PAUL-ANDRE FORTIER
Lane Alexander
With the poetic compression of Doris Humphrey’s Day on Earth, this dance covers the course of the man’s life, as he discovers the shape of his small world, paces its length, tries to escape it, rebels against it, despairs, accepts his small world, loves it, and is buried in it.
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Fortier’s performance was the first of four in the Dance Center’s New World/New Art ’92 festival, which continues through November 14.
Alexander seldom falls back on a tapper’s bag of tricks, however, and visual effects and showmanship take a backseat to musical clarity. When a rhythm repeats, Alexander may use different steps to create it. He invents new steps, such as a double turn in which his foot sneaks out to make a single tap on an offbeat. Alexander is as likely to leap into a tap, an unusual move, as he is to slide to the side with a big flourish–an old-fashioned tapper’s move. And whatever the steps, Alexander is always exactly on the beat. Altogether this was a generous, virtuoso performance.
