La MaMa e.t.c. put on a doubleheader of mostly new works and works-in–progress at their dance festival Saturday night, but the marquee titles may have been reversed. “Male Bonding” gave us three pieces with dancers mostly obsessing about themselves. On the other hand, six women were billed as the “Dancing Divas,” but their work mostly explored relationships. The best was a double duet by Pam Tanowitz that explored both the mechanics and the psychology of partnering.
Three of the four dancers in Tanowitz’s piece are associated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and they were exemplars of his cool and detached style of movement. At the same time, “Forever and Ever; Duets” showed what you might call a woman’s touch in the choreography – a gentleness and sensitivity between partners that communicated as intimacy. Like many pieces of modern choreography, the action veers, sometimes abruptly, between displays of strength and collapses into helplessness. But here, the breakdowns have a dramatic purpose, serving as tests which the partnerships are able to meet. The two couples – Melissa Toogood and Daniel Madoff, Anne Lentz and Rashaun Mitchell, support each other in a series of movements drawn from the ballroom, the bedroom and the ballet. Their bonds are so close that you can’t imagine the usual variation – an arbitrary switching of partners. In true Cunningham style, the couples don’t interact directly, but by the end, with one pair holding a fish dive while the other pair lie side-by-side on the floor, the viewer has put two and two together.
A more mysterious twosome came in the persons of Vicky Shick and Eva Karczag, who begin their “Double Vision” reclining side-by-side in the dark, with the light on four almost-matching legs extended straight in the air, trading a microphone as they converse about the confluences and coincidences of their two lives. Then they get up and set a table for an imaginary dinner for two. In a series of mundane oddities, with minimal but striking dance movement, they flirt with the notion of two being one. The psychological undercurrent called to mind Ingmar Bergman’s classic film “Persona.” What’s going on with this female bonding? Something ordinary, comfortable, and profound.
Ironically, it seemed that in the companion “Male Bonding” program, the dancers were just struggling to make peace with themselves. Dubliner John Scott began with an elaborate “Bowing Dance,” a solo/duet in which he plays two characters in sequence, “me” and “you.” These two greet each other formally, eye each other warily, join together in an uncomfortable, spasmodic union, and finally step apart, seemingly no better acquainted than before.
John Jasperse has a funny bit in his work-in-progress “Pure,” where he plays a haplessly self-critical ballet dancer, trying in vain to perfect a single pirouette, getting nowhere but analyzing each attempt. His companions include two similarly self-conscious female performers, who earnestly debrief us on the feelings that accompany their emotional improvisations.
No such ironies leaven a one-man festival of flagellation by Miguel Gutierrez, entitled “Nothing, No thing.” It opens with a solo in silence, which looks like a man trying to shake off a demon. Part Two is a monologue for the demon himself – a cynical, isolated artist who hates himself and his egocentric art. Part Three is a lament wailed at a brick wall, a lung-bursting complaint against an ex-lover. Intense it is, cathartic it’s not. There doesn’t seem to be an inch of daylight between the artist and his personal pain – no space for redemption, no relief for his ill-fated audience.
One thinks back with fondness on the Dancing Divas, all of whom had a sense of play with their material, and their colleagues. Barbara Mahler’s “Two for the Show” was a serial collaboration, the choreographer lining out her theme, then leaving to make way for a spirited variation by the much younger Jessica Winograd. Its effect was captured by my neighbor in the audience, who whispered, “Are they mother and daughter?” Nothing in the program suggested so, but the dancing did.
The most ambitious, or at least most populous piece on the program was Sara Rudner’s “Positions - The All Star Variation,” which was actually a collision of two simultaneous pieces, an elegant series of floor poses by a dozen or so dancers, overrun by another bunch in a madcap improvisation, invented and directed on the spot by our Irish visitor, John Scott. It would have been funnier if Scott and his troupers didn’t strain so hard for the laughs.
Sally Silvers’ “Yellin’ Gravy” was a hillbilly ode to the Civil Rights era. Her collaborators were two mobile percussionists who roamed around La MaMa’s balcony, and experimental poet Bruce Andrews, who put together a “Frankenstein’s collage” of provocative words and sentences, with recorded sounds of blues and bluegrass, all focused on America’s chronic racial stress. Silvers drew laughs as she scampered and scuttered around the stage, seeking relief at one point from two baby bottles stuffed in one mouth. “Remix to the mofongo,” explained the poet. “Foxidize.” What’s the occasion? Silvers’ program note ends simply, “Go Obama.”
Jodi Melnick’s excerpt from “Business of the Bloom” was a solo, but at least in this context, looked like calm, joyous homage to all feminine fecundity. Go La MaMa.
