THE BRAIN-DEAD CONTESSA: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY SHOWCASE
The most impressive pieces were by choreographers Bob Eisen and Rosemary Doolas. Eisen’s Ten Minutes and Doolas’s Drought and Persona are clearly drawn, carefully styled, and expertly executed. Ten Minutes, a solo dance by Eisen, is at once obvious and completely mysterious. He simply enters the space, sets an egg timer for ten minutes, and then performs a series of enigmatic yet emphatic dance gestures before his allotted time is up.
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Eisen is too intelligent an artist to allow this piece to dissolve into sentimental drivel about the frustration of missed communication or the honesty and primacy of nonverbal language. Rather, the more intense and complicated his body language becomes–and every gesture is performed with virtuoso precision–the more seriously he commits to the act of communication itself, trying to explain some intangible point for all he’s worth. It’s almost as if the dancer were working through some very complicated problem in his head, in a charmingly personal and tantalizingly ambiguous process that unconsciously infuses his whole body. All the clues are there–carefully articulated hand gestures, intense facial expressions, clearly delineated movement phrases, sudden silences–but those clues refuse to reveal anything but their own status as clues. In a sense, Ten Minutes ingeniously shows us how a body can mean rather than what a body can mean.
Persona, a work in progress, joins these same three women with two others, Christina Brake and Ellen Cook; they bounce around the stage like startled penguins. Their bouncing stops only when they become inexplicably intrigued by the most uninteresting of events: they all stare with great interest as two dancers find their feet moving in unison. Throughout all of this a rather smarmy-looking man in black (Carlos Mercado) skulks about the stage, preening in a mirror. His connection to the piece seems tenuous at best, and eventually you just stop paying attention to him. Though Persona is clearly unfinished, its images show an intriguing evolution of the images in Drought.
The other offerings left me cold. Krista Willberg’s Get Back is a completely tame, jazzy dance piece that meanders nowhere despite the best efforts of its three talented dancers, Jamie Alagna, Lezlee Crawford, and Herron. Live jazz also found its way into the evening, played on the piano by Bradley Parker Sparrow and sung by Joanie Pallato. Though I’m not qualified to judge their musicianship, they certainly seem to have an Attitude.
