NANA SHINEFLUG AND MARY WARD
Local choreographers Nana Shineflug and Mary Ward, who recently showed new works at the Dance Center of Columbia College, seem to share an interest in the mystical, making it the subject as well as (presumably) the desired end of their dances. Yet neither takes a solemn approach–just the opposite. They seem to ask: Can humor and mysticism intersect? What theatrical illusions can I exploit or explode to humorous effect?
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One of Ward’s two premieres, Champagne, has the giddy exuberance of inebriation, your garden-variety elevated state. To sparkling, rippling music by Steve Reich, the three dancers (Beth Bradley, Brian Jeffery, and Ward) are suddenly spotlighted center stage, one behind another, flicking arms, hands, heads, shoulders, and the occasional leg or hip, each dancer in his or her own time to the music. This mostly stationary group looks like Siva turned party animal. When they then break apart, their dancing has all the energy and momentum but few of the actual moves of jazz dance–in fact Champagne plays on a certain kind of exhilarated social dancing closely related to jazz. As the dancers’ luminescent, satiny costumes catch and reflect the light’s subtly shifting pastel hues, the overall effect is sexy but not seriously sexual: despite the potentially divisive fact of a threesome, there are no hints of jealousy or of any other tensions.
In this first section, the nonangel is left comically in the dust, but in the second section a different dancer (Jeffery) is excluded. In fact he’s being smothered–those voluminous sheets have multitudinous uses–under a “blanket” by the two others. When the two disappear offstage, he’s subjected to a voyeuristic vision of a man and a woman, seated at a table, whom he sees only as distorted silhouettes thrown up and greatly enlarged on a scrim at the rear of the stage. The dancer seems both entranced and repulsed by this vision: he looks and turns away, looks and turns away as he dances, entrapped, in a bar of light center stage. In this dark section we remember that Satan and his gang are fallen angels.
But these good bits were overshadowed by whole sections that didn’t work: Shineflug arduously making her way from one end of the stage to the other by clambering across a rope ladder strung horizontally, while the dancers move in a procession bearing sparklers. Or the angel on roller skates in “Fatima the Spinner and the Tent,” who’s joined by Fatima (Shineflug) herself on skates throwing confetti. Moreover the live music–which was fine in itself, gentle and a little mysterious–however softly played was too loud, threatening to overpower the dancers’ voices. There is too much going on in Sufi Tales, too much that is discordant with the simple, straightforward tone of the tales themselves; in the end I found all I could see were cardboard wings, all I could hear was the whir of roller skate wheels.
