NEW FORMS/CHANCE DANCE FESTIVAL
When a dancer hits middle age, everything begins to harden. The joints begin to calcify, setting permanent limits on their, and the dancer’s, movement. The once-exhilarating activity of making and performing dances starts to seem routine, and threatens to become rote repetition. In response many creative dancers throw themselves into technique–perfecting their particular way of moving. The victories are often hard for audiences to see except as a kind of glow the performance gives off.
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What to Do Till the Doctor Comes illustrates Buckley’s established comic style. Five dancers (Lauren Helfand, Christi Munch, Toby Lee, Carrie Hanson, and Heather Sultz) walk onstage and arrange themselves in two rows in front of a pregnant woman (dancer Linda Levine) as if to entertain her. Their energetic dance, with loosely swinging arms and legs and feet slapping the floor, looks like an aerobic tap dance in sneakers. The dancers pause and the “music” for the next section starts–a square-dance caller explaining, then calling a dance. The performers re-form their lines and start a faster, more intricate dance that ends with Sultz being held upside down by her ankles and passed from one couple to another in a square dance from hell. What to Do is funny and charming, but it doesn’t have much depth.
It’s not so much that Buckley makes a breakthrough in The Grave Digger as that he finds a new way to approach his technique. The broad comedy of What to Do Till the Doctor Comes gives way to a more detailed, delicate comedy–Charlie Chaplin rather than the Marx Brothers. Buckley’s tragic moments, like Chaplin’s, can be tinged with bathos; but as long as Buckley does not become Woody Allen and take himself too seriously, all should be well.
The middle solo was actually a duet Eisen performs with a television set showing the same dance he’s performing. It’s filled with clever visual contrasts, such as Eisen crossing the stage in a skirt while the character on TV crosses in ski mask and field-hockey leg guards. Eisen uses the television medium in a simple, natural way–perhaps the best use of a TV I’ve seen in dance. This solo is clever and aims for lightheartedness, but it’s woven with darker-hued threads.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jennifer Girard.
