by Leigh Witchel
Wendy Osserman has been making dances since before you were born. Her newest, “Undermine,” is inspired, as she states in her release, by the “current political turmoil.” It formed a watercolor of an evening that showed more than it told.
Two men and three women, as well as Osserman, made up the ensemble, augmented by two inventive musicians, Skip La Plante and Concetta Abate. Four dancers entered to the scratching of violins. Joshua Tuason, a long-time member of Stephen Petronio’s company, entered, dressed like a penitent. His outfit, a rough brown cloth, seemed to be cut from a bolt with a hole for his head. He slowly spun round the perimeter of the small, square dancing space.
Something was disturbing, but not something specific – more of a disturbance in the force. The other dancers were impelled into motion; loping and reaching, then coalescing into a group that traveled unsteadily to the diagonal. They looked out at us wide-eyed. Then they tipped back, bumping into one another and violating each other’s space, falling to the ground.
They lay there on their sides, racing in place like dogs having running dreams. Getting up, they began to take flight into jumps and swirls. The cast reached up and fell, some stiff like corpses, others sprawled like restless sleepers. Finally they all stumbled on a diagonal to a slow collapse.
The uncertainty was clear, the cause – not so much. Gary Champi tossed restlessly as Lauren Ferguson lay on her back. She slowly stretched her leg up like the feeler of a praying mantis. They wandered separately the perimeter of the space until they touched. He clutched her and fell. The other two women entered, posing like gnarled trees.
The show bridged worlds – both musicians were stationed stage right with an assortment of improvised and traditional instruments; the sounds from them recalled both bharatanatyam and gamelan. The evening bridged formalities as well. Elegantly gaunt and silver-haired, Osserman watched the show from the front row at first. Then she got up and walked without ceremony right past the fourth wall on to the stage. In silence, she reached to the ground, shading her eyes, and wandered uncertain and unsteady with her arms splayed.
Dance sections didn’t end with exclamation points, question marks or even periods. Sometimes they ended with trailing ellipses. We knew a section had ended because the lights went out, and that it was intermission because they came on.
After the break, there was a series of duets. Ferguson and Emily Vetsch circled one another. One of them was pulled into motion by her arm racing ahead of her. She dove between her partner’s legs, worrying her partner with frantic hands. The other just stepped away to pick her up and flip her over by her legs.
Champi and Cori Kresge emerged from opposite corners and slowly circled and moved past one another, stepping as if drugged or sleepwalking. They came close enough to embrace but spun away.
La Plante played wood blocks as if they were a marimba while Champi and Kresge sped up. The two raced and flailed in fleeting connections. Finally Kresge nervously felt Champi’s leg and climbed on to his back, grabbing him as the lights dimmed.
Tuason reentered in a loose, flowing coat: lunging, reaching, balancing and walking with arms like divining rods drawn to the floor. Champi entered; again, the dancers met with a wary circling until they touched. Their dancing together was more martial; one carried the other or tossed him off his back into a roll. They leaned against one another but not for support: more in each other’s space as if they were competing for a seat on the subway. Champi cradled Tuason and brought him to the floor but then the lights went out and “Undermine” was over, moving right into “Udjat,” a work from 1985 that was presented as if it were a coda to the later work.
The three women replaced the two men in a more austere setting. In side lighting, the trio wore black; their hair held back severely and secured by a black band. The vocabulary in the two works was similar: the trio posed to open, one woman was supine, another held a third upside down. “Udjat” was made up of sculptural, slow reaches and tumbling. Crouched over, the women walked as one creature towards the side lights They separated and whirled, with their arms held wide, then formed a totem that held still as the lights went out. It could have been from Nijinska’s “Les Noces.”
The sonorous music, by La Plante and Abate, played on everything from violins to refrigerator bins, was a huge asset. Osserman didn’t do theses or conclusions; her work felt more like a landscape than a journey. Each vista was nicely framed, but the individual sections were similar enough that the whole felt weaker than the parts. The lack of build made a long work feel longer.
Osserman may have been inspired by current events, but she’s a timeless rather than topical artist, and perhaps that’s why she has lasted so long. “Undermine” didn’t feel like a meditation on our times. It had the shifting, crepuscular feeling of something you caught a glimpse of in half-light, down the hall, reflected in a mirror.
copyright © 2018 by Leigh Witchel
“Undermine,” “Udjat” – Wendy Osserman Dance Company
Theater for the New City, New York, NY
March 14, 2018
Cover: Wendy Osserman in “Undermine.” Photo © Steven Pisano.
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