by Leigh Witchel
Craft is predictable. It relies on following models that work. Battery’s Dance Festival’s indoor performance, the final program after a week of outdoor performances, featured five dances, each of which followed well-established models.
Battery Dance, which has hosted the festival for 41 years, unfortunately could not perform, but the five remaining dances, including acts from Denmark, the Netherlands and Québec, provided a full program.
Man is a social animal. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Omar Román de Jesús looked at both these familiar ideas in “Los Perros del Barrio Colosal” for the group Boca Tuya. The first dancer entered from the house, stepped onto the stage, and howled. To Latin music, a septet of dancers wearing jackets and pants for respectability worked in unison, punching and tightly spasming, growling and making other canine noises.
The cast attacked the choreography energetically, throwing themselves into the unstable balances and attacking one another like dogs, civilization and balance itself among the many things the work questioned.
The score changed to a Liszt piano adagio and the group formed a drunken line. One person stepped out from the line for a tableau, a familiar idea that was used effectively. To conclude, the cast ran in a group, except for one, loping round behind. The expectation was that he would begin a solo, but another woman came in for a final howl breaking that assumption wittily.
Based in Denmark, Julienne Doko brought her solo “Lost Memories (Mémoires Perdues)” for its United States premiere. Doko also began by entering from the house and walking onto the stage.
Done to spoken word, the solo used a contemporary African vocabulary and was largely free-form or acting out what was said. A voice-over admonished, “Until the lion learns to speak, the tale will always glorify the hunter.” The text was a litany: “Racism, sexism, chauvinism. All the isms. Explain diversity until your eyes pop out.” Or “The sea is history. The sea is herstory. The sea is theirstory.”
As urgent as the message was, Doko’s solo didn’t tell us anything we haven’t been told. A lot. If “herstory” has made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race, it can be considered familiar wordplay. The work’s sincerity also got delivered in the form of a lecture rather than a conversation. It was both tempting and easy to tune it out, and was that the point?
Familiarity can breed contempt when you’re trying to convey a message, but in comedy, familiarity is your ally. The Dutch group TeaTime Company brought the US premiere of “Stick-Stok,” a trio that fell somewhere between new circus and new vaudeville.
Pieter Visser came onstage with three poles in graduated size precariously balanced on his neck and shoulders that he laboriously tried to balance into a pyramid. The problem was he had three poles and only two arms. Just as he figured it out, Bavo de Smedt entered and stole one of the poles.
After a struggle, Hannah Rogerson appeared at the side. After a hilariously tense moment, they all raced and grabbed a single rod. From here, there was less conflict and more cooperation; Rogerson stood on Visser’s shoulders, both de Smedt and Rogerson balanced on the rotating pipes in different tricky configurations.
Another familiar joke that played well; Visser, who was tallest, rotated with the pole on his shoulder. It cleared Rogerson every time, but de Smedt had to duck. The piece ended as they raced and in a feat of sleight of poles, managed to place them in one last balanced sculpture, like enormous pick up sticks.
“Stick-Stok” relied on the simplest and most familiar comic structure imaginable – straight out of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton: Present a goal. Introduce an obstacle. Hilarity ensues.
Dallas Black Dance Theater brought “Face What’s Facing You!” choreographed by company member Claude Alexander III. A large cast work with 14 dancers, it was impressive that it fit comfortably on the Schimmel stage. The entire cast was deployed in three rows for a big unison opening.
As the title suggested, the piece was about overcoming adversity and it trod a familiar path. A group raced to form a line down the stage before walking off to leave Hana Delong alone, who clutched her head as three agitated women observed her.
Delong danced with Alexander; she collapsed, returned to him, fought him off. A circle surrounded her – much of the work was structured as an individual or couple against the group. Finally, everyone raced across the stage as Delong slowly walked off.
“Face What’s Facing You!” took its approach to adversity sincerely and predictably. The dancing was great. Elijah W. Lancaster, who danced with Ailey II earlier in the year, just joined this company and did countless turns. The theater was small enough that you could hear the dancers’ sharp breath intake as they hit a pose.
Compagnie Virginie Brunell, from Quebec (Quebec), closed with “Les Corps Avalés” (Swallowed Bodies), also a U.S. Premiere. This was an excerpt from a full-evening work done in Montreal accompanied by a string quartet; here the music was recorded. The selections weren’t credited, but you knew you had heard them.
“Les Corps Avalés” was just as angst-ridden as the piece before it, but angst was more ambivalent coming from Montréal than Dallas. Seven dancers in street clothing began by slowly moving, then picking up the tempo. They spasmed tightly in place, or wiped their faces as the strings played in a nervous ostinato.
The music paused as the dancers stood breathing heavily, then a series of futile embraces: people first embraced thin air, then the others who rejected or slipped away from them. They formed a continuously replacing line – one of the more familiar tropes in the evening.
The meat of the excerpt was a duet for a woman and a man. He backed out slowly as she spread her arms wide, then finally raced into her with a shocking, explosive jump that would have been effective no matter how many times we saw it.
Holding him parallel to he floor in her arms, she grabbed and rotated him. Her overhand grasp made it arrestingly possible to rotate him as if he were being roasted on a spit, but it was also precarious, and seemed as if he could slip to the ground at any point. To close, he dragged her before they walked off together, but ending with the duet felt like a bleeding chunk rather than a complete thought.
Familiarity is also bloodlines. You could see the influences on many of the works or companies: Alvin Ailey on Dallas Black Dance Theater. De Jesús had a varied career, including at David Parsons Dance Company and Ballet Hispaníco. Brunelle seemed to be marinated in Québec dance theater including Marie Chouinard.
At their least inspiring, a few of the works felt like composition projects from a good college dance program. But each was solid, well made, and familiar. The question was which of the works could break through the familiarity to become memorable.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Los Perros del Barrio Colosal,” “Lost Memories (Mémoires Perdues),” “Stick-Stok,” “Face What’s Facing You!” “Les Corps Avalés”– Battery Dance Festival
Schimmel Center at Pace University, New York, NY
August 20, 2022
Cover: Bavo de Smedt and Hannah Rogerson in “Stick-Stok.” Photo credit © Steven Pisano.
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