MORDINE & COMPANY DANCE THEATRE
With three premieres on a program of four works, Mordine is obviously going through a particularly productive phase. Program credits for the new works reflect an interest in collaboration: Thin Ice and Woman Question have been choreographed “with the dancers,” and In One Year and Out the Other is a performance art piece made and performed with James Grigsby. Letting others in on the creative process can be invigorating, but it can also backfire.
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William Russo’s commissioned score for Woman Question is a perfect fit with this six-woman dance about the hobbles and burdens placed on women–often by themselves. His composition for strings and harmonica soloist (Corky Siegel) is both bluesy and classical, timeless and folksy, humorous and mournful–in it we can hear the plainness and high drama of women’s behind-the-scenes lives. Elise Ferguson’s costumes are another matter. What look like dingy white union suits are “embellished” with gimcrackery about the waist and hips: short, stylized hoopskirts, ruffly aprons, corsets, bustles. Though I believe the intent was to suggest turn-of-the-century sartorial chains and their modern counterparts, the effect is hideous–unflattering and comically undignified. I spent the first several minutes of the dance trying to overlook the costumes.
If Woman Question looks at the ways women sometimes sabotage themselves, Thin Ice explores the competition between men that both binds them together and keeps them forever at a distance. Joel Klaff’s costumes recall silky martial-arts pajamas most obviously, and flags more subtly; Richard Woodbury’s score manipulates a small number of sung notes in a subtly varied sequence of hypnotic repetitions; and Ken Bowen’s dark lighting seems to place the dancers in some dusky underwater place.
Everything about In One Year and Out the Other is confining: the small gestures, mostly for the head, arms, and hands; the costumes, which dominate and place the characters; the claustrophobic set; even the snippets of Maria Callas recordings–yes, her voice does soar, but the context forces us to see this romantic flight ironically. This piece is an astoundingly effective portrait of an airless room–but unfortunately the stale room seems to have infected the artists’ treatment of it. There’s a vision here, but it’s a static one; the piece doesn’t evolve, doesn’t ever threaten to break out. And original as it may be to bring a painting to life, when it comes to performance we look for more than animated figures.
