AMERICAN JAZZ DANCE WORLD CONGRESS ’90
I was curious to see whether these concepts would apply during International Night at the American Jazz Dance World Congress ’90, which featured companies from Germany, Japan, France, and the United States. And despite a few minor surprises, the companies’ pieces did seem consistent with these expectations. What kept them from being boring was that many had enough innovation to provide the “astonishment” that Diaghilev was so fond of. (“Surprise me,” he said to Cocteau when the latter asked him what he’d like to see him do.)
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The highlight of the first evening’s program was Masashi and Action Machine, from Japan. Choreographer and artistic director Kukimo Sakamoto’s high-powered The Seven Gods innovatively combined traditional Japanese hand gestures, poses, and circus acrobatics with the movements and sensibilities of jazz dance. The eclecticism of the piece extended even to the costumes. The black outfits suggested kyogen, the characters in No theater who bustle about “invisibly” adjusting everyone’s kimonos; but they were updated with sexy strapless tops. In another section of the dance, the preoccupation with contrasting colors, which characterizes not only Japanese theater but Japanese calligraphy and prints, emerged in the contrasts between the dancers’ white masks, the black costumes, and the deep red lighting.
On the other hand, Odums’s Layers of Veil was the highlight of the next evening’s program. (The rest of the companies on that night were from Chicago and Austin, Texas.) Danced with virtuosity by five women, Layers of Veil had all the revelatory power of a classic French movie in which each scene reveals more about the characters. The heavily garbed women looked as solid as monuments when the dance began, with the sturdiness of Picasso’s giant women. Their cowls over their faces, like masks or veils, were mysterious, but their layers of clothing were mundane, resembling ordinary peasant women’s field clothes. When they lowered their cowls to reveal their faces, they hit their shoulders with their fists and pounded their hands into their stomachs, expressing, in contrast to their former stoicism, the turmoil of their inner souls. As they peeled off layers of clothes, each stage was more stylish. They progressed from submissive, tortured caryatids to women in full bloom, rejoicing in their power and sophistication. The choreography had echoes of many influences, from the modernism of Elisa Monte’s Pigs and Fishes, with its driving beat, to the ingenious classicism of Balanchine’s intertwining figures holding hands. It’s the kind of masterful dance you long to see and rarely get to.
Gus Giordano’s ambitious Michelangelo: Images in Stone gave us the torment of the artist struggling to express himself. While some of the choreography was too obvious, there were stunning visual images throughout, such as Michelangelo (Paul A. Brown) being lifted in a wide jete on the arms and shoulders of a few dancers while the rest of the crowd reached imploring arms up to him. The artist later brought form and order, breathing life into a block of marble by breaking up its mass of dancers into variously posed statues. The muscular shadows printed on the dancers’ leotards created a half-marble, half-flesh effect. The final scene made the whole dance worthwhile: inspired by Michelangelo’s The Deposition, intended by the artist as a monument for his own sepulcher, it showed Michelangelo seated on high, apparently floating in front of a long, white sheet draped from ceiling to floor.
