NEW DANCES ’90
Melissa Thodos uses props. In her very first piece, the 1987 Reaching There (to be replaced on this weekend’s program by a new work by Barbara Stein), she uses a large cylinder, about chest height, rolling herself on top of it and inside it. In her new work, Corner Pocket, she uses pool cues, which call up a whole culture, an attitude, a characteristic way of moving. Somehow we don’t associate the pool hall with sensitive male-female relations–it’s a masculine environment women enter at their own risk.
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In fact, sexist assumptions are the bedrock of Corner Pocket, though Thodos turns the tables on men a bit: her trio is made up of two women (Christine Bornarth and Tina Morrocco) and one man (Carl Jeffries). And she has a field day with the cue’s Freudian connotations. All three want that pool cue badly; they pursue it relentlessly, snatching it away from one another. But Thodos also uses her prop in unexpected ways–a cue held between two people keeps them at a distance, but it also connects them. Moreover the cue provides visual and kinesthetic interest–it’s an extension of the dancer’s body, particularly of the arms, and we can easily imagine the cue’s heft and force and how it would feel to the touch. So when the man holds the point of the cue to the back of one woman’s neck and pokes her forward with it, cultural and psychological associations and imagined physical sensations come together in a particularly expressive way.
Gongora also choreographed a piece for this concert, Come Pile, a likable dance for six (Amy Alt, Sara Ayers, Hector Cruz, Dawn Herron, Louis Miller, and Sabine Parzer). The driving score, by Doug Wagner, occasionally includes children’s voices, whose high-pitched claims and quarrelings make a piercing descant. The dance’s real calling card, however, is its quirky movement, more original than any other on the program. Gongora makes special use of quizzical sidewise looks at the audience. Sometimes he surprises us with an oddly held head, as when the dancers perform a high, circular kick, holding their arms up stiff and high–and look down. Another surprise comes when the dancers, lying face down in a diagonal row across the floor, leap up briefly one after another, like piano hammers flying up to strike at invisible strings.
Until about three-quarters of the way through there’s no accompaniment but the sounds the dancers make themselves (except for a brief, faint snatch of music, more imagined than heard). Then we hear Winston Damon’s brief score, with a kind of East Indian sound that’s somehow both mysterious and comical; it ends before the dance does. At some point I realized that I had been waiting for the music to start, assuming that the dance would “really” begin once the music did. Wrong, of course; it’s as much dance before and after the music as it is during.
