DANCE & MORE FOR $1.98
It’s the same with MoMing’s “Dance & More for $1.98”–though I didn’t suffer often during this engaging and frequently funny evening. This year the venerable annual showcase features 19 works by 15 neophyte choreographers and “others” (who produce the “more”). The performance lasts only a couple of hours, and you can’t beat the price–less than a third of what you’d pay for a movie.
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The attraction of an evening like this is in seeing how well the artists accommodate themselves to the form: the problem is to make a small thing not only complete but varied. Some of the most successful pieces here worked within self-imposed limitations. Perhaps the most richly textured of these was Colleen Halloran’s SWF (Single White Female). Halloran uses an old chair, an old phonograph player, and an old scratchy recording of Lulu’s “To Sir With Love” to set the mood, but this solo gets its real color and strength from Halloran’s clever, biting monologue and her odd, itchy way of interspersing movement and talk. She’s a wonderful comedian, raucous and hostile and vulnerable; she also heightens and stylizes body language, cracks visual jokes (a reference to White Castle burgers entails a big slide across the floor), and smokes a cigarette more eccentrically than anyone else I’ve seen. But the work’s depth comes from the moments when Halloran withdraws–when she takes a slow, silent, inward walk, or writhes on the floor in a private reenactment of a bad dream or a worse experience.
It takes guts for a young artist to produce a long work of pure dance for several performers. Todd Michael Kiech showed considerable ambition and promise as a choreographer in A Square Dance, though it suffered by its placement on the program: coming after Jeanette Welp’s free-for-all A la la la la, its boisterous but controlled movement looked stiff and stagy. But Kiech shows a real gift for contrasting the movements of different groups onstage. The second half of A Square Dance is particularly suggestive: to the buzzing insect sounds of a summer night, a man and woman dance together while the other four dancers “sleep” downstage, gently rolling, their bodies silent but murmuring. The duet is athletic but also occasionally quiet and evocative–the man and woman, facing each other, by turn gently touch a foot behind the other’s knee. It ends with the woman repeating one of the sleepers’ gestures: she lies on her back, and slowly her index finger and then her arm point straight up–grow magically and naturally erect, like a plant–and collapse, in a movement that seems as involuntary and inevitable as an erotic dream.
That leaves Douglas McMinimy, whose six short pieces, interspersed with the other works, feature poetry by Stevie Smith. From what I can recall of Smith, she has a deceptively flat-footed style with a jazzy, ironic edge (she wrote the lines “I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning”). McMinimy–who has trained as an actor as well as a dancer and who recites all the poems himself, either standing or moving about–successfully captures those qualities. But his declamatory, formal, almost 19th-century style of recitation jibes oddly with the interpretive movement. And would he have changed his style if he were reciting another poet? I found this performer’s bold, lacquered manner and quizzical “cute” looks at us (were they meant ironically?) offensive even as I admired the effort to reinterpret Smith’s poetry.
