DAVID PUSZH DANCE COMPANY
Shaun Gilmore at MoMing Dance & Arts Center
Dancers, even more than the rest of us, hate and fear fat. Like aging, it’s a serious impediment to the body’s expressive capabilities. And if I’ve made Fat sound like a humorous insult to the obese, that’s not the whole story: Puszczewicz is very sympathetic to the overweight person’s plight, particularly when she has a yen to dance. The mood of this piece shifts from the comic to the pathetic when two slender dancers (Ellen Airi Hubbell and Emilly Stein) enter in skintight leotards to move gracefully and quickly all over the stage while the fat lady, stationary, looks on longingly.
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Us & Them was my favorite work on this evening’s program. These young dancers–most with a fine if sometimes uneven technique–really soared, especially at the dance’s fast-paced end. At the same time, there were lots of visual contrasts: two dancers turned across the stage simultaneously but at different rates, or one group performed high-flying leaps while a second rolled along the floor.
Then the Hypochondriac enters (Mark Richard). Wearing a partial mask that gives him a pronounced hook nose and downturned mouth, the Hypochondriac is both infantile and aged. He’s every mother’s nightmare of what her coddling during a child’s illness might produce: a dependent whiner who extorts sympathy with his aches and pains. His monologue reveals that the Pill Lady is a fantasy of his mother’s. One day when he wouldn’t take his medicine, she told him that the magic Pill Lady had left a special treat for him under his pillow–pills, of course. From that point the fantasy takes on weight and shape, and it becomes clear that the fantastic vision we see onstage is a child’s idea of the beautiful lady impossibly elegant and refined, and tremendously seductive because she seems invincible and immortal.
