by Leigh Witchel
How do you make an honest dance? Have something to say. It doesn’t have to be a message or a story; it can be an idea. You don’t need a slogan. Just dig into the movement ideas and don’t move on to a new one without exploring fully the ones you have. If you have a story or a message, say what you need to say. Say it again. Don’t stop saying it. Don’t let up.
Fall for Dance’s hyperpopulism doesn’t make it a bastion of honest dances. There’s been an awful lot of dances aiming to give the audience what it thinks you want. That’s OK, once. After two or three programs (or 18 seasons) it starts to wear you down.
Pennsylvania Ballet has rebranded as Philadelphia Ballet, and the company brought “Connection” by Brazilian-born, German-trained Juliano Nunes. A contemporary ballet for five couples, the choreography cleaved to the music like a barnacle to a dock. Every note in an arpeggio got an arm movement or a step. It felt insistent and obvious. Ezio Bosso’s score, mostly piano and strings, sounded like outtakes from a film.
The work, performed in a light haze, started out in a circle with couples or a single dance breaking off. The vocabulary was technical, but with a contemporary mobile torso that felt more like an accent than integral. There was enough unison work it felt overused. At the end of the movement, one man was singled out and pushed. It wasn’t clear why someone pushed him, but it did impel him into a solo of jumps, beats, and virtuoso turns.
After, two men hauled a woman around; one man lifted her, the second crouched and the first deposited her on the second’s back like a parcel. This was followed by another duet where the woman barely hit the floor, but she didn’t look ethereal. The man wasn’t her support, he was her handler.
We’re seeing an awful lot of choreography that explores partnering as woman-as-cargo. Can’t we find ways to use all that technique and the man’s support to heighten her agency and their communion?
The next duet contained more complicated promenades and daredevil maneuvers, all to plangent cello. The score switched at the end to pulsing electronic music with a sudden incandescent lighting change. The mechanical ballet positions also didn’t get developed, the lights brightened to normal and it became a big unison finale. The cast moved back to the circle, fell down, got up and held hands in a line. At the end, the dancers came forward and stared at us. If you hadn’t figured it out by then, that stereotype was the signal that the piece was hollow at the core.
Philadelphia Ballet’s level is high enough that it could make “Connection” look good. The dancers are very technical and well rehearsed. They moved beautifully and sank their teeth into the movement, but beyond virtuosity, they were biting into nothing.
What does “Connection” want to be when it grows up? You were hearing emotion and seeing tricks. If you use emotion as a veneer rather than a motive, it chips and rubs. After a while, you see how thin the coating is.
Micaela Taylor’s The TL Collective are based in Los Angeles, and her “expand practice” takes from multiple influences and asks for dancers to project as much emotion as possible – at least to display it. But except for the different veneer, “Drift” didn’t feel any more honest a work than “Connection.”
“Drift” was performed by four women and one man. Because she’s developing her own style, Taylor is the most unique of them. The soundscape was cobbled together, including a narrator going through a self-help blather about what to do in adversity. If it was annoying, it was also fitting as it tried to sound heartfelt, but just ended up sounding rehearsed.
You could see what Taylor was aiming for with exaggerated emotions most clearly by watching her. With her putty face and timing that pointed up irony and satire, she used the display of emotion as a performance tool. Along with the quick isolations and hip hop, there were a lot of open mouthed grimaces and clenched hands; the cast did the robot, pushing one another out of the way as the soundtrack chugged in a constant nervous pulse.
On Taylor, the irony was more clear. She had the most satiric moment when she danced a grimacing solo to “A Change is Gonna Come” with a crazy focus and timing that called into question that optimism as much as the motivational speaker. It’s a very fine line and the others could do the movement, but they didn’t give you that. And when it wasn’t there, “Drift” felt as mercenary with its material as “Connection,” as if it used emotion and meaning as commodities.
The good news: there was one really honest dance on Program 3. Assistant Artistic Director Conrad Kelly II’s “The Movement” for Step Afrika! was about as honest as it gets, a sustained expression of rage following the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others. There were so many their projected names became a blur. Yet no matter how uncomfortable, inspired or angry it made you, it was still the easiest dance to watch because it was the best made and the least sleazy of the three.
Based in DC, Step Afrika! does stepping, an African American form of stepdancing that developed independently, but has similar stomping footwork to Irish stepdance. It adds tight arm work – claps, feints and punching the air.
Originally performed virtually earlier this year, the work was now performed on a bare stage. The stage was still smoky, but with no intermission, there could have been a production decision that if one dance had haze, they all did. “The Movement” began to a speech by Martin Luther King about the broken promises of America.
That’s a lot to live up to, but “The Movement” didn’t coast on its source material. What we heard and what we saw had no daylight between them: form and meaning slammed together. The dancers dialed the attack of the steps so high and managed to sustain that throughout. You thought they’d have to let up or take a breath, but as we heard from them once again, they couldn’t breathe. The unison squadron format that’s part of stepping became quasi military. An army of protest; its weapons were the shouted chants, claps and stamps. If unison is a bludgeon; this was a dance that called for one. There was plenty to respect in the high level of skill, the honesty and control over the message, and the no-bullshit approach.
Step Afrika! has its own cultural touchstones. A call and response was done as might happen at a meeting or service: “No Justice, No Peace.” At the end of “The Movement” the glares turned into smiles at a curtain call where the dancers did a more lighthearted clap-along. But the dancing earned everything they did.
Dance is an emotional art form. It doesn’t do facts and figures; you can’t put a bar graph on stage. So its greatest arguments are propaganda. “The Movement” is up there with “The Green Table” as a great, honest piece of dance propaganda. Honesty is only sometimes fun. Often, it’s uncomfortable. But it’s almost always a rush. “The Movement” was, as Simone Weil described “The Iliad,” a poem of force.
copyright ©2021 by Leigh Witchel
Fall for Dance Program 3
New York City Center, New York, NY
October 19, 2021
Cover: Step Afrika! in an earlier filmed version of “The Movement.” Photo credit © Jati Lindsay.
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