LYNDA MARTHA DANCE COMPANY
Company director Martha’s Elements, choreograghed in 1979 and restaged this year, represents the banal, pretty stuff that used to be the company’s hallmark. The dancers enter rolling and stretching; they huddle, reach, and plie. They lie scattered about the space, come to life one by one, collapse one by one, rise again one by one. Though such repetition can be soothing or meditative, in the first section of Elements it is numbing and predictable. Each movement phrase is initiated by a clear musical cue–a change in tempo, a sudden silence, the entrance of a different instrument. (Rick Panzer’s electronic music alternately suggests wind chimes, wind instruments, a windstorm, and assorted drums and keyboards; it’s a score more programmatic than evocative.)
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Cartoons can be irresistible or insipid, depending as it does on the evanescent qualities of a particular performer at a particular moment; its success or failure has very little to do with the choreography. Repeated viewings of Cartoons convince me that what matters is its dramatic success; in choreography so determinedly theatrical, we can tell the dancer from the dance.
