. Pairs break out of those lines for quick adventures—physically demanding but never aggressive with each other. Facing the past, staring at the future, meeting both in the here and now.

Davalois Fearon and Nicholas Sciscione in the new second part of Stephen Petronio’s
Locomotor/Non Locomotor. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

There’s much less travelling in Non Locomotor, which begins after a short pause. Fearon tunes us in to the new slant on movement. She has changed out of her black, gray, and white outfit by Narciso Rodriguez into a bright blue one, and, while she may leap into action, she begins standing in one place and working her body as if forces inside it were migrating here and there, causing her spine to ripple, her shoulders to lift and circle, her hips to sway, her feet to jitter. The three men who spend time with her (Tuason, Grenek, and Sciscione) also investigate the ways in which their arms and hands can gesture, their heads can adjust on their necks, their hips can thrust forward.

(L to R): Gino Grenek, Joshua Tuason, and Nicholas Sciscione in Stephen Petronio’s Non Locomotor. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

They pose in sculptural ways, and Fearon, a blue streak, passes between them and among them. Although they lift her, she’s one of the gang. When the four of them divide into two couples, these drift in and out of synchrony as the paired dancers play catch and release or lean together. The four end Non Locomotor separated, bending forward and clapping their hands together—not as if they were applauding, but as if they were summoning some force out of the ground.

I recall Merce Cunningham once alluding to RainForest as being “about” a small community. I saw this ravishingly beautiful dance for a group of six around 1968 when it was new and again in the 1970s with a different cast (the premiere in Buffalo—where the company had a residency at SUNY-Buffalo and Buffalo State College—was filmed, and the later version appeared on television in 1976 for WNET’s Dance in America series). I did indeed see the six as forming a community, although one in which each of them was used to spending time alone. I thought of them as akin to a renegade pride of lions—with a leader, solitary hunters, interlopers, matings, and squabbles polished into a kind of mystical formality. Both David Vaughan in his masterly book Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years and Carolyn Brown in her marvelous Chance and Circumstance bring up the possible influence of nature on RainForest. One inspiration may have been Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People about the pygmies and their treks through jungles of impeding branches (which Cunningham was reading at the time). The rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he was raised, may also have fed into the dance.

Nicholas Sciscione (R) approaching Gino Grenek and Davalois Fearon in Merce Cunningham’s RainForest. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Its setting by Andy Warhol is a host of silver mylar pillows. Filled with helium, they gleam in Aaron Copp’s lighting like pools of water struck by sun. A few are anchored above the stage, but others float at will (during the April 8^th performance, five or more of them drifted out into the audience—a little too distractingly), and the dancers, in the course of their movements, kick them around. I recall David Tudor’s score, titled Rainforest, as evoking bird calls, rushing water, and other sounds of nature, albeit in disguise. On the night I attended, John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein mixed and produced the music on their consoles, and it seemed louder than I remembered but also wonderfully atmospheric. The costumes, devised by artist Jasper Johns, are flesh-colored leotards and tights that have had pieces cut out of them (they resemble a subtly mangy pelt).

RainForest is a rarity among Cunningham’s dances. It almost encourages you to interpret what you see as little dramas (as I have done above). Its ambiance is one that juxtaposes solitary ventures to unusual encounters that hover on the edges of “meaning.” The first sequence between Grenek (in Cunningham’s role) and Fearon (who alternates in the part created by Barbara Lloyd, aka Barbara Dilley, with Medlock) has an almost languorous quality. When he sits, she slowly crawls on her belly over and around him; he calmly presides over her journey, sliding one hand along the floor as she comes from behind him, so as to make an arch that she must pass through and turning his head to watch her do that. The arduousness of this mysterious task—which they repeat several times —is reinforced by its culmination: she lies draped across his lap, while a newcomer (Sciscione)—who has from the beginning been standing motionless, his back to the audience—advances deliberately on them, creating an odd counterpoint among his footsteps, the jerk of his arms into squared-off positions, and the sudden isolated contraction of his spine.

Cunningham wonderfully combined animalistic images with the elegance that is also intrinsic to him. When Grenek has exited, and Fearon has fallen on top of Sciscione, Tuason persistently nudges her off her prone partner with his head and shoulder, but then he and Sciscione advance on Fearon in slow lockstep, one of them making only a gentle hint of “go away “ with his hands; that gesture causes her to roll offstage. Later, Fearon stands with one leg lifted behind her, as poised as any ballet dancer, and Grenek crawls around her on his hands and knees, like an animal tracking a scent.

Melissa Toogood, caught by Nicholas Sciscione in Merce Cunningham’s RainForest. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The sound of the dancers’ feet smacking the pillows as they stride about, often on tiptoe, plus the pillows’ evasive responses intensify the performers’ need for of alertness in an unpredictable landscape. And violence does erupt—not exactly as animosity, but as speed and physical recklessness. It’s almost a shock when Melissa Toogood (in a role that Brown, for whom it was created, characterized in her book as “spitfire, hellcat—feral and dangerous.”) cuts loose. Her long hair whips wildly when she and Sciscione whale their arms at each other and when he lifts her and flails her around him, sets her down, flails her around again, making her legs fan open each time. Later, she runs at him, and he upends her—her knees clamped over his shoulder—and swings her dangerously. You watch this, or Stone in her last-minute appearance shaking her head crazily, or Grenek in the final burst of furious movement that brings the curtain down, and wonder—not for the first time—what was going through Cunningham’s mind when he choreographed this unforgettable work of art and selected the visual and aural landscape in which it abides.

Toogood, as you’d expect, performs RainForest superbly. The others, who have obviously worked hard to master this new-to-them language, and have all the skill and intelligence needed to do so, will, I expect hone their performances over time. Fine as they are, they’re not yet fully fledged in this dance’s combination of precision (mainly in the swift, stiff, striding steps and certain gestures) with wildness (mostly in the arms and body and some of the “big” movements). The alertness to the moment, the full awareness of shifts in focus and dynamics. . .these they have only intermittently. Full immersion will surely come.

Meanwhile I applaud Petronio’s Bloodlines project and the combination of humility and confidence that made him decide to embark on it.

The Mark Morris Dance Group performs at BAM.

A marvel: Aaron Loux in Mark Morris’s Pacific. Photo: Hilary Schwab

Was it George Balanchine who said he wanted us to see the music and hear the dancing when we were watching his ballets? Maybe he said only the first part of that. Mark Morris, I think, hopes for something similar when we see his choreography—not meaning that we should hear feet hit the floor, but that the dancers carry the music in their bodies, and if the music stops for some reason, but the dancers go on dancing, we might hear something like it in our heads.

I wish I knew what aspects of each musical composition that Morris works with influence his choreographic choices. Sometimes he follows the rhythm proper closely, sometimes the words of a song. But more often, he seems also to be guided by the music’s atmosphere, degree of density, instrumentation, history, and the ineffable images that creep into his brain when he listens to it.

The two new-to-New-York works that the Mark Morris Dance Group performed during its recent season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music have different origins. Spring, Spring, Spring is set to a recent arrangement of Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece, The Rite of Spring. The 1913 ballet by Vaslav Nijinsky for which the music was written depicted a pagan spring ritual in which a virgin was chosen to dance herself to death in order to urge the earth to get busy being fertile. There were countless tales of the initial shocked reaction to the music’s thundering dissonances and the dancers’ pounding, unballetic movements. Since then, a slew of dances have been set to the score. All this history Morris had to deal with or disregard; he chose a stance closer to the disregard-entirely possibility.

Aaron Loux (L) and Dallas McMurray in Mark Morris’s Whelm. Photo: Yi Chun Wu

The other New York premiere, Whelm, is set to music not meant to be danced to: Claude Debussy’s impressionistic piano pieces “Des pas sur la neige,” “Etude pour les notes répétées,” and “La cathédrale engloutie.” The titles are suggestive: steps in the snow—soft, often unheard, yet leaving prints; a mythical Breton cathedral engulfed by the ocean. The repeated notes in the second piece are often spat out in staccato phrases marked off by pauses. And, unless Morris had a macabre dream and found music that enhanced it, he heard things in these works that inspired him to choreograph Whelm.

His title word can be defined as to overcome utterly, to submerge, to engulf, and you can divine these acts in the mysterious piece that Morris crafted for four dancers. You can’t even be sure what you’re seeing at the outset, thanks to Nick Kolin’s exceedingly dim light and the black costumes that Elizabeth Kurtzman has designed. A path of light leads from the front of the stage to the back. Along it, a strange creature with a large head trudges very slowly upstage, as Colin Fowler draws the first somber chords from the the piano. When the stage brightens slightly, you can see that the creature is two men (Dallas McMurray and Aaron Loux), one behind the other and that the large-headed effect is caused by the black hoodie that McMurray wears. Keeping to their narrow path, one of the men slithers down and through the other’s legs; when he stands, the other does the same thing. In serpentine fashion, the two make their way upstage.

Maile Okamura and Dallas McMurray in Whelm. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

A woman (Maile Okamura) runs to the men and is lifted, which sets off a series of bizarre maneuvers for the three, or two of them, performed with care. At the back of the stage, another woman (Chelsea Acree) walks in barely discernible slow motion across the back of the stage. She wears a widow’s black veil. When the four dance together, they’re almost antic—witchy. But many of the images seem to evoke those definitions of “whelm.” Okamura begins to lean and sag; McMurray circles around her, returning just in time to catch her before she falls. Three of them join spoon-fashion and sink together. Settled between McMurray’s lifted legs, Okamura gazes upward.

Maile Okamura on Dallas McMurray in Mark Morris’s Whelm. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Whelm is an eerie morsel, its strangest element another presence. At one side of the stage sits a shape resembling a craggy rock or a miniature mountain. When there’s enough light to see it more clearly, it appears to be covered in black velvet. The dancers—leaping and falling, tangling and staring upward—pay it no mind. For quite a while, I’m convinced that it conceals people and that they will eventually move. I keep checking. No, it remains inert, and I’d rather not imagine what might be under it.

Mark Morris’s Spring, Spring, Spring. Front L to R: Noah Vinson, Stacy Martorana, Billy Smith, Rita Donahue, Sam Black, Michelle Yard, Brandon Randolph. Photo: Ken Friedman

Spring, Spring, Spring is the closing piece on the second of the two programs that MMDG presented at BAM. It begins with a different sort of mystery—a musical one. The audience is sitting in darkness when the first single notes of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring sound. But they vibrate strangely, and when the opening melody breaks free, they have an unusual resonance. A brief muffled thudding also sounds unfamiliar. When lights reveal the musicians, you realize that the members of The Bad Plus (Ethan Iverson, piano; Reid Anderson, bass; and David King, percussion) have not been playing this prelude live; the opening moments of the score had been electronically manipulated and recorded.

The Bad Plus, essentially a jazz trio, isn’t easy to pin down; elements from rock and classicism conspire in its work. The group’s composition is both faithful and innovative in relation to Stravinsky’s score, and the result is terrific. Morris’s ritual is simply dancing to music with allusions to a spring folk festival in imagined open air. The men are bare-chested and wear vividly colored trousers. Kurtzman has dressed the women in lightweight, high-waisted dresses that shade from yellow to pale blue in various ways. Everyone wears a wreath of leaves and flowers. No one gets sacrificed; no one rests for long. Fifteen members of the company form circles and circles within circles. They prance and sway and roll on the ground. They jump over one another. They pair up. They leap.

The Mark Morris Dance Group in Morris’s Spring, Spring, Spring. Foreground L to R: Brandon Randolph, Brian Lawson, Dallas McMurray, Aaron Loux. Photo: Ken Friedman

Morris has divided the ensemble into three units: four men, five women, and a sextet of three women and three men. For them, he has woven playful encounters and moments for individuals to shine into a brilliantly patterned celebration that offers only the subtlest of allusions to the Stravinsky-Nijinsky Rite—for instance, in the hint of ritual games and the pairing of men and women. At one point early on, the women in the sextet (Rita Donahue, Michelle Yard, and Laurel Lynch) hold onto their partners (Billy Smith, Sam Black, and Noah Vinson), who lean forward at an angle as they strain to travel; you think of stubborn fields being plowed in a matriarchal farm community. Five women stagger and whirl about, and you think they might have had too much elderflower wine.

In harmony with the music that some of us know so well, people leap boisterously across the stage and exit. Lauren Grant whirls onto the stage and as quickly whirls out of sight. Donahue, on the other hand, balances for a long time on the ball of one foot. McMurray has a buoyant solo, Lynch another one. Together they form chains and indulge in bouts of counterpoint. Philip Watson’s lighting sets them against a blue sky and unobtrusively turns the light golden, dims it to late afternoon, or boosts it to noon.

Couples in Spring, Spring, Spring. L to R: Michelle Yard with Sam Black, Stacy Martorana with Noah Vinson. Photo: Ken Friedman

One of the most memorable sequences appears as the music is building toward the climactic sacrifice Stravinsky intended. The dancers gather in three shoulder-to-shoulder lines, set one behind the other, as in high-school yearbook photos. The people in the front line, say, may lift their linked hands to form arches for those behind them to thrust partly through and then retreat.

You see clasped hands in the second line lifting to come over the heads of those in front, and lifting again to return to position. The effect is of a very human machine, putting out immense concerted energy, seeming to grinding its wheels, yet moving inexorably forward. People break the formation but return to it. Women are lifted, passed down the line. When the music, as I recall, reaches the explosive shouts that accompany the sacrificial maiden’s jumps, they all jump.

There’s no violence in Spring, Spring, Spring. Given the costumes, it’s easy to view the dancers as San Francisco flower children of the late 1960’s, but these are no iconoclasts; they’re controlled in their patterns, expert in their dancing—even in the way they sink down at the end in what’s obviously an avoidance of climax on Morris’s part. Here’s the soft young grass, they seem to be saying. Let’s take a break.

Mark Morris’s Grand Duo. Foreground: Sam Black and Lauren Grant; at back: Jenn Weddel. Photo: Erin Baiano

Program A closed with Morris’s great Grand Duo of 1993, set to Lou Harrison’s Grand Duo for Violin and Piano. It too suggests a primal gathering, but it’s fiercer and wilder than Spring, Spring, Spring. In their satin costumes by Susan Ruddie and in Michael Chybowski’s lighting, the dancers ride Harrison’s music (splendidly played by Fowler and Georgy Valtchev of the MMDG Musical Ensemble) as if they’re striving for individuality and companionship in a driven and dissonant society, impelled by the music to congregate. You see Lynch slowly raise her arms to dabble her hands in a mysterious horizontal beam of light, watch her slowly merge into a partnership with Domingo Estrada, Jr. Donahue falls to the floor and rises with her hands folded into fists. Okamura crawls onto the stage and reaches up, as if to push heavy air that’s descending on her. There are almost always squads and crowds coming and going.

But for “Polka,” the last of four sections, the fourteen dancers form a big circle, and for over four minutes perform a fierce communal ceremony—running around the circle with a limping step, thrusting their arms into the air. Feet wide apart and stepping rhythmically, they slap their hips. Hunkered down and facing into the center of the circle, they flick a foot out, then the other. They shake their heads vigorously. Harrison’s music makes one think of the open spaces of the American West and fierce tribal gatherings in relation to a more urban society. It’s significant that for this section, the dancers have changed clothes, in order to be dressed for action—their legs free to stamp the ground and kick the air.

L to R: Domingo Estrada, Jr., Dallas McMurray, and Aaron Loux in Mark Morris’s Pacific. Photo: Hilary Schwab

In its two programs on BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, MMDG presented seven works on the stage, all of them marvelously performed by this most musical assemblage of dancers. Morris choreographed Pacific for the San Francisco Ballet in 1995, and Tina Fehlandt staged it for his own company just this year). It’s set to the third and fourth movements of Harrison’s Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (played at BAM by Valtchev, Fowler, and cellist Wolfram Koessel). Think Pacific ocean breezes, think peaceful. The women’s long dresses and the men’s long, full skirts (costumes by Martin Pakledinaz) swirl in the gusts of movement.

It’s a delight to see this piece performed by Morris’s own dancers. No one stops to freeze a classical pose. You want feet beating together in the air, pirouettes, arabesques? They abound, and the dancers accomplish them with brio, but they also breath into them and out of them as if they were simple exclamations of good health and happiness. Since this ballet opened the first program, it was the one in which certain dancers began to draw my eyes. All the company members are terrific, but sometimes one or another will appear to have blossomed in some way. This season, two of the men struck me. Dallas McMurray has been a part of MMDG since 2007, and he’s always been fine, but his dancing seems to me to have a new fullness, a controlled abandon. Estrada joined the company in 2009, and I’ve never seen him as vibrant and technically accomplished as he is now. Watching these two was like seeing someone you thought you knew reveal more about themselves.

Sam Black took on a new challenge: replacing Spencer Ramirez in the 2013 duet Jenn and Spencer (Brandon Randolph also took on the male role, but at a performance I didn’t see). In this moving duet, the man and woman embrace, sustain each other, argue, and struggle together, the changes in their relationship in tune with those sustained by the instruments that play Henry Cowell’s Suite for Violin and Piano. In six short movements, a love affair (or a marriage) unfolds, seizes up, and is tersely ended (for now) with a slap. Black performs the male role excellently and I expect will get into it even more deeply over time. Jenn Weddel has ripened magnificently in the part made for her and discovered more nuances. The long skirt of her satin evening gown is not only an unruliness that has to be mastered, but seems almost a part of her, like a lioness’s lashing tail.

L to R: Crosswalk: Laurel Lynch, Chelsea Acree, and Stacy Martorana capture Billy Smith. Photo: Elaine Mayson

Seeing works more than once means more than as well relishing favorite moments, you may notice details of choreography you missed the first time. Watching Jenn and Spencer this time, I saw how the act of the two people clasping hands (one each) on a high diagonal could mean different things—from cementing an agreement to blocking one. I loved re-visiting the crazy episode in Morris’s 2013 Crosswalk in which Acree and Lynch grab Vinson’s hands, and you can’t tell who’s pulling whom. It’s not even clear that he’s the boss when he follows the two of them, who are heading forward on their hands and feet, as awkward and gangling as newborn calves. Also, the first time I saw this piece that Morris set to Carl Maria von Weber’s Grand Duo Concertant for clarinet and piano (played at BAM by Fowler and Todd Palmer), I failed to absorb the full impact of a racing, knocking-down dance that has a cast of eight men and only three women (Stacy Martorano is the third). Nor did I notice the irony of a passage for the men that made them appear—in a highly stylized way—as if they had hold of reins and were urging their horses on.

(You can read my more detailed responses to these two 2013 works at: http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2013/04/for-eyes-and-ears/.)

Mark Morris’s Words: Aaron Loux (L) and Brandon Randolph. Photo: Ani Collier

When I saw Words in October, 2014 at New York City Center’s Fall for Dance season, I was tickled by the way Morris got dancers on and off the stage. Two dancers holding a rectangle of cloth walk onstage, dropping off performers partly concealed behind the cloth and picking up other.

(You can read my first response to Words at: http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/2014/10/everybody-fall-for-dance/.)

This time, at BAM, I found this device to be even wittier than I had thought. For instance, you may see four pairs of legs walking behind the curtain, but only one person stays onstage, and no one new is taken away. So the device (borrowed from India’s Kathakali theater) takes on the image of a bus; not everyone’s getting off at this stop. It’s also interesting that—although there’s a great deal of vigorous activity in this dance set to Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words—the various duets often occur in a relatively confined space, as if to suggest that these are conversations, even though no one talks.

In all the pieces shown at BAM, it’s fascinating to see, once again, how musical these dancers are (please include Lesley Garrison and Brian Lawson) and how dance-sensitive the musicians. And, of course, it’s Morris who finds inventive ways to bring them together. For our delight.

Pam Tanowitz Dance and the FLUX Quartet opens Bard SummerSpace 2105.

Stuart Singer (L) and members of Pam Tanowitz Dance in Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy). Photo: Cory Weaver

The featured composer at Bard SummerScape 2015 is Carlos Chavez (1899-1979), and in July and August, the 26^th annual Bard Music Festival will devote its performances and symposia to him and his contemporaries. On June 27, Summerscape opened at Bard College in Anandale-on-Hudson with a taste of his music. Choreographer Pam Tanowitz included on her program a brand new solo that she created for Ashley Tuttle, set to the composer’s Sonatina for Violin and Piano—not a piece that alludes to his Mexican cultural identity.

Tanowitz is remarkable for her skillful reimagining of formal devices, such as repetition, unison, counterpoint, retrogression, etc. and for the ways in which she honors and utilizes ballet steps, while teasing them in various ways and introducing non-balletic ones to jostle them a bit. Tuttle, a former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, a member of Twyla Tharp Dance, and a starring performer on Broadway in Tharp’s Movin’ Out, has the intellect and the body memory to tackle almost anything.

Ashley Tuttle with pianist Michael Scales in Pam Tanowitz’s Solo. Photo: Cory Weaver

In Solo, Tuttle shares the stage with violinist Pauline Kim Harris and pianist Michael Scales. She’s dressed becomingly (by Reid Bartelme) in footless purplish tights and an elegantly cut peach-colored tunic. Glowing in Davison Scandrett’s fine lighting, she begins in place, working her feet in their pointe shoes a bit. Oh those feet! Beautifully arched and subtly used, they remind me of Balanchine’s advice to his women dancers: they should use their feet as if they were akin to an elephant’s trunk—complicated, flexible appendages that could move with delicacy as well as power.

Tuttle dances as if she’s trying out steps or remembering them, rather than “performing” them for us. We watch her, prepared for anything, and “anything” appears in perfect harmony with the ballet steps you might expect. Knocking, in passing, on an imaginary door or spending a few moments prone on the floor are elements in a texture that includes arabesques and pirouettes. She may flex her feet on a jump, when you might expect them to be pointed—no big deal. She passes behind the violinist and around the piano, then places a hand on that instrument as if it were a studio barre, in order to engage in a little supported work.

What we see is a superb dancer firmly and gently on the prowl in a territory both familiar and unfamiliar. She wears her virtuosity as if it were made of silk.

Maggie Cloud and Dylan Crossman in Tanowitz’s Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy). Photo: Cory Weaver

Tanowitz’s Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy), which opened the Bard program, begins with a solo by Dylan Crossman that is equally thoughtful. He’s no ballet dancer—ruggeder in what he does, but wonderfully precise. He’s a lean man, and when he swings a leg around, you may think of a knife slash. A former member of Merce Cunningham’s company, he’s alert to all the nuances in a sequence of movement—when to suspend a step, when to slow it down, when to turn in into an exclamation point. Verbs like “veering,” “vaulting,” “tilting,” “careering” come to mind. Melissa Toogood (another Cunningham alum) enters, gazes at him, and backs out. No point in bothering him now.

He dances to 1655, by Caroline Shaw, the first of three contemporary pieces to be played by the FLUX quartet (Tom Chiu, violin; Conrad Harris, violin; Max Mandel, viola; and Felix Fan, cello). The other works are David Lang’s almost all the time and Ted Hearing’s For David Lang. The quacking viola that begins 1655 hints at the interesting things to come—rhythmic, fragmented, with lots of space between groups of sounds. In Crossman’s solo, as in all Tanowitz’s work, her musicality is evident, although not wedded to the beat. Watching and listening, you’re aware of echoes and sudden congruencies, as if dance and music are two compatible fellow travelers who have much in common despite individual agendas.

The title Broken Quartet sums up the ambiance of what is essentially a foursome, but one in which the dancers rarely perform in clear-cut unanimity. And all four performers have moments in which they stand and stare, as if not yet sure how they fit into an established pattern. Maggie Cloud arrives, looks at Crossman, and starts dancing when he approaches her. But he returns to his initial phrase (which he does intermittently throughout Broken Story), and she wanders into counterpoint with him before the two fall briefly into unison. She leaves and crosses the stage behind a scrim, where Scandrett’s lighting has created a hazy sunlit corridor, then re-materializes. Definitely no ecstasy. Once, when she’s frozen on her spot, he simply picks her up and puts her down elsewhere.

In the intermission after this piece, a friend I ran into spoke of how much she loved watching dancing. Just watching it for what it was, what it awakened in her own body. She wondered whether there was something she should be understanding and doesn’t. No, I told her, especially in a non-narrative dance like this. Nevertheless, since the materials of dance are human beings, their movements inevitably suggest feelings and physical sensations that we all have. It wouldn’t surprise me if I learned that Tanowitz had organized a more traditional quartet and then picked it apart and scattered its elements. But there’s no need to delve for meaning in the fact, say, that Toogood at one point spins offstage and then reappears spinning across behind the scrim. It’s not fairyland back there, but it is another space and affects our perception of her action.

Stuart Singer and Melissa Toogood in Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy). Photo: Cory Weaver

Stuart Singer arrives even later than Toogood. He stops by while she has become embroiled in a fascinating solo voyage that includes a moment of strangely precise, jolting staggers, as if little explosions were happening unexpectedly under her feet. He almost immediately exits, looking back at her over his shoulder. Shortly, he returns to dance alone also. At the end, when Toogood has finished a sequence of big falling-apart leaps, whaling arms, and spins, and starts to back offstage, Singer reaches a hand to her from the wings, and on this comradely note, the lights go out.

In the coming and going of these four terrific performers, Tanowitz suggests a community in flux, with dancing as a metaphor for daily activities. Yes, they do pair up, yes, finally, all dance together (Tanowitz is masterful at building tension and interest without smacking you in the face with it). But the choreography preserves the performers’ individuality and the image they project of decision-makers working out their dance destiny.

Lindsay Jones (minus the audience) in her intermission solo in the lobby of the Richard B. Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Photo: Cory Weaver

Tanowitz also has a surprise for those who thought that intermissions are only for coffee, chit-chat, or a breath of fresh air. In the lobby of the Sosnoff Theater in Gehry’s Richard B. Fisher Center, a tall, slim, dancer, Lindsey Jones, traverses the implied path between two big, square-off pillars that sit about twelve feet apart. Back and forth she goes, trying something different each trip, pausing occasionally. Whether stretching out her long legs in big shapely maneuvers or taking scrabbly little steps, she remains oblivious of the watchers; her world exists within ours, yet as removed, in its own way, as a painting hanging on the wall would be.

After intermission, The FLUX Quartet appears again on the apron at one side of the stage to play two Conlon Nancarrow string quartets (Nos. 1 and 3). In these compelling works, the texture can change dramatically from dense, intricate allegro passages to thinned-down circuitous melodies; in one moment, a violin is played so quietly and at a high pitch that it sounds like a mouse’s lament.

Since I saw the fascinating piece, Heaven on One’s Head, that Tanowitz set to this music a year ago February, she has, I believe, redesigned it. In it, Cloud, Crossman, Singer, and Toogood are joined by Jones, Andrew Champlin, Sarah Haarmann, and Vincent McClosky—all of them wearing Bartelme’s handsome red velvet shorts and tops.

Foreground: Melissa Toogood in Pam Tanowitz’s Heaven on One’s Head (2014) Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

It seems to me that Tanowitz’s propositions about the space and what we see or don’t see have become more compelling. When Heaven on One’s Head begins, the curtain pauses briefly when it has lifted only halfway up, and we see that dancers are already moving. Then, midway through the work, Toogood moves onto the stage apron opposite the FLUX musicians and directs her dancing toward the stage; now the curtain has descended so low that we see only the dancers’ feet or seated bodies. At another point, men start falling in from the wings on the musicians’ side. First, Singer drops into sight and is pulled back by invisible hands, then McCloskey, then Champlin, who recovers, hops offstage and is replaced by Crossman (I think that’s right). Champlin must fall again, because I recall Crossman, in plain sight, dragging him away. Just before the end, this motif recurs. So the stage extends its boundaries. What is happening that we can’t see? What does a partial curtain conceal?

I’m struck this time—not just by the inventive, changeable patterns and the juxtaposition of stillness and motion, but by the variety of steps that send the dancers into the air. In ballet, these have French names: grand jeté, sauté, assemblé, sissone, jeté en tournant, etc. Put simply, these are the basic ways anyone gets off the ground: leaping, hopping, jumping from one foot and landing on two, jumping from two feet and landing on one, making a half-turn as you leap. In addition you can smack your legs together in the air, bend them, or keep them straight. In Heaven on One’s Head, Tanowitz employs all these steps at one time or another, but they don’t look the way they do in a classical ballet; her dancers may tilt their bodies in the air or hunch them over. Watching them, you don’t even see “steps.” You think “flying,” “vaulting,” “soaring,” “exploding into the air.”

Whether together, apart, clamped to a partner, lined up, scattering, rushing away, or falling to the floor, these are people you want to keep watching. They make your pulse quicken and slow down. What’s the story? It’s what they are doing. What are they doing? That’s the story.

Summation Dance celebrates its fifth anniversary at BAM Fisher.

Members of Summation Dance (L to to R: Devin Oshiro, Megan Wubbenhorst, Allie Lochary, Angela Curotto, and Taryn Vander Hoop) hold Sumi Clements in Clements’ At the Hour.  Photo: Larson Harley

Perhaps someone some day will write an essay about dance titles, how they vary —encapsulating a theme, for instance, or borrowing from literature, or throwing spectators off the track with a word or phrase that has a secret meaning for the choreographer. Summation Dance titled its latest work At the Hour. What strikes you first? Those raised in Catholicism may think of the “Hail Mary: “. . .pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Other dance goers may follow up the ambiguous phrase with their own ideas about this important hour, while still others shrug off the title altogether.

Advance press material noted that choreographer Sumi Clements’ inspiration came from 1960s Spain, when four young girls in the village of Garabandal famously claimed to have received visitations from the Virgin Mary or her deputy, St. Michael, prophesying catastrophes to befall sinners from on high.

At the Hour, which premiered at BAM’s Fishman Space in the week following Labor Day, is Summation Dance’s first long (slightly under an hour) work. It celebrates the fifth anniversary of this six-woman company that appeared the same spring that its founders, Clements and Taryn Vander Hoop, graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with MFAs (I knew them back then).

Clements is Summation Dance’s principal choreographer and co-artistic director, Vander Hoop is its executive director and co-artistic director. Talented and resolute, the two have attracted donors and forged ahead, averaging four appearances a year for the group. Welcome to the world of modern dance and postmodern dance—a world in which almost every dancer has another job.

(L to R): Devin Oshiro, Taryn Vander Hoop, Angela Curotto, Megan Wubbenhorst, Allie Lochary, and Sumi Clements in At the Hour. Photo: Larson Harley

I mention this background because Summation’s dancers are not onstage wimps or idealized creatures or conceptual artists; they are tough, determined, earthy women. They do not soar into the air; they plant their feet apart and hunker down. They are not into wasting time.

In At the Hour, they have no truck with glamor either. Brigitte Vosse has costumed them all in loose, sleeveless dresses that conceal the shape of their bodies, but don’t hide the sweat stains that darken the fabric’s muted colors. Clearly, the world these women inhabit is a dangerous one, and they inhabit it together—a tribe that holds its rites together, promotes fellowship, and is disturbed by occasional conflicts and an atmosphere in peril.

The beginning of At the Hour is especially striking for its use of the flexible Fishman Space. Megan Wubbenhorst is alone onstage, facing an audience banked on one side of the room. Nothing hides the armature of the building’s interior; we might be inside a giant submarine. Kyle Olson’s commissioned score starts of with quiet, intermittent rattling sounds and tickings. Wubbenhorst is doing something both mysterious and compelling. She seems askew in some way—careful, contained, but not sure where gravity is pulling her. Glued to one spot, she leans, gazes into the space, balances in tiptoe, revolves—always slowly, experimentally. Then she looks up.

So do we. There is a dancer on either of the empty two side balconies, standing still and watching or beginning to move slowly. During this passage, they may disappear and reappear on the opposite side, and what moves they make increase in scale and distance travelled along the narrow paths. From my vantage point, Devin Oshiro is especially vivid—rushing along, spinning into deep, wide-legged squats. Then Simon Cleveland’s lighting subtly but firmly draws our attention even higher. Omigod! Clements and Vander Hoop are clambering around on the heavy metal grating that lies beneath the overhead lighting equipment. I’d say they’re monkey-like, but they’re too cautious for that. This is unfamiliar territory to them, and they don’t appear to be succeeding in finding a way out (if that’s their aim). Down below, Wubbenhorst continues her own explorations, and gradually she is joined by the others: Angela Curotto, Allie Lochary, Oshiro, and, soon, the two overhead explorers.

Taryn Vander Hoop (L) and Devin Oshiro tend to Megan Wubbenhorst. Photo: Larson Harley

What I identified as ritual is simply big, fierce, often fluid dancing that the members of this society know, or learn by watching. It may involve odd and striking coordinations, but, arduous though it is, it shuns conventional virtuosity.. Clements is adept at introducing a theme through, say, one performer and then letting it infect others or crop up later in other circumstances. The six dancers may fall into unison or three-part counterpoint; two may dance together at the same time as two others—confrontationally or helpfully—both the pairs independently occupying the same area at the same time.

Enigmatic dramas crop up briefly. Two bars of light slide along the floor to mimic the vertical supports on the back wall. Bells ring in Olson’s score, and a short rhythmic motif begins to repeat. Oshiro and Vander Hoop join to manipulate Wubbenhorst, who—her eyes closed—moves with the slipperiness of a fish. Carefully turning her, pushing her, catching her, the two are intent on their job, whatever it is. But when they return her to her place and put her down on the floor, and Cleveland produces a tiny pool of light for her, she somehow hardens. Curotto tries every grip or leverage she can manage to lift Wubbenhorst or move her elsewhere, but can’t budge her. In the end, they both fall, a new musical texture arises, and the lights brighten.

This is not the only time that the action suggests a lesson being learned, a test being made. Wubbenhorst is clearly important in some way. Twice the others lift her high in a standing position, like a statue, or a visionary who needs to see into the distance.

Megan Wubbenhorst lifted by (visible L to R): Devin Oshiro, Taryn Vander Hoop, and Allie Lochary. Photo: Larson Harley

There is a point late in the piece when my attention flags. What has been urgent and fascinating begins to seem drawn out. I note how skillfully Clements is handling the formal devices of repetition and variation and varying the ways the dancers come together or separate, but I lose a sense of what these wary, watchful women want or are trying to accomplish. In the end, however, they find a destination. Olson’s music turns rhythmic, full, and insistent as, one by one, the six feed into a line that stretches across the space. Breaking away individually, rejoining again, they walk very slowly on tiptoe away from the audience toward the back wall, which turns russet. A sunset? A sunrise? An apocalypse? Will help come from above, or will disaster rain down on them? The hour—whatever it signifies—has come.