STANDING IN THE WINGS
The concert was dominated by Tim Buckley. Buckley is the genuine article: he dances, choreographs, sings, plays accordion, and composes music. Most important for this concert, he always seems to have a cluster of dancers around him and inspires them to create their own works.
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Buckley’s Husker Beat best shows this musical sense. The steps are remarkably simple–often one step per beat. One dancer (Christy Munch) beats out the rhythm with a tambourine and drumstick. The rhythm is varied and driving, providing a perfect motor. The dance’s themes develop, climax, and resolve with almost perfect timing. Stick Dance is a variation on Husker Beat: the dancers (Balinda Craig-Quijada, Julenne Graham, Lauren Helfand, Dawn Herron, Ruth Klotzer, Linda Lenart, Munch, Louie Miller, Julie Schiller, and Heather Sultz) carry broomsticks and beat a rhythm on the floor with them. In the first section, they look like morris dancers in Lawrence Welk clothes. The second section, which starts with a terrifying thump of sticks on the floor, takes on a darker tone; the sticks are used like cattle prods. The section ends suddenly, without resolution; perhaps the work is unfinished.
Images dominate Daughter, conceived by Royd Climenhaga, Cynthia Haskins, Mark E. Lococo, Francois McGillicuddy, Trish Suchy, and Mark Weston and performed by four of them. They use long passages from J.M. Coetzee’s novel In the Heart of the Country, about a girl whose father remarries even though the girl is still anguished over her mother’s death. The score is a voice reciting Coetzee’s text against the background of a haunting, wordless song; often the voice is recorded two or three times and played back slightly out of synchronization; we can almost catch the words. This creates a dense texture that captures the girl’s tortured feelings. The two characters are a woman in white and another in black; they are illuminated by flashlights held by two men completely outfitted in black–even their faces are covered.
Louie Miller’s duet, Mother Tongue, which he performed with Herron, is a smaller, more laconic dance than Klotzer’s but it also works well. Atmospheric music by Dead Can Dance combines the sound of a thin trickle of water with a slow-motion rhythm section. Miller crosses to Herron in a lovely walk in plie roughly like a spider going courting. They travel back across stage with tiny sideways movements of their feet, looking oddly like statues being moved. Herron jumps at Miller, who catches her but finds his face buried in her stomach. In other imaginative movement, Miller and Herron carry water to their mouths in their cupped hands, then suddenly stop and look around. The last image is possibly one of reconciliation: Miller reaches out, offering water to an unseen person, and Herron reaches out, offering water to him.
