DAVID PUSZH DANCE COMPANY
The first piece set the tone for the evening. Just Affairs, a 1985 work by Puszczewicz, features a man and a woman in near darkness alternately falling into and pulling away from each other. The couple, danced by Ellen Airi Hubbell and Evan Charles How, seem relatively uninterested in these exchanges, although once in a while they reach for each other longingly.
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What makes this dance unengaging, aside from its deadeningly solemn air, is Puszczewicz’s inability to send his dancers in any particular direction. He does not allow them to build off each other or off previous movements. Instead they go through a series of prescribed poses, all given equal time and equal weight, so that the dance is utterly regular and unsurprising. At one point, in fact, when the man leaves the stage for perhaps two minutes, the woman dances on at an unchanged pace. When the man returns, the two merely continue coupling and uncoupling until the piece ends.
The concert was not only poorly paced and unintelligently arranged–Just Affairs and Wounds of My Belief, two dark, slow pieces, were followed by an intermission–it bordered on the truly offensive. Fat, by Puszczewicz, begins with a filmed close-up of a man’s head projected onto the head of a stuffed dummy. In a voice-over, a man explains that “there are no happy fat people” and that it hurts when people call him fat. Immediately following this moment of touching honesty and vulnerability, a woman lumbers onstage wearing a “fat suit” made of the same material as the stuffed dummy. She proceeds to perform what is meant to be a comical routine about a fat person’s inability to move gracefully. Then two other women in wispy blue outfits dance onstage, and we’re supposed to laugh as the fat lady tries unsuccessfully to duplicate the beautiful movements of the blue nymphs. How dare this inferior fat person infringe upon the holy territory of the exalted Thin Ones!
