CHOREOGRAPHERS SAMPLER
The sampler is supposed to offer its choreographers feedback–a discussion with the artists follows each performance. Even more important, it gives them the chance to stage a work they may still be mulling over. Not that there was anything unpolished about this evening–the dancing, lighting, music, and costuming were all remarkably finished. But the sampler is a genuine middle ground between fooling around in one’s studio and mounting a full evening of works.
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In Venus Rogues, Amy Osgood sets out to do nothing less than go behind the facade of Botticelli’s Venus. What does it mean to pose as a goddess? And, by the way, what expectations do all women face, laboring, as Yeats said, to be beautiful? Yet Venus Rogues is no feminist polemic: it turns its subject inside out in a way so delicate and unexpected that the viewer sometimes loses track of the choreographer’s point of view.
It’s part of the strength of this piece that the viewer’s sympathies remain with the Venuses, not with their angry questioner. They seem like children being attacked for their innocent wish to please–their joint wish, with the artist, to reproduce “spring, bloom, our vision.” Later in Venus Rogues Osgood makes clear the limitations, the lies, and even the torture implicit in this vision of women–“bloom” to some means youth, for instance, and no one has that forever. But Osgood also makes us hold onto the grain of truth in this vision of women–as creatures of nature, who have a natural solidarity.
I once said Saner is no dancer. I take that back–he’s just not your everyday dancer. Large and powerful, with ropy arms and a sharply chiseled head, he moves with an unfinished grace and energy that are unique. His big, lumbering, airborne motions are often confined to a small space–he leaps up and tumbles to the floor in one spot over and over. In this piece he dances with his brother Marlin Saner (who also wrote the music for The Box and played the piano and other instruments in it), and that’s a treat. Marlin, somewhat smaller and more delicate than his brother, shares his gift for loose but powerful movement. And they work together, well, like brothers. They take turns rocking each other off their feet, and Marlin performs an astonishing backward leap into his brother’s arms. It’s a revelation of the trust and intimacy possible between men.
