by Leigh Witchel
Ballet Collective’s tenth New York season, “Fluidity of Time,” was – as always – uncommon, unusual and elegant. And this isn’t a backhanded insult, classy.
Also as always, the source work for its new dances was a work of art. Once again, as always, you didn’t need to know this. It mattered more to the process than the product.
The company inaugurated the performing space at Trinity Commons, which we reached by walking across the Trinity Church grounds, including stepping over gravestones. The performing space was in a modern building reached by a bridge crossing above the street to a lovely open space of wood, set up like a studio.
There was a sprung floor in the center and shallow rows of seats on three sides. It felt like being inside the saloon of a large ship. The evening had the feel of a party on a yacht, including a security detail beforehand.
The evening was split into two works, the first by Bryn Cohn, a contemporary choreographer who directs her own group, Bryn Cohn + Artists, and the second by Artistic Director Troy Schumacher.
In her program note, Cohn saw “The First and Last Light” as a migration of strangers through both space and time. Her source was a lighting installation by Olafur Eliasson, “The Weather Project.” She used a recorded score by Alex Somers that sounded deliberately distorted. The dancers were dressed by Lauren Starobin in loose, iridescent costumes and wore thin socks as footwear. To start, everyone assembled slowly on a diagonal, some women on the men, including Megan LeCrone on Lorenzo Pagano’s shoulders, another woman on the other man’s back.
The dancers swayed. This was a group with a different makeup than usual; only LeCrone was in New York City Ballet. Like Pagano, several dancers were from Martha Graham Dance Company (Schumacher had done a work there in 2019). Jada German had recently danced with Twyla Tharp.
Cohn’s phrases looked different than Schumacher’s. Her palette had some classical movements but was more contemporary: spasming motion and intermediate positions. And this group was made up of dancers who could work in the zone between schools.
The others left, leaving German to do a solo. She explored the space in the angled light. “The First and Last Light” didn’t have a front and a back; the space felt fully used. Graham Feeny and Pagano returned, one leading the other. At the end of German’s section, she walked into the two men, who briefly barred her before letting her and LeCrone pass, as they exchanged places.
It was LeCrone’s turn for a trio with the men, the men passing her dreamily from one to the other. She had changed into pointe shoes. That’s a sign of changing times; it is now more common even than it was 20 years ago for women to change into and out of pointe shoes during an evening, even within the same dance.
LeCrone exited from the opposite side, leaning this way and that as the men reached back towards her, then left. Two women performed a duet in a corridor of blue light, walking it like a tightrope as the corridor kept reforming along the perimeter of the space.
LeCrone returned, still wearing pointe shoes. She rose to pointe and shivered elegantly. The lights came up on a quartet who again paced a tight square of light at its boundaries, reaching to one another. The four resonated back and forth, looking up with their hands above them as if to shield them from something falling. It felt as if space were collapsed more than time, or perhaps that time was treated as if it were space. It was the boundaries that were meant to be confusing.
German and LeCrone returned to rejoin the group, with LeCrone back in socks. Cohn’s movement was free, but often in a crouch as if the straight axis of a classical torso were melted. The dancers looked to all corners; the music turned to a steady beat as they jumped and grouped, lifting one another. The work ended suddenly with a blackout on a lift.
Even though we stayed still, “The First and Last Light” had the panoramic feel of a group in a pause not just in time, but space. There was brief respite before resuming a trek, but the question was not when would we continue, but where we were.
An interesting work, “The First and Last Light” was also a point on the continuum of how dancers are training and performing. We were looking, as we often do, at a work composed for dancers who could do both ballet and modern technique. Which discipline was moving to the center?
Schumacher’s work, “Forest of Shifting Time,” was completely different, bristling with conceptual energy. It had complicated visuals designed by Doug Fitch, live music and a hint of a narrative. A wind quintet played at the back, and the dancers entered dressed in high tube-like structures as fantastically striped . . . tree trunks? The feeling was antic, not threatening. Was this a benign Birnam Wood?
Fitch’s multimedia work provided the source and like Cohn, Schumacher began with the premise of strangers arriving in a strange land. Two women, German and Shelby Mann, were dressed as young girls in red gingham dresses, blue tights and bright yellow footgear, and wigs with blue pigtails. One difference: Mann was wearing pointe shoes, German wore soft slippers.
The girls pulled the trunk off one of the creatures. It laid there at first, finally stretched, and got up. It was a dancer in a novelty store dinosaur costume, only painted as if covered in graffiti. Soon there were two graffitoed dinosaurs spinning and doing calisthenics. They seemed a bit like urban versions of Chagall’s monsters in “Firebird.”
While the girls huddled in the center, the dinosaurs tiptoed over to the girls and bowed. Everyone made friends and danced while the tree trunks jumped and shook, then the creatures left, leaving the girls to sleep in a diminishing pool of light.
LeCrone entered, carrying a Mylar balloon. Its crumpled, random shape somehow recalled Noguchi’s mask of Orpheus. LeCrone stepped up to pointe and slowly rotated. In came a procession of fabulous creatures: a glitter bird with ribbon wings, which looked like a more deliberate take on Chagall. It danced with a blue genie, then grasshoppers entered, then moths.
The girls fought off the menacing insects, but before victory the insects left, to be replaced by a faceless woman with blue hair. A couple in silver kept blocking the girls’ way to the blue-haired lady with strips of tulle. When the girls finally started to make progress, the tree trunks returned, and the mysterious lady left.
The trees pulled off their trunks, revealing the previous characters hidden inside the trunks. The girls huddled in the center as the others headed towards them. Peacefully or not? A blackout happened before we knew for certain.
Augusta Read Thomas’s score was episodic and antic: Kitten On The Woodwinds. Fitch’s concepts had the crazy energy of Mark Ryden’s designs for “Whipped Cream.” With the use of hobby-shop costumes, there couldn’t help being something child-like about the work, but not something immature. The concept worked.
Schumacher is passionate about collaboration, and he has guts. He’s never shied away from letting a visual concept have equal or greater billing than the steps. There are times it hasn’t work out to his benefit, when it wouldn’t have hurt him to be selfish about making the best choreography, come hell or high water.
Still, it’s led him, along with the Collective, to make fully interdisciplinary works, the kind he’d never get the time or resources to make at NYCB. With “Forest of Shifting Time,” Ballet Collective has made something fascinating and rare: family-friendly high art. It may be the best dressed children’s ballet ever.
copyright ©2023 by Leigh Witchel
Fluidity of Time
“The First and Last Light,” “Forest of Shifting Time” – Ballet Collective
Trinity Commons, New York, NY
November 2, 2022
Cover: Shelby Mann and Jada German in “Forest of Shifting Time.” Photo © Christopher Duggan.
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