MORDINE & COMPANY DANCE THEATRE
A culture that values women primarily for their youth and beauty pressures a female choreographer and performer, especially one who reaches creative maturity sometime after 35, to reassess her role in creating and performing dances. She may continue to perform as before, inviting criticism of her changing body and physical prowess (or, if she’s Martha Graham, eliciting wonder at the sheer force of her unique performance persona). She may continue to make dances as before but stop performing in them–as in Mordine’s 1990 Subject to Change (revised and restaged for this season). She may make dances that exploit the contrasts in body and performance style between herself and a company of younger dancers–as in Stream of Recollection. Or she may seek a form more congenial to experienced performers than mainstream modern dance–like Here and There, the performance work Mordine created in collaboration with James Grigsby, with set and costumes by Frank Morreale and score by Richard Woodbury.
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No sooner does this central character (Mordine, but last Saturday Paula Frasz) approach the family group than it disappears. She finds herself alone in a small, warmly lit area of the stage: she balances and turns, limbs extended and bent, hands moving quickly against the air; but this large, purposeful movement covers very little ground. She disappears behind a heavy, black velvet curtain hanging center stage, and shortly reappears in a small dimly lit area beyond it (Ken Bowen designed the set and lighting).
In the course of the dance they strip away their costumes, revealing flesh-colored leotards and tights. The change in clothing emphasizes a change in the choreography: the complex spatial patterns, the small groups dissolving and resolving, eventually coalesce in unison movement; the proffered hand lingers, and is accepted. Stripped of their uniforms, their public personas, the dancers are able to relate, to move together. But the dance’s final and lasting image evokes alienation, not connection: one dancer slowly collapses onto his back in a pool of light downstage, the others, ranged about the scaffold, aloof and gazing down at him. Perhaps our private selves aren’t really subject to change.
