MORDINE & COMPANY
Proximities is a lissome dance set to Brahms’s Serenade in A, all gaiety and good cheer. The dance opens with a solo danced by guest artist Michael McStraw, a solo full of quick little circles of the head, foot, and hand. If Ken Bowen’s sunny lighting and Frank Garcia’s lame-trimmed orange and yellow unitards hadn’t signaled the tone of Proximities, McStraw’s obvious pleasure would have: he thinks the dance is fun and funny, so we do, too.
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At one level, the 1969 Proximities is a museum piece, a faded Polaroid of a strain of postmodernist dance popular then. But while the dance is frankly dated, the company’s performance is not. Their dancing makes sure we notice that Proximities is an easy, breezy dance as well as a relic.
After the dancers turn to us, the game is altered: the gestures are slower, stagier. The only sounds come from the dancers’ game: beat, beat, beat, the silence of the gestures, the slap that follows. The movement empties itself of meaning; it gradually becomes a simple, abstract five-count phrase. The gestures may appear in front of the performers or out to the sides; they may suggest scissors, peace signs, oath taking. The pace picks up again, and suddenly the dance leaps the abstract to the human–the quiet touch of one dancer’s hand on the other’s, an exchange of glances, a moment’s rest.
Like Delicate Prey, Flores y Animales is a beautifully staged dance full of darkness and foreboding, but the new dance moves at a more human, more humane, pace. The two dances show that Mordine has been reshaping her dance vocabulary: phrases in both are shorter, choppier; body shapes are less a matter of fluid lines than sharp angles; the dancers start and stop, tracing abrupt linear patterns instead of huge continuous arcs. In Flores, this new kind of movement combines with Mordine’s powerful sense of dance as theater, creating a dance that is simultaneously accessible and challenging, both abstract and affecting.
Flores reminds me of Merce Cunningham’s Doubles (performed at the Goodman several years ago) for two reasons. Both dances use the simple juxtaposition of choreographer with dancers–not character or narrative–to make abstract movement profoundly affecting. Both dances allow the collateral arts of lighting, costuming, and music extraordinary range and power. Flores seems to coexist with its score rather than deliberately toy with contrasts and convergences of movement and music. (The choreography may well have a more intimate, intricate relationship with its score than I perceived in one performance–I found my attention shifting back and forth, alternately fascinated by one and then the other.) But unlike most of Cunningham’s commissioned scores, Henry Threadgill’s commissioned music (for clarinet, saxophone, trombone, cello, contrabass and drums, performed live last weekend) is something I’d listen to with or without the dancing. Miriam Hoffman’s dip-dyed and spattered costumes–each ranging from neon to neutral–evoke floral, animal, and human images simultaneously. Ken Bowen’s lighting surpasses even his usual high standard.
