AKASHA AND COMPANY
Quartet: A Formal Offering, a premiere by Los Angeles-based choreographer Mary Jane Eisenberg, shows us the work of human existence, what the Bible calls the “labor of love.” The commissioned score by Bruce Fowler is anxious and modern percussion is provided at some points by what sounds like a knife hitting a tin can–but also dramatic and emotional, driving toward resolution. The costumes have a timeless simplicity: the women wear calf-length dresses with camisole tops; the man, pants and a loose shirt.
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As the lights come up, we see four dancers (Anne Kuite, Oliver Ramsey, Margaret Rojek, and Marilyn Tracz) entering from different corners of the stage. They converge in the middle and turn to face the audience, looking at us briefly before beginning the dance. It’s as if Eisenberg were saying, “This is something created, an offering to you. And now the work begins.” The four dance together, then each dances separately–Ramsey and Tracz also perform a duet–and finally all four dance together again, this time in unison.
The stage is dark, we’re waiting, when suddenly we hear a mechanical whir. When the lights come up, we don’t focus on the dancer–she’s on her back with limbs aloft like a baby–but on the contraption she’s lying on: a revolving (what we heard was the motor) circular platform perhaps four feet in diameter.
Perhaps the most interesting questions raised by this piece are whether nature is human, and whether humankind is natural. In the natural world, does natural law–survival of the fittest–reign? At one point a dancer topples onto his back like a helpless bug and is abandoned by the others. Or do animals have an innate altruism? Witness Wade’s nudging another dancer back on his feet with her nose. Ultimately however, to a generation made cynical by Disney’s anthropomorphism, Vastus Sylva is merely clever, and its marriage of the cute (barking seals, for example) with the abstract (the trademark Pilobolus “fungi” look) is un successful. Only when the dancers pile themselves into a very symmetrical, formal heap and raise their eyes to the audience to gaze back at us does the dance come alive. Only then does it escape the insouciant luxury it borrows from the natural world and set the human mind and heart to work.
