Alexandance’s first full length show, A Vertiable Smorgasbord, is a fascinating glimpse into worlds both funny and fierce.  Presented by Triskelion Arts, choreographers Alex Springer and Xan Burley lay it all on the line in a jam-packed evening of short dances ranging from wittily astute to traumatically effective.     

The gems of the evening are two duets between Burley and Springer themselves. The first, from 2009 entitled Spilt, is a clever window into a marital relationship laced with tension and high romance.  It begins in a mini living room; Burley is in a flowered dress and white jacket, Springer holds her on his lap.  In 50’s era glasses, a sweater vest and a huge grin, he struggles to keep his hand over her mouth. When she finally breaks free, pearls come popping out like little white secrets.

Second, Springer and Burley dance Man + Woman, a duet which skips the trauma of relationships and focuses instead on the awkwardness of the first attraction and the satisfaction of the final moment.  Beginning as running and off-timed flights through space, this dance ends in a totally satisfying kiss.

The darkest piece of the evening, Microfiche, is a no-holds-barred journey through depravity, isolation and trauma.  Five dancers clad in night gowns and white socks dance around, under and through a blue tarp who’s rasping, shifting movement serves as a metaphor for the (not so) hidden pain in all of us.  This dance makes the audience feel just as uncomfortable as the writhing dancers through the use of incredibly loud and grating sound.  The technique is successful, if pain and anger are what I am supposed to feel, but I can’t help but be a tad offended after being made to sit with my hands over my ears for more than 10 minutes.  The point is open for debate…

Whether it is amusement or empathy that we feel in the theater, one can’t help but be excited by the promise of new dance makers like Alexandance in this often formidable city.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  Alexandance
Choreography: Alex Springer and Xan Burley
Venue:  Triskelion Arts
Show Date:  March 27, 2010
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Corella Ballet Castilla y Leon’s weekend at City Center is a ballet feast.  Serving up everything from a tidbit of Swan Lake to an exciting new work from ballet’s newest it-boy Christopher Wheeldon to former ABT stars, Corella’s brand new company shows that it has the mettle to not only bring more ballet to Spain, but to teach us Americans a thing or two as well.

Corella’s own choreography, String Sextet, starts us off on a neo-classical journey through tight shifts in space and fiery technique, best exemplified by the diminutive Kazuko Omori and gangly Joseph Gatti.  She is light and precise in a innovative jeté jump where she is pulled magnetically back to her starting point.  Gatti is youthful, confident, and musical, working well within Tchaikovsky’s mesmerizing score.

However, the most technically exciting of the evening is Herman Cornejo. A former dancer with American Ballet Theatre, Cornejo steals the show in the Black Swan pas de duex.  His jumps are so buoyant, his turns so spot-on that several audible whistles are heard from the balletomanes sitting behind me.  He pulls one pirouette series, ending in such a beautiful plié dévelopé, it makes me shiver.

We first see dancing from Corella himself in a duet for him and his sister Carmen, choreographed by Maria Pages.  Solea is a tribute to Flamenco’s rich history in Spain and Carmen flies through fiery flamencoesque foot work en pointe while Angel slices through jumps with multiple beats.  They trade off and play with traditional flamenco structures and rhythms in a satisfying re-interpretation of the form.  One sees here why Angel has been such an audience favorite for the last decade-plus.  He is a ball of energy, every move bursting with such finesse and charisma, one can’t help but love him.

Finally, Carmen Corella impresses me again as the first soloist in Wheeldon’s relatively new work Danse a la Grand Vitesse.  She is clad, as are the rest of the females, in a leotard with vertical black stripes and nude pointe shoes.  This look emphasizes her already long torso, and as she morphs through Wheeldon’s contorted shapes, she maintains a weird and fluid grace that is transcendent.  I love Wheeldon’s ability to move static shapes through space in a way that questions the resiliency of the human form.  His women are constantly spinning in the arms of their men.  Down is up and up is down in this rocking and energetic new piece.

One hopes that Corella and Wheeldon, two of ballet’s favorite young men, will continue to bring new ballet to the world stage.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  Corella Ballet Castilla y Leon
Choreography: Angel Corella, Christopher Wheeldon, Maria Pages, Leonid Lavrovsky, 
Venue:  City Center
Show Date:  March 19th, 2010
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In a new program at Symphony Space     David Parker and Gina Gibney present an interwoven evening of works that show just how different and yet subtly reminiscent two very distinct contemporary works can be.  For the new series entitled “Short Form Weave,” Parker and Gibney are invited to make works to the music of composer, Ryan Lott that would, in presentation, vibe off the other’s kinesthetic energy.  The resulting dances are presented in delightful tandem, first a section of Parker’s Other Arrangements then a chunk of Gibney’s concrete mechanique and so on, four sections in total, with no intermission. The original sound score is performed live by Lott himself, sometimes appearing with a just a laptop, and sometimes with the music ensemble, yMusic, just behind an opaque scrim.

Watching dances in this format allows for a remarkable game of compare and contrast.  I am struck immediately by both choreographers’ attention to musicality.  Parker likes rhythm…  Like a concert with Bobby McFerrin, his dancers slap themselves and each other; they stamp the floor and interact accompanied by distorted voiceovers to create a mottled fabric of humanistic happenings.  On the other hand, Gibney works with the full ensemble of musicians playing cyclical and dramatic classical sounding music in which she wonderfully mimics each musical movement’s sensibility within her own choreographic structures.  When the ensemble plays arcs and rolling shifts, she gives us leaps and circling partner lifts in canon.  When the score shifts to staccato pulses, her dancers turn their heads sharply from side to side leaning forearms into the floor and flipping their bodies unison.

The resulting emotional life of each work are strikingly different in tone.  Parker has his dancers quickly come in and out of moods dancing wildly and hopping, flailing about but then walking slowly, pausing to look pointedly at one another.  Out of everyone in Parker’s more active section, my favorite is Amber Sloan; fully committed to every movement, Parker’s piece seems tailor-made for Sloan with her noticeably long limbs and perfectly awkward, perfectly weird quirks.  Love her….

In Parker’s final work of the evening, Parker is a delight.  He comes closest to theater when a duet, that begins as a slapping game, progresses into a fun vaudevillian rendition of “Tea for Two,” remarkably well sung by Jeffrey Kazin and Nic Petry.  Although the jokes here are predictable, I sincerely enjoy the rhythmic play in which each man tries to steal the other’s spotlight as well as enjoy the queer reading of the song.

In contrast, Gibney’s work gives emotionality as a starting point with tantalizing texture.  Her dancers, beautiful and very clean, have mastered the controlled, swooping feel of her movements (Joshua Palmer looks exceptionally “on” in his quick shifts between off balance turns and sharp, directed gestures).   At the very end of the second section of Gibney’s work, a long, angst-filled duet winds down into running and circular suspended lifts. The dancers twirl as the music plays elongated and slightly grating chords, and because here Gibney goes against the music’s overwhelming rhythm, the lights quickly fade on a gripping scene still fueled by a fiery disharmony.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  Short Form Weave- The Bang Group and Gibney Dance
Choreography: David Parker and Gina Gibney
Venue:  Symphony Space
Show Date:  March 5, 2010
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José Limón Dance Company performs radiantly with timeless perfection!  Showcasing in New York City at Baryshnikov Arts Center, There is a Time, by Limón, and Rooms, by Limón’s close colleague Anna Sokolow, these two legends offer disparate and compelling visions of the same generation in American dance history, both of which to dancers’ delight still have the power to speak to us today.

The program opens with Rooms, Solokow’s intensely American "masterwork" examining, mostly through short, intense character studies, isolation and fantasy in post-war America.  Thanks to generous funding for this revival, the score, written by Kenyon Hopkins specifically for this piece, is performed to live music played by an ensemble from the Manhattan School of Music. Beginning with a jazzy overture the stage is evocatively set for New York in the 50’s, a hot bed of American Jazz.  Moving into the dance numbers, Sokolow slowly reveals her studiously sparse movement vocabulary in the first section for the company.  All members sit in high backed black chairs, the men in brown pants and grey undershirts, the women in lavender chiffon shirts over long pink satin dresses.  They are each in a separate block of white light.  One woman turns slightly to the left, another slowly arches her face towards the ceiling.  This sets off a chain of tilting bodies, extending arms, and rises to standing that, while quite slow in execution, nevertheless find impact in increasing tempo and deadpan delivery to an ever more dissonant accompaniment.  Although a group choreography, Sokolow titles it and the last full company section, "Alone."

She continues to offer glimpses into the lives of several typically New York characters; the hyper-active jazz cat shaking his snapping fists as he lounges backward over his chair, the dreaming and languid female lover, opening one leg to the ceiling, closing it and rubbing it over the other several times so that pink of her satin under-dress is revealed barely covering her crotch, the desperate young man searching for meaning as he spins in a crouch, head up, arms spread flat out parallel to the floor.

Sokolow’s success in this work comes from her dedication to her limited vocabulary.  Her philosophy might be summed up as, ‘if its worth doing once, its worth doing again.’  But her repetition isn’t simply doing the same again.  She continually shifts the movement against it’s own rhythm, and that of the carefully constructed score, so that movements that might seem quirky, or even flat, gather emotional intensity over time.  The overall effect is a vision of New York, and, by extension, of America, as a collection of lost souls on a doomed search for connection through art, sex, and love.

Limón, on the other hand, offers up a more cheerful vision.  In There is a Time, he choreographs, quite literally, a passage Ecclesiastes, which begins, "To every thing there is a season…" and which most viewers will recognize.  Taken with the text the choreography can seem pedantic, even mime-like, but removed from the obviousness of the words to which it was made, it takes on a dramatic relevance that in totality is quite powerful.

The work is an elaborate circle dance.  Morphed from more pastoral invocations of this folk form, Limón keeps his dancers in vaguely 19th century dress; long skirts for women and peasant shirts for men.  The company begins in a circle, facing inward and lightly swaying from side to side.  The moment is striking which is why he goes back to it as a final image – after we have seem Limón’s dense choreographic overview of the human condition, it moves us again with it’s simple evocation of community.

Full of trademark Limón spinal curves and falling arabesques, as well as drama and joy, this dance showcases the specificity of both Limón’s technique and his dramatic vision.  Men leap through the air, one leg stretched forward, foot flexed, the other tucked up and and underneath the pelvis while the elbows come in front of the body, fists clenched.  It is a virile move, and fits here to present men as fraught, but powerful creatures.  Women are also strong in this vision, but of course in a different manner.  Love, as a flaxen-haired woman in a pale blue dress, brings peace to the warring hordes with a single sweep of her outstretched arms.

My favorite dance of the evening, done by my favorite dancer of the company Jonathan Fredrickson and Kathryn Alter is set to a "A time to keep silence, and a time to speak."  She is a conflicted woman with something to say- she covers her mouth and holds it in either from fear or pride, it is hard to say which through her enigmatic performance.  He is a loud mouth and cocky.  As the company keeps time with hand claps from the sides of the stage, he slaps his thighs, feet and hands on the off beats.  He sweeps a leg through attitude, slapping his knee on the way down, and comes through a deep second position to do it again, all the while maintaining beautifully controlled technique.  As he then reaches to the sky, one leg coming to passé and the other descending into plié, I smile, because it feels just so… Limón.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  Rooms and There is a Time performed by the José Limón Dance Company
Choreography: Anna Sokolow & José Limón
Venue:  Baryshnikov Arts Center
Show Date:  February 10, 2010
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MSF/Doctors Without Borders has been working in Haiti for 19 years, most recently operating three emergency hospitals in Port-au-Prince, and is mobilizing a large emergency response to the Haiti/earthquake disaster.

Can you please help them provide medicine, surgeons, nurses,
and supplies to victims in this crisis?
Click Here to Send a Direct Donation to Doctors Without Borders

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Richard Alston’s newest season at the Joyce is a surprising medley of three works, blending disparate styles into one evening of stirring dance.

Alston, a British choreographer, begins the program with Shuffle it Right from 2008- a very American dance for an American audience. Featuring the early jazz music of Hoagy Carmichael, Alston’s dancers glide and jive through accentuated low turns with bent wrists, floating along then breaking down with little hops- much like a child who can’t conceal his excitement. Alston’s men are made to dance in white pants, shirts, and socks; as they swoop through lunges, they seem even more "cool" and, as they execute Alston’s demanding and precise choreography, one can’t help but applaud their negotiation of such slippery business. The women are in full-skirted dresses with colorful patterns on white backgrounds; immediately one notices their long legs and uniformly well-pointed feet.  Alston’s company is obviously well-trained and dances together beautifully, however, Alston seems to rely rather too heavily on unison.  When he does mix things up, the effect is of a kaleidoscope suddenly shifting, but then, there they are, altogether again.

Following with Movements from Petrushka, Alston loses much of the sophistication he has built in the opening work. This piece, about the parallels between Nijinsky and the famously tortured role he created, pits a solo male dancer against a crowd of Russian revelers. They dance with feet flexed, he writhes in growing agony, clutching his head and waving his arms in speedy circles. He is eventually set upon by the crowd which he repels and pushes to the floor. The work ends with our hero silhouetted against a bright blue backdrop, one hand to his head and the other outstretched.  I very much enjoyed the stage design by Liz Reed who sourced the marvelously creepy images that serve as backdrop from the original Diaghilev production a century ago.

To end, the company presents Blow Over, also from 2008, set to music by Philip Glass.  In by far the most exciting piece of the evening, Alston shows remarkable stylistic variety, creating movement phrases where his dancers are asked to loose the understated sophistication of Shuffle and replace it with an energetic abandonment and flinging of limbs.  Growing from the plodding chorus of "Open the Kingdom" to the whirling duet of "Changing Opinions," Alston and his dancers find freedom to Glass’ pulsing score and haunting pop lyrics.  At one point Alston returns to a preferred grouping of two quartets, one male, one female. The women throw themselves to the floor in splits as the men run and arch backwards in passé. At times like these, his dancers achieve a wonderful recklessness, but too often he staunches it before it can really become ecstatic. It seems that if he could just turn it up a notch all over, he would have had a fantastic piece.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance: Richard Alston Dance Company
Choreography:  Richard Alston
Venue:  The Joyce Theater
Show Date:  January 15, 2010
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A man in a tuxedo takes the stage at Dance Theatre Workshop while the houselights are still up. He welcomes the audience and says that we are going to try an experiment.  He splits the audience into three sections, then instructs us all in the singing of, what else, "Do, a Deer". Instantly I am hooked, and from what I can see, so are those around me.  How rare is it that the audience is all grins before the show even begins?

From there Elkins takes off on a tender modern-dance re-make of the classic musical.  Each song is acted, mimed and danced in Elkins signature blend of pop and lock, breakdance, capoeria, and 90’s modern dance grooves.  Here his style is particularly effective, contrasting sharply with the original Northern European feel which everyone clearly remembers, booty-drops in incongruous places become a consistent joke.

But, his sense of humor goes beyond this easy one-liner and he finds ways to make the movement itself funny in clear short statements that make you laugh out loud.  In the nunnery, Elkins crafts a convent of nuns out of hoodie wearing dancers who all move in beautiful canon, clearly exemplifying the harmony of the original vocal score.  The canon becomes a double joke on the line "How do you catch a wave upon the sand?" when the nuns, joined hand to elbow, pass one of Elkins’ signature ‘waves’ through their linked arms.

Elkins has also gleaned some great comic acting from his troupe of fearless dancers.  Notable for their hilarious duet to "I have Courage" are Donnell Oakley and Meghan Merrill, two of Elkins three Maria’s.  They fight against one another, symbolizing opposite sides of Maria’s personality at this pivotal moment in the story.  Each woman’s dancing is full and fearless but their duet timing is the real draw of this dance.  Nearing the end of the exhausting section, Oakley sits in a disjointed pile next to the effervescent Merrill.  Merrill tips herself into a side-ways downward dog as Oakley crosses herself, dives between Merrill’s legs, bounces her shoulders off the backs of Merrill’s knees and flies off again, only to spring on to the next move.

The supporting cast and guest artists are all in on the joke and perform it with such commitment and energy, I wonder why we can’t do this (funny modern dance) more often.  Get to DTW to catch this show while it lasts.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance: Fraulien Maria
Choreography:  Doug Elkins
Venue:  Dance Theater Workshop
Show Date:  December 17, 2009
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Last Life is an R-rated thrill.  Timothy Haskell’s new fight play, performed as part of the two-week long Fight Fest at the BRICK theatre in Williamsburg, takes a time-hopping journey through a dark and violent world, leaving some viewers invigorated and those more sensitive, myself included, a bit queasy.

Watching Last Life is like watching "Kill Bill," only live.  But, since movie edits don’t apply to stage fights, Last Life must deal with the illusion of violence in other ways. Throughout the show there is a special effects man positioned down-stage right, and, at the proper moments, he runs onstage as the action freezes and wipes blood-red paint onto the actors’ smashed faces, severed limbs, and stab wounds.  At one particularly gruesome moment, he tosses a red and sloppy bundle onstage (brains) just as someone’s head gets smashed in.  Nice.

Last Life’s plot line functions as an excuse for breaking into fight choreography; according to the stagecraft fight world, this is called a "Fightsikall."  Glancing at the program before the show, I learn that the action has been cut and spliced back together out of order, each section labeled Present, 7 Years Ago, 8 Years Ago, etc… But, as I watch the play, there is no way to know when one is. The impression of cause and effect is murky, someone kills someone, then someone kills someone else, and now both parties want revenge… and then something about explosive protein shake.

But of course, as an excuse for fight scenes, it works great.  Every couple of minutes someone is either tortured, beaten, or killed.  The tiny stage at BRICK is kept clear for fights by leaving actors (when not fighting) in chairs across the back.  The dialogue is performed seated and facing the audience, as if looking at the other member of the conversation who is, in fact, seated two chairs down.  Kudos to Aaron Haskell, as SkinFace, who’s spot on timing, even with lines too explicit to repeat here, offered some much needed comic relief, and Jo-anne Lee, who’s screaming Fenrir belied her less than chilling stature. Unfortunately, this minimal movement flattens some of the other speaking moments, but allows the fight scenes to stand out as thrilling, action-packed, frighteningly real vignettes.

As bodies transition from sitting to flying through the air, rolling on the floor, and brandishing knives in no time, I am impressed not only by the intricacy of the action, but by the athleticism of the performers themselves.  This is a brand of choreography that allows absolutely no margin of error.  If you are late, you will get hurt.  Plus, Haskell’s choreography is not suave or understated.  It’s scrappy, and dirty, and loud, lots of stutter stepping and repeated slapping.  I would imagine it takes lots of concentration to look so desperate and stay so, in reality, safe…  Yowzers!

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  Last Life
Choreography:  Timothy Haskill
Venue:  The BRICK Theater
Show Date: December 16, 2009
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What can I say?  I love The Nutcracker.  And the Nutcracker, as performed by Neville Dance Theatre, is a revitalized production full of the magical holiday spirit we know and love.

Growing up in Maine, I fell in love with the Maine State Ballet’s Nutcracker, then watched my peers in Robinson Ballet’s Nutcracker and, most recently, was awed by the height of Nutcracker heights; New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker.

Neville sets her Nutcracker in contemporary Manhattan, (although it seems more like Brooklyn judging from the "view" out the party scene’s window), and she is gratifyingly consistent in the opening act.  The children, mostly girls, get cellphones for Christmas and parents take pictures with digital cameras.  Drusselmeyer and Clara’s father are one and the same, well played by Yasu Suzuki, and rather than scaring the children he plays a game of "find that dance," performing dances from around the world and having the children point to their origin on a world map.  Neville keeps the two dancing dolls, the female version, fairly typical with her red cheeks, wide eyes and pointe shoes.  The male doll is also consistent with the original version of the story dressed in dated all green army fatigues and sporting a wooden gun.  This is the only uncomfortable moment in Neville’s updating of the story.  It feels strange to have such a multi-cultural, modern family festively unveiling a violent toy.  It’s a little chilling.

The story continues in like form; the mice battle is turned into a street fight between clogging NYPD officers and break dancing would-be thieves.  Clara is injured in the fray and, through a little bait and switch "magic," literally leaves her body to journey through the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy.  Unfortunately, this Saturday afternoon, her escort, the Nutcracker, visibly injures himself during their pas de deux, but manages to to finish his part.  Well wishes to Christopher McDaniel… Snow is scaled down due the lack of stage space, but retains it’s magical sheen.  My date is entranced both by the fake snow falling onstage and the real snow outside at intermission! 

The second act delightfully opens in the land of the sugar plum fairy, and we are treated to a modified mélange of dances from around the world.  Spanish is Flamenco dance; Arabian is belly dancing.  The French dancers sport Marie Antionette wigs, and most enjoyably, Tinikling, a traditional Filipino dance with sticks, is performed with all the children.  To finish out the act, the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier perform a pas de duex and a solo each. The choreography here is fittingly traditional, but is a little scary in the pointe work.  Combined with the aforementioned injury, I wonder if it is the floor?

Regardless, no matter if performed at the State Theatre or a tiny (slippery) stage in midtown, The Nutcracker is a classic. I applaud Ms. Neville for her courageous rethinking of a traditional story.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  The Nutcracker, Neville Dance Theatre
Choreography:  Brenda Neville
Venue:  The Howard Guild Theater
Show Date:  December 5th, 2009
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Walking into Ahern’s version of the Brooklyn Lyceum is stepping into a world that has always been.  Ahern structures Sensate like an installation; audience members arrive and leave at any point during a three hour period. One walks into the performance space with no program, only the instructions to move around the space at any point, to sit anywhere, and to get as close to the dancers as one would like.

There being no discernible beginning or end to this dance, one is struck by various impressions which overlap and overwhelm one another.  First, two women in rags, one in very short shorts and the other in a long skirt. They run at one another, pushing each other to the ground, the skirted one gains the upper hand and folds her partner into a ball, then kneads her like dough as she climbs to kneel on top.  On a catwalk in the back of the space, a woman in a long dress, her face to the corner, a man, opposite her with hands curled like fiddleheads, walking very slowly, a woman’s bloody knees as she hangs, upside down, against the wall…

Then, one notices the audience members. Stage lights glint off glasses, footsteps add to the atmospheric score as people shift. There aren’t very many people there, but this creates an interesting dynamic in itself.  You hear something, you turn, and you don’t know whether to expect an audience member or another dancer, appearing out of the woodwork.

Each viewer has a different experience of this work but, from my perspective, the strongest section of this dance is Donna Costello’s arresting solo, performed in a smaller space adjacent to, and above the main room, separated from it by a plane of glass.  Sitting on the catwalk, I can watch Costello shake and fall, punctuating her destructive movement with moments of "dance" moves.  She hops backward repeatedly, waving her arms in front of her face then steps forward and completes three attitude leg raises, front, side, back, bending her torso towards her raised knee.  From my viewpoint, Costello is seen through the plane of glass and the criss-crossed strips of marley, lain onto the bare plywood floor in the main room, are reflected over her body.  As the dance continues in the room where I am sitting, the dancers seem to move over her, worlds colliding, but taking no notice.

Finally, I shift to watch the dance from this smaller room and am involved more than expected.  I am actually hit by the dancer performing here as she rushes by. Her dance is violent, with swinging, jabbing arms, and even before she slams into my legs, I am afraid she is going to punch me.  Yikes!  Luckily she doesn’t.

In this room, I am also illuminated as to the construction of the sparse, apocalyptic score we have been hearing all night.  Anne Hege is singing, live, into a contraption that seems to be made of balsa wood, tape players and a Mac computer.  As she sings she manipulates the tape players and several feet of the actual tape, with the help of an assistant, to distort and loop her voice.  It is quite impressive.

At some point during this last solo, I realize the dance is about to repeat and this knowledge urges me to step out and end my experience.  I realize, on the walk home that I am slightly disappointed now that I know it just starts all over.  I realize, rather than watching the creation of the universe, we are watching what is left after the world has ended.  Sensate is disturbing.

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance:  Sensate
Choreography:  Carrie Ahern
Venue:  Brooklyn Lyceum
Show Date:  November 21, 2009
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Darcy Naganuma’s company, Naganuma Dance, is a collection of beautifully muscled bodies that know how to move.  In their latest show, Nouveau Americain, this weekend at Joyce SoHo, Naganuma brings out all her tricks, b-girling, pas-de-chat-ing, and high-kicking through dissertations on our nation’s troubled state.

The first and strongest piece of the evening, Ameriwho?, opens with a string of spoken and visual responses from the international community to the question, "What is the first thing you think of when you think of America?".  Not many of the answers are positive and Naganuma takes these disconcerting impressions as the jumping off point for her choreography.  Her "New America" is fashionable- dancers are punk-ishly clad in zebra stripes, red, and cut-off jeans, but dysfunctional- they stagger and shake like hot-wired robots between jazzy jumps and turns.  As structure builds and unwinds the dancers are torn apart and glare at one another and the audience.  They take turns mouthing along with the Brazilian girls, "It’s not my fault."  Naganuma’s America, then, is post-Bush.  Struggling to move past the lingering troubles of the last 8 years, but getting sidelined, perhaps, in angst that does more harm than good.

Naganuma’s Box Suite relies on collapsible Ikea storage units for it’s movement invention, and does a great job riffing off comments that America is "A bunch of kinds" with it’s slapstick bumbling (heads inside the boxes) to Rachmaninoff’s very recognizable, "Flight of the Bumblebee."  Naganuma utilizes her dancers’ varied backgrounds by choreographing a hip-hop section starring Sarah Ahn from Hawaii who pulls off some great b- girl moves.  These are translated onto some of the more ballet-bodies in the cast, and morphed into petite allegro steps.  The dancer’s vibe off one another, tossing the boxes, sharing the limelight, and looking like powerful, versatile women.

Throughout the rest of the evening Naganuma expounds on this idea of the New American, finding strong material in her cast’s international background.  America, as we know, is a melting pot and it is great to hear Naganuma’s dancers all speaking in their native tongues.  Whether using a thick Trinidadian accent, German, Japanese, or Jersey slang, Naganuma’s dancers command their voices well, and let us know that they are intelligent people, bringing personal and varied backgrounds to an American dance company.

Finally, Naganuma takes an unexpected turn in the last piece of the evening, Tower. Her dancers are clad in translucent earth tones with the ladies in black bra tops. They speak in a language unidentifiable to me, and seem to be worshipping, murmuring to one another, perhaps cautioning, perhaps urging each other on.  I’m not sure what this work has to do with the rest of the program, although it is, again, great to see these beautiful bodies.

Naganuma finds a gorgeous image to end the evening when Charly Wenzel, a small blonde woman, cradles the much larger Dwayne Brown in her arms.  He almost covers her with his body, but looks into her face for comfort which she gives, in small movements, as the lights fade.  Bravo!

iDANZ Critix Corner
Official Dance Review by Meghan Frederick
Performance: Naganuma Dance Company
Choreography: Darcy Naganuma
Venue: Joyce SoHo, New York City
Show Date:  November 19, 2009
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