MOMING COMMISSIONS: NEW WORKS BY JAN ERKERT AND AMY OSGOOD
Erkert and Osgood both make dances with a distinctly postmodernist slant. They very often choose movement that makes their dancers look just like the rest of us–walking, running, rolling, reaching, falling. No movement is automatically disqualified just because it’s ugly, ordinary, or strange. The choreographic structures that shape their dances–the repetitions, the canons, the reversals–stay close enough to the surface for us to feet we know what’s going on. Their dances aren’t occult but open and inviting.
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In Antigamente, Erkert renders the familiar altogether strange. Set on Juli Hallihan, an uncompromisingly straightforward dancer, the movement is at once simple and artful. Hallihan crosses the stage several times, leaping, sliding, pausing, rolling, and pausing again; but with every cross the movement is heightened–more extreme, more dramatic. Pauses become balances, balances become turns. The score veers from the contemporary–a quiet, ominous composition by Kevin Volans–to the Renaissance–“Missa Pastores Quidnam Vidistis,” sung by the Tallis Scholars. The set–leaflike piles of crumpled paper washed in eerie, changing light (designed by Tom Fleming)–and the fluttering, ragged umber costume (designed by Winston Damon) intensify the dance’s otherworldly air.
Set on Mary Johnston-Coursey, Judith Mikita, and Jane Siarny, Journal starts, stops, and starts over again. The dance pulls the audience into the choreographic process–we see a phrase, see it lengthen, see it again in a duet–instead of offering a polished, finished product. Journal is an entirely self-aware dance, a gentle poke at the conventions surrounding performers, theaters, and audiences. Journal is joyous, sensuous dancing, too.
Osgood’s The Other Comes to Be Light, also a commissioned work, creates the same impression of immediacy and rapport. The first three sections of this duet are danced to poems (“Oranges” by Ronald Wallace, “Lines on a Tenth Anniversary” by Arthur Smith, and “In the End We Are All Light” by Liz Rosenberg), and the dancers’ highly gestural movement is as artfully edited, pointed, and telling as poetry. Images in the movement and the text unspool in tandem, but neither is subservient to the other; they resonate rather than illustrate. As the taped narration describes the sensuous pleasure of savoring each bit of an orange, Bill Dietz revels in slow leg stretches. When the text describes an old man carrying his wife’s handbag, onstage Dietz carries Susan Richter-O’Connell balled up against his chest. (Her feet flex and point as the narrator describes the small gold clasp snapping open and shut–a moment characteristic of Osgood’s wit.) The three scenes, which embody different stages in human relationships, suggest that there’s a great deal of meaning in the way ordinary people wash windows and visit their doctors as well as in the way they make love, over and over again, in the course of an ordinary life.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Paul Boucher.
