AKASHA DANCE COMPANY
Dancers like these can persuade us to swallow almost anything, even persuade us that they aren’t dancers at all but plants and animals. In Ginger Farley’s A Beastie Piece (1985), the dancers are creatures of fantasy–a whacked-out ballerina in frothy pink, a Napoleonic figure sporting three shiny red horns, and a quirky character in what seems to be a 1920s bathing costume. In Joseph Novak’s Pas de Plant (1979, rechoreographed 1989), the dancers are an iridescent palm tree and a cat. In Austin Hartel’s Vastus Sylva (1986), they’re a changing menagerie.
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The Tom Waits score for A Beastie Piece tells us that “there’s a lot going on underground,” but there’s not an equivalent amount going on onstage. In the first two sections, the men–Rob Lane and Oliver Ramsey–get all the exciting choreography: the odd jumps, the quick entrances and exits, the bent wrists and flexed fingers. The woman, Elizabeth Wild, gets in on the action only occasionally, but she does get all the camp–pursed lips, raised eyebrows, the silent movie “Ooh! I can’t look!” look. In the brief third section, the trio cuts loose in unison movement that emphasizes their three contrasting body types and subtly different choreographic phrases; they wear pastel-spattered white unitards and are finally freed of the beginning’s shtick.
Dances that deal with human relationships, manners, mores, and character–even just by implication–are more substantial, satisfying fare. Of the nine sections in Martin Kravitz’s The Once Not Remembered (1984), the three duets treat three of the innumerable ways that people can dance together; we read the duets as metaphors for human interaction.
