ECHOES AND MIRRORS: NEW DANCES BY MAGGIE KAST AND LEIGH RICHEY
Kast’s choreography is quiet and gentle. Like a soft-spoken person whose near whisper forces you to listen intently, Kast uses soft, flowing movements that challenge you to follow them. Especially in the last dance on this program, Vienna, she seems to give in to the movement, falling into the phrases, almost flowing into them like water into a glass.
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Kast and Richey both speak during Dance Without Warm-up. Kast begins alone, stating that after 50 years of warming up so she can move her body in ways neither God nor Mother Nature ever intended, she decided one day to skip ballet class and create a dance without warming up. “This would be a dance I could do anywhere–on a subway, in a neon-lit nightclub in Shanghai, where I was once asked to do a dance as part of an exchange between Chinese and Western dancers. I could do it in whatever I had on, after riding all day in a bus, after a heavy meal . . . ” This is a true effort to create a universal dance.
Kast gives Richey’s Terra Firma Air her emotional all–when she brings her hands in toward herself, then brings them back out imploringly, she seems to be drawing emotion out of herself in a mute appeal to the viewer to understand. Kast, who’s had solid white hair ever since I first saw her in the 70s, creates a dramatic effect when she dons a long, loose white poncho/robe over her short, fringed multicolored tunic.
The dance’s final note is a violent, destructive, defiant one–the dancers circle the table repeating those last lines, ripping a page out of the newspaper on the table with each round, crumpling it, and throwing it to the floor. It’s at once a dance about regret and the wish for expiation–a yearning to go back–and about the realization that going back is impossible. That place no longer exists, nor does your former self. The waltz of life goes on–gently, softly, but relentlessly–much as Kast’s creative life has over the years.
