Pam Tanowitz’s The Spectators at New York Live Arts, May 15 through 18; Bill Young and Colleen Thomas’s A Place in France at 100 Grand Street, May 16 through 19.

Pam Tanowitz’s The Spectators. Front, L to R: Maggie Cloud, Andrew Champlin, Sarah Haarmann. At back: Pierre Guilbault and Melissa Toogood. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Pam Tanowitz’s new The Spectators at New York Live Arts is so clean you could eat off it. Pristine patterns control the six dancers she deploys, and no move they make is blurred or loose. One of Tanowitz’s talents is making cool choreography heat up. Its precision creates a tension with its full-out strenuousness. If these performers were the kind who sweat heavily (and, miraculously, they’re not), they’d be wading.

As in Tanowitz’s previous pieces, her training in Merce Cunningham’s technique and her love of ballet are evident. In much contemporary choreography, the dancers’ legs function mainly to carry them around in various ways; the main action is lodged in their mobile torsos and arms. In The Spectators, feet get a workout, whether aiming at the air or tracing designs on the floor. However, Tanowitz subverts the erect posture of classicism as well as steps that look familiar—pulling a limb askew, making an arm crook, canting a position to the side. She puts unlikely steps and gestures together and makes them look like friends.

Foreground: Melissa Toogood. At back: Andrew Champlin and Maggie Cloud. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

And she can startle you. In the middle of a suave, supple, good-behavior solo, Maggie Cloud begins taking big steps, thudding her bare feet on the floor.  In the solo that opens the piece, Melissa Toogood, advancing toward and away from the audience and turning, turning, turning, suddenly whips into a fall and ends up lying on her side. On a subtler level, five people may be dancing in unison, and one of them will break into a different step for a few seconds, then drop back into the pattern.

Davison Scandrett’s splendid lighting is also full of surprises. A couple of times, the stage goes dark, except for a sudden blare of footlights, and then swiftly returns to the status quo.

The music, too, has a pleasantly unsettling effect. The first part of The Spectators is accompanied by Dan Siegler’s recorded score—one of fine variety, supportive rhythms, and rich instrumental textures. Then, in the middle of the piece, members of the Flux Quartet walk in and take their places to play Annie Gosfield’s Lightheaded and Heavyhearted and The Harmony of the Body-Machine. The violinists and violist sit out the second of these works, and cellist Felix Fan plays an eerie duet with electronic sounds.

The title of the dance is apt.  From time to time, dancers stop moving and watch one another. Tanowitz also treats the space behind the standing sidelights as part of her design. Scandrett illuminates that usually dark backstage area whenever one or more dancers get busy there. Toogood seems about to exit from her first solo; instead, she hangs out for a while, leaning against the proscenium arch, half seen, checking the action.

Andrew Champlin and Maggie Cloud in The Spectators. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

The dancers’s costumes (by Renée Kurz) vary in cut and color. Toogood wears red and Cloud blue. Sarah Haarmann is in fuschia, Dylan Crossman in burnt orange, Andrew Champlin in navy blue, and Pierre Guilbault in khaki. Six small, rectangular patches of similar colors are placed on the floor along the front and rear edges of the performing space. The dancers’ comings and goings, pairings and separations are absorbing to watch. Maybe you admire the three women, facing front and dancing in immaculate unison—their straight arms, tilting bodies, and busy feet detonating designs on the air. Maybe what draws your eyes is Champlin, passing through with a mazurka step that no one else appears to know. Or Haarmann taking big, turning paces back and forth along a diagonal, while bent over and staring in those two directions with what might almost be apprehension.  These greatly gifted dancers are jumpers, and often someone leaps high into the action with no obvious preparation.

Dylan Crossman and Melissa Toogood in the final duet of Tanowitz’s The Spectators. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Often the performers handle one another quite casually. Guilbault and Champlin pick up Cloud in passing and carry her away. At other times, an enigmatic purposefulness colors their actions. Cloud pulls Champlin into a deeper lunge so she can copy him. In the final moments of the piece, Crossman, who has danced a complex and intriguing solo, comes together with Toogood for an equally intriguing duet, in which the two link up or shadow each other. After a while, they travel forward along the track that Toogood established at in her opening solo. When they come close to the audience—surprise!— he touches her cheek, and as they retreat, they kiss. The cello goes wild, then settles into something like a folk-dance rhythm. In the final moments, Toogood is alone again, spinning chains of turns.

Bill Young and Colleen Thomas’s There’s a Place in France. L to R: Pedro Osorio, Colleen Thomas, Anthony Phillips, Denisa Musilova, Darrin Wright. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

I like to think that only in New York City could you go on consecutive days from New York Live Arts’ stylishly anonymous black-box theater and the arrowy clarity of Pam Tanowitz’s The Spectators to Bill Young and Colleen Thomas’s bedecked loft and the couple’s A Place in France, in which blurred edges and dreamlike illusions nibble surreptitiously away at the craftsmanship that, nonetheless, supports the work.

Going to 100 Grand Street to see A Place in France causes me to flash back to the 1970s, when choreographers such as Trisha Brown, David Gordon, Meredith Monk, and Douglas Dunn showed work in the studios where they lived and labored (in a city transformed by landlord avarice, Dunn is one of the few artists who does this now). You wait on wooden stairs worn down by the feet of years-ago factory workers until the door opens and you can enter and wedge yourselves into folding chairs. The studio is large, but not enormous. A long rectangular glass tank containing a couple of inches of water is very close to some front-row spectators’ toes.

Look around. The studio mirror has thin vertical strips glued to it. Sheets of crumpled brown paper cover two other walls and a corner. Little red lights dangle from cords near an upright piano whose rear surface is ornamented with red and blue balloons. A clear plastic sheet hangs on one side of the space. A translucent plastic rectangle the size of a large television screen hangs farther back. Near the mirror, three slings are suspended from the ceiling on ropes. Rebecca MK Makus’s lighting and visual design has already set us up for trickery and illusion.

Foreground by tank: Colleen Thomas. At back, L to R: Michael Ingle, Anthony Phillips, Darrin Wright. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Are we in a carnival funhouse? A dream? Could be either. Or perhaps the playground of some very sophisticated children. I’m pleased to note that the remarkable composer-musician-performer John McGrew credits “the young musicians at Choo Choo Train Pre-K in Brooklyn” with helping him write the lyrics for some of the songs in A Place in France.

The naughty schoolyard ditty that gives the piece its title is sung sotto voce by Anthony Phillips in his opening solo: “There’s a place in France/ Where the ladies wear no pants.” But after the opening line, his voice trails off, and, as he’s dancing around, he adds, “and the men like that.”

When he lifts his long shirt, the butt he wiggles at us is clad in underpants trimmed with rows of red feathers. That explains, sort of, the barnyard squawk he let out seconds earlier. Or was that about echoing (or foreshadowing?) the trombone hefted by McGrew? Phillips’ dancing is a winning mixture of cockiness, slinkiness, and gravitas. When he’s finished, he goes and stands behind the tv-ish panel; seen through it, his head becomes enormous. After that, he slips into a sling and joins Michael Ingle and Darrin Wright in some synchronized swinging.

How do you write about this exhilarating circus of a piece? It’s definitely about more than dancing—although there’s plenty of that. In some sense, it’s about putting on a show. People are always ready to fix one another up. The basic costumes by Juli and Alex Albene consist of white underwear on the butch side; sock garters are de rigeur whether or not socks are in evidence. Over these, dresses, shirts, trousers etc. are handed out and helped with. Only Pedro Osorio arrives presentably outfitted; still, all gather to do a little tweaking.

The tank of water presents a trial of some sort. Denisa Musilova steps into it and wades for a few seconds. Intermittently throughout the hour, others approach it less tentatively. Wright sticks his head in and shakes the drops out of his hair. Musilova and Thomas hold hands and dance in it; Thomas sits in it briefly. At the end, Phillips lowers himself slowly into the water until he’s lying down. That’s the final image.

Pedro Osorio (L) and Colleen Thomas. Behind panel: Michael Ingle and Anthony Phillips. On panel: Ingle’s upside-down head. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Sometimes Makus’s lighting changes drastically; the room becomes all red, all blue. Peter Richards projects videos (live-feed, I believe) on the crumpled paper of one corner; the images stretch and flicker and distort. McGrew is a musical polymath. Now he’s on trumpet, now at the piano, now squeezing an accordion, now with a harmonica in his mouth. All in service to the ambiance of the moment. He sings too, in a high, sweet, rueful voice.

Nor does he stay at the edges of the action. In one vignette, he joins others in a clump, and, when they fall in a heap and lie in positions that summon up images of battlefield dead, he ends up with his head pillowed on Phillips. In this position, he begins to sing about “glow power,” which is “something that makes you brave; you get it from the sun. . . .”  Thomas is the only one who hasn’t collapsed; she stands with her back to the audience, unmoving. McGrew, singing on, crawls to her and grabs her ankle. Suddenly everyone else wakes up, falls back, sits up. Thomas stomps. They all fall again. A game, perhaps, with dark undertones.

A lot of what happens in A Place in France is tender in a no-nonsense way. People are always recovering, bouncing back. Six people pair up and dance together, no rules about gender. The movements are juicy, weighted, rough around the edges. When Phillips (what a performer!) talks quietly about a dream, with the pungent recurring line, “I need to be soft again,” others take turns settling him down or holding him up; McGrew, walking him along, begins to echo his words.

Foreground: Ingle (L) and Wright. Behind them: Denisova and Phillips. Reflected in mirror: Osorio and Thomas. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu.

And there are small, offbeat celebrations. Some of the balloons get popped by bumping bodies. While a recorded soprano sings a fragment of one of the rippling folk songs of the Auvergne, Osorio performs a powerful, wrenched-about solo and, at the end of it, releases a small tempest of glitter.

The marvelous performers together create something ineffably magical—both childlike and seriously adult. A Place in France slips about the way dreams do. Imagination and wit run hand in hand with beauty—lose and gain, fall down and get up, run some more.

Jonah Bokaer performs his The Ulysses Syndrome with his father, Tsvi Bokaer, May 9 and 10, during the French Institute’s World Nomads Festival.

Jonah Bokaer in The Ulysses Syndrome. Photo: Bénédicte Longechal

Ithaca is the island in the Ionian sea that Odysseus (aka Ulysses) left when he armed himself for the Trojan War, and it’s the place he returned to after ten postwar years of wandering. Ithaca, New York, is the city where Tsvi Bokaer finally settled after roaming from his native Tunis to other Mediterranean cities, to France, and to California, where he became a screenwriter. In Ithaca, he married into an American family of Shakespearean actors, fathered six children, and set up a cinématèque, a concert hall, and more. One of his children, the choreographer-dancer Jonah Bokaer, has also become a wanderer of sorts—touring the cities of the world as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and then as a choreographer. When Tunisia settled down after the uprisings of the Arab Spring of 2011, the younger Bokaer visited for the first time all the places where his father’s family had lived.

In light of all the above, it’s not so astonishing that Jonah Bokaer should choreograph a dance inspired by the notion of journeys and dislocation and called it The Ulysses Syndrome. What is surprising is that he should conceive and perform the piece as a duet with his father.

Bokaer is not a choreographer who tells stories. Those who viewed the piece as part of the French Institute’s “World Nomads” Festival—this year focused on Tunisia—may have read that the six-sided installation of long, fluorescent light tubes, suspended a foot or so off the floor by ropes, was inspired by the hexagonal tiles and architectural shapes that he viewed in Tunisia, or that Soundwalk created the remarkable score for The Ulysses Syndrome by travelling 40 miles of Ulysses’s trip home via a sailboat equipped to receive and record distant sounds. At certain moments, we hear Tsvi Bokaer’s voice reading from the twelve parts of his memoir, Le Danseur Errant et la Méditerranée, on which the twelve episodes of The Ulysses Syndrome are based, but what he says remains a mystery; many are the languages he speaks. Equally enigmatic are some of the gestures that embed themselves in your memory.

Those mythic or remembered travels are not, I think, the only voyage that the duet acknowledges and reveals. It’s the voyage of a father and a son coming together for a period of time to create something. When the son is one of six children, such prolonged and purposeful intimacy must be rare. And it is a fine thing to see.

Tsvi Bokaer and his son Jonah begin the journey. Photo Bénédicte Longechal

The atmosphere reveals itself in a leisurely manner. The two men enter and sit companionably, side by side on the floor, leaning against the gray back wall of Florence Gould Hall’s stage like resting fishermen. Rodolphe Martin’s magical lighting gradually warms them like emerging dawn. For a long time, they move very little—repositioning a knee, an arm. The sound of lapping water is heard, and a man’s throbbing voice. Is it hot? Perhaps. Tsvi lifts his face to the sun. The sound of waves gets louder, gulls cry, a woman speaks. Tsvi lies down for a nap.

Jonah embarks on a journey across the space and begins to introduce movement motifs that will recur through the piece. He crawls in a very idiosyncratic way, pausing intermittently to raise one hand off the floor and look back toward the bent leg he’s just lifting; it’s a fluid move, though. He almost looks as if he were throwing something behind him, perhaps covering his tracks. He circles a hand closely around his head the way a cat washes itself.

Jonah Bokaer extending the hexagon. Photo: Bénédicte Longechal

The choreography seems to be comprised of small events that stand for larger memories. Jonah, 31, with a nearly shaved head and a slight beard, plays down his dancerly prowess, while Tsvi, 71 and a non-dancer, extends himself to echo his son’s sharp, momentary cave-in or to join him in a repeating pattern (a few walking steps and three quick, stiff little bounces onto and off the toes). Even when the dancelike music providing the rhythm stops, the men maintain their synchrony.

Among the movement motifs is one that involves Jonah wrapping his arms around his body and twisting himself askew; another move that one or both men make has them stroking one hand slowly and firmly down the opposite forearm. The father watches the son much of the time. The sound score changes their terrain in dreamlike ways. Sometimes they’re on the sea, sometimes in a schoolyard, with children calling out excitedly, or in the hubbub of a souk. Voices whisper. A song is heard, the strings of an oud are plucked, drum beats speed up. And occasionally, silence falls.

Inverting the world. Photo: Bénédicte Longechal

Some events are evocative but mysterious. Tsvi takes a scarf from his pocket and blindfolds Jonah, who then gropes his way to the wings of the stage and leans there, holding onto himself, like a kid made to stand in a corner.  At another point, Tsvi gestures like a conductor, and the fluorescent lights flash on and off in a sequence. Jonah stands on one leg, pressed against the back wall, and leans so far to the side that his face is upside down and his other knee points skyward. Is this an encrypted memory of his grandfather who performed gymnastics?  Is could be. It could also be something entirely other.

Some actions are task-like. Jonah separates a central pile of papers into perhaps a dozen separate pieces; later he re-arranges them. But almost all the movements are performed calmly and deliberately, as if the emotions that may have accompanied them once have been cooled and veiled by memory. When the two pretend to shoot guns past each other, each signaling the shot with a different vocal explosion, neither man shows triumph or animosity. When they crawl together, lock shoulders, and try to push each other back, the very effort produces a semblance of emotional heat, but no obvious rivalry develops, although Jonah does make a slight I’m-done-with-this gesture as he stands and walks into his next activity.

Tsvi Bokaer and Jonah Bokaer. Photo: Bénédicte Longechal

It’s touching to see the two men collaborating. Once they stand close, their foreheads pressed together, blindly touching each other’s heads or shoulders or arms; they seem in an uncanny way to be merging. They sit on the floor and play an inscrutable game with rings they have taken off; we hear the metallic clink as the rings fall or strike each other, see the swoosh with which the men reach to pick them up to shake and throw again. They could be two guys in a remembered tavern, but on this particular evening, live before us, they are Tsvi Bokaer and Jonah Bokaer, father and son, vying courteously with the golden recollections that bind them.

New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center, April 30 through June 9

Front, L to R: Brittany Pollack and Taylor Stanley, Sara Adams and Harrison Ball, Indiana Woodward and Peter Walker, Lauren Lovette and Chase Finlay, Kristen Segin and Ralph Ippolito of the New York City Ballet in Christopher Wheeldon’s Soirée Musicale. Photo: Paul Kolnik

In the Spring of 1988, the New York City Ballet put on an American Music Festival. George Balanchine had been dead for five years, and the two Ballet Masters in Chief, Peter Martins and Jerome Robbins, commissioned enough new ballets to keep dancers, guest choreographers, and resident choreographers rushing in and out of the company’s studios, gnawing on health bars. Was this Eliot Feld’s rehearsal? No, it was Bart Cook’s. Then when was Martins scheduled? Not too many memorable works emerged.

For the 25^th anniversary of this prolific venture, Martins wisely kept the plan modest in scale. Among the 25 ballets showcased as the American Music Festival during the first three weeks (April 30-May 19) of NYCB’s Spring Season are revived treasures like George Balanchine’s beautiful and mysterious Ivesiana  (1954) and Peter Martins’ terrific first ballet for the company, the 1977 Calcium Light Night (also set to music by the American maverick Charles Ives). And only two works are premieres.

The excellently designed program for the season’s gala on May 8 featured music by Samuel Barber, André  Previn, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, George Gershwin, and John  Philip Sousa, and choreography by Balanchine, Robbins, and Christopher Wheeldon, whose Soirée Musicale and new A Place for Us were the only ballets performed in their entirety.

Barber’s Souvenirs Ballet Suite isn’t new to NYCB’s repertory. The music was commissioned by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein for Todd Bolender’s Souvenirs (1955), a comedic romp set at a resort hotel circa 1914.  The very young Christopher Wheeldon used the music for the very different ballet that he choreographed for the students at the School of American Ballet in 1998. Soirée Musicale is that ballet. In reviving it for the NYCB, Wheeldon has added a new pas de deux.

Harrison Ball and Indiana Woodward in the “Two-Step” of Wheeldon’s Soirée Musicale. Photo: Paul Kolnik

The French title seems reasonable, given that Barber’s music doesn’t sound overtly American, and Holly Hynes’s very pretty costumes, with their layered net gowns for the women and ballet’s version of black-tie for the men, have a romantic aura. The bit of black drapery hanging at the rear of the stage isn’t exactly festive, but the ballet is clearly a dance party, beginning with couples waltzing to the kind of music that demands swirling around in a decorous embrace.

Wheeldon draws other ideas out of ballroom dancing, though. For a while during Barber’s opening “Waltz,” three couples explore all the ways they can revolve without leaving the spot they’re standing on. The men turn the women and circle them; holding each other’s hands, partners weave and unweave in bewitching ways, as if warming up for the waltzing and running about that they’re eager to get back to.

The “Schottische” brings out the perkiness in Kristen Segin and Indiana Woodward. They flutter around each other and hold hands in skaters’ position to sprint around the stage. The arrival of a man (Ralph Ippolito) incites a bit of vying for his attention. But, although polite, he has to go elsewhere. Same with Peter Walker (or was Walker the first and Ippolito the second?). Left to themselves, the women are best friends again.

Lauren Lovette and Chase Finlay in the new pas deux of Soirée Musicale. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Here’s what happened to the men. They heard about lovely Brittany Pollack, and heard the orchestra strike up Barber’s unmistakably slinky “Tango.” Pollack starts out with three suitors. Two more arrive shortly. Now she has a partner and four guys in waiting. She plays fair—falling into each one’s arms in turn. That becomes impractical, as more men arrive. Twelve cavaliers expressing interest display themselves neatly. But just before the end of the music, most of this dapper army departs, leaving Pollack again with a trio of men. How could Wheeldon resist giving a nod to Balanchine’s Apollo?  The three grab her hands and urge her on: three godlings, one saucy muse leading them astray.

Woodward and Segin team up with Sara Adams and two men (Harrison Ball and Taylor Stanley) for the “Two-Step.” But the principal two-step of the ballet is Wheeldon’s new pas de deux for recently minted principal Chase Finley and Lauren Lovette (a lovely dancer, who has just been promoted to the rank of soloist). Wheeldon has always shown a gift for pas de deux. He adds a warmth to classicism without mangling it. This duet is fresh and full of small inventions—much more than an amuse-bouche on the way to the ballet’s “Finale.” The evening’s pairings and flirtations have spawned some sweet-natured intimacy.

Wheeldon attached a note to his world premiere, A Place for Us. It reads: “For Jerome Robbins. A thank you,” and the title is drawn from West Side Story, the musical that made Robbins famous around the world. This duet for Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild has the quietness that Robbins prized in ballets of this kind. No visible effort, he believed, should mar a behavior as close to natural as ballet choreography (and ballet dancers) could come.

Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild in Christopher Wheeldon’s A Place for Us. Photo: Paul Kolnik

Peck and Fairchild—marvelous dancers and expressive performers— are perfectly cast. On the night of the gala, they had the pleasure of dancing to wonderfully performed music. As played onstage by NYCB’s excellent and versatile pianist Nancy McDill and a great guest clarinetist, Richard Stoltzman, the “Interlude” from Previn’s Clarinet and Piano Sonata elided fluently into Bernstein’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano.

 The duet begins as the two dancers walk slowly into a rectangle of light that designer Penny Jacobus has laid on the floor. Stoltzman and McDill move into a spare, soft-voiced instrumental dialogue as the pace picks up. New windows of light appear for Peck and Fairchild to step into. There are some lovely images. When she walks backward, holding his hand as he advances toward her, he looks down for a moment at their clasped hands and then up at her, as if acknowledging that this relationship is growing on him. Three times, she runs toward him, and he dips just enough so that she’s caught mid-air on his shoulder—no grasping hands visible. Yet, difficult as this maneuver may be, it’s anything but bravura. The dancers act as if this were simply a delightful step into intimacy that they want to savor.

Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild in A Place for Us. Photo: Paul Kolnik

When Previn’s “Interlude” ends and Bernstein’s Sonata begins, the atmosphere becomes more playful and the dancers perkier. Peck pushes Fairchild offstage, but seconds later he rushes back. He sits and watches her dance (a very Robbins touch) and claps his hands when she finishes. Stolztman’s clarinet winds her up, and she’s spinning like a top as the curtain descends. (Stoltzman, too, was wound up; he bounced from his stool to join McDill and the cast for a curtain call with an exhuberant little “tour en l’air.”)

Robbins’s own choreography was represented on the gala evening by “Cool” from West Side Story Suite (1995) and an excerpt from Glass Pieces (1983).  It’s always fun to see the NYCB men crouching and running and looking tough in the choreography drawn from the musical. They also yell and sing. Andrew Veyette as their leader manages the song very well, although the miking made him sound hollow in a strange way, and his enunciation isn’t spic-and-span. At this performance, without the earlier scenes in the ballet to get them on edge, the Jets didn’t all have the nervy, electric energy that “Cool” needs. The gang has to be simmering toward a boil for the song to convey its message fully.

The excerpt from Glass Pieces rides and digs into the powerful pulse and deep, braying horns of the “March” taken from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten. Conducted by Daniel Capps  (Clotilde Otranto led the orchestra in West Side Story Suite), the score takes no prisoners. You imagine that if one dancer stumbled and fell, the others would just have to trample a comrade. The twenty-four men and women are always on the move—coming and going in squads, working their way into lines and circles and multiple curves. Sometimes they stride out in almost two-dimensional positions—perhaps Robbins was alluding to the “Egyptian” aspect of the music—and balletic maneuvers are avoided. They’re like athletes warming up for some game we don’t get to see. Or maybe this is the game, and we just don’t know the rules. Like Glass, Robbins blew minimalism into fascinating complexity.

Additional pas de deux showed two of Balanchine’s many sides. On this special night, “The Man I Love” from Who Cares received a new look. Andrews Sill led the orchestra through Hershy Kay’s orchestration of Gershwin’s song, with Cameron Grant as the solo pianist. But guest performer Queen Latifah strolled onstage to sing it for us. Shimmering in a silver-sequined gown, she delivered the words warmly and caressingly—avoiding personal tempo changes that might endanger the choreography, yet with some individual touches. Amar Ramasar partnered Sterling Hyltin, who seems more radiantly alive each time I see her dance.

Ashley Bouder and Andrew Veyette in the Fourth Campaign of Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes. Photo: Paul Kolnik

The night-under-the-stars ambiance of that music was succeeded by the full sun of the duet that makes up the “Fourth Campaign” of Stars and Stripes, with Ashley Bouder as saucy “Liberty Bell” (“belle” is more like it) and Veyette as her strutting partner, “El Capitan.”  They make a charming pair, and Balanchine obviously relished the happy bombast of Kay’s adaptation and orchestration of Sousa marches. This is a duet for jumpers who can flash their legs in the air at top speed, and Bouder and Veyette fill the bill. Their flirtation isn’t easy, nor is she demure; the man has to duck every time he turns his partner, since her arabesque could easily smack him in the gut (or worse).

When two squads of women and one of men (that we normally see earlier when Stars and Stripes is performed in its entirety) march onto the stage, their advent comes as a big, happy surprise.  Balanchine’s forays into Americana always balance a tongue-in-cheek approach to stereotypes with genuine affection for the customs and foibles of the choreographer’s adopted country. As the huge flag is pulled up to end the ballet, let us this time  salute America’s contributions to music history and to the repertory of our cherished native ballet company.

Tamar Rogoff’s Summer’s Different in La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart’s Theater, April 24 through May 12

Tamar Rogoff”s Summer’s Different. Foreground: Emily Pope-Blackman (L) and Deborah Gladstein. At back (L to R): Brandin Steffensen, Peter Schmitz, and Emma Lee. Photo: Julie Lemberger

A family’s summer day on the beach, what could be finer?  Of course, someone might get  sunburned, someone might drop her hot dog in the sand, someone might swim out a little too far. There could be bickering. Tears saltier than usual could be shed. But still. . .a cloudless sky, blue waves. That’s the kind of day it seems to be in Tamar Rogoff’s startling new work, Summer’s Different. When all its five characters are posed onstage at LaMama, they resemble the figures in some of Milet Andrejevic’s 1980s paintings of people at ease in Central Park. Updated from Greek legends, his still figures and their apparently pristine relationships suggest enigmatic, maybe darker underpinnings.

Rogoff prepares us for an idyll. The characters wear bathing suits, they spread towels; various garments hang from clotheslines at the end of the theater where the tiers of seating are usually filled with chairs. We spectators are arranged in a single U-shaped row that turns the performing area into an arena of sorts. The family members who enter one at a time are immediately identifiable. Peter Schmitz is the occasionally crabby grandfather, and Deborah Gladstein the mild, but not docile grandmother. Emily Pope-Blackman must be their daughter; she’s also the mother of a young teenager (Emma Lee) and a ten-year-old girl (Annabel Sexton-Daldry). The youngest child loves her father (Brandin Steffensen) very much. In fact, with some reservations, they all love one another.

Annabel Sexton-Daldry cartwheels for her family. (L to R) Peter Schmitz, Deborah Gladstein, Emma Lee, Emily Pope-Blackman. Photo: Julie Lemberger

Rogoff’s great gift (aside from her ability to choose and illuminate unusual scenarios) is her way of making small movements reveal large stories and large movements reflect emotional states, while bypassing display. As the characters enter, each takes a turn arranging a family tableau—gently leading others to a new spot and posing them, this one’s head on that one’s shoulder, someone’s  arm around another’s waist. Another of Rogoff’s gifts is her compassion; it animates all her work.

In Beo Morales’s atmospheric score, music often gives way to the sounds of waves and gulls, sometimes of human voices (I thought I heard a coast guard’s announcement). Joe Levasseur’s lighting creates the weather—inner and outer. Everything seems quite normal at first. The family members do what you might expect—relax, put on and take off dark glasses, play. The little daughter dons a red kiddie tutu and dances around, gracefully waving her arms in the air; the others applaud her brave leaps in a circle. She and her father settle down to play. Both her mother and her older sister often take their long hair down or twist it back up into a bun, but the mother leans down and gestures, as if shading her eyes or looking under something. Grandmother basks in the sun. Grandfather takes off his specs, points them down, and peers, as if they could magnify beach life.

The family members travel to new stations along the edges of the semi-circle and repeat their actions during the course of the dance. They scan new territory; we get new perspectives—the unself-conscious beauty of the older daughter, say, and her awareness of her recently changed body; her grandfather’s protectiveness of her; his stiff, obligatory push-ups.

Brandin Steffensen, cross-dressed, in Rogoff’s Summer’s Different. Photo: Julie Lemberger

They all, at one time or another, scan an apparently cloudless sky.  It is, therefore, a shock when Steffensen appears on what seems to be a diving board jutting out from the bleachers; he’s wearing a rather old-fashioned woman’s bathing suit. The board is a liminal place, and this is his moment of decision, a private revelation. The others are asleep, and he is lit as if he’s alone on a cliff in a shaft of light. That light goes briefly out. Now you recall how adept he was at putting makeup on Sexton-Daldry (at her request).  How when the girls wrapped their supposedly wet hair in towels, he created a more elaborately twisted turban out of his towel. You remember, too, how often he simply watched Pope-Blackman.

Delicately, Rogoff and the performers dissect what must inevitably ensue when an apparently straight man, a loving husband and father, feels himself to be—in a crucial part of his nature—female. Transgender identification can manifest itself in various ways, and Rogoff doesn’t attempt to analyze the man’s situation in detail. Instead, she shows us his anguish and how—in a kind of shame perhaps—he retreats from his wife.  In a beautifully conceived sequence, Steffensen (he has removed the bathing suit) walks, then runs faster and faster in a circle. Pope-Blackman pursues him. She wants to touch him—perhaps to console him, perhaps to reassure herself that he loves her, perhaps to question him.  Maybe all three.  He shrugs away from her hand, pushes her back. They run and run and run; eventually they become violent.

Steffensen running away, Pope-Blackman pursuing. Photo: Julie Lemberger

Something is gradually achieved in the couple’s moments of rueful tenderness (underscored by sweetly sentimental music), but the family’s equilibrium has been upset, even though all return to some of their earlier separate activities, The grandfather, apparently appalled, doesn’t want the girls to see what’s happening to their parents and keeps shoving his son-in-law away; his wife calms him. She also soothes the teenager, who is more upset than her little sister (she loves her father and doesn’t see a problem).

Fighting-embracing: Steffensen and Pope-Blackman. Photo: Julie Lemberger

Rogoff has chosen to make items of clothing symbolic of the deeper changes, perhaps because cross-dressing as a phenomenon is readily apparent and understood.  When Pope-Blackman performs a furiously conflicted solo, hurling and twisting herself around, she’s wearing a slip. (Schmitz and Gladstein pass through, fond and at peace, appearing not to see her distress or hear her gasping for breath.) When she has finished, Steffesen appears, and she takes the slip off and hands it to him, backing away, covering her breasts with her arms as if she has never felt so naked in her life. Lee brings her a towel, wraps her in it, and leads her away.

Now we see what the man has been wanting. Steffensen conveys with wonderful sensitivity how the slip makes him feel. It’s like a new skin, something he can subtly undulate into and against. He raises his arms softly, calling to mind the little girl’s lovely freedom of movement. She is coltish because of her youth; he is awkward because he’s young in a different life.

L to R: Lee, Steffensen, Gladstein, Schmitz, Pope-Blackman, Sexton-Daldry. Photo: Julie Lemberger

The matronly bathing suit has another role to play. After we see new manifestations of the tensions and alliances within the group. Gladstein brings the garment and hands it to Steffensen. It’s a somewhat corny moment, theatrically speaking, but it makes an unequivocal point about forgiveness, and it isn’t dwelt on. In an echo of the beginning, Lee repositions Pope-Blackman  and Steffensen, allowing them unity with each other, as well as with Gladstein and Sexton-Daldry. She herself keeps hold of Sexton-Daldry’s hand, but steps away, staring into the distance. Schmitz, still troubled, stands completely apart from the group, staring at a picture he finds difficult to understand and accept, even though it’s composed of people that he loves.

As I write this, I’m aware of moving back and forth between the names of the characters and the names of the performers who bring them to life. As a writer, I want readers to keep the characters straight, but I also want to convey how sensitively and carefully these performers inhabit their roles. You almost feel that you could go up to any one of them and pay after-show compliments, but just as easily ask, “So how do you feel now about all that happened today on the shore?”

Stephen Petronio Company at the Joyce Theater, April 30 through May 5, 2013

Dancers in Stephen Petronio’s Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30), Emily Stone center. Photo: David Rosenberg

Over a hundred black-clad members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City form a V around the corner of the Joyce Theater—some on 19^th Street, some on 8^th Avenue; over a hundred pairs of eyes focus on composer Son Lux (aka Ryan Lott), who, shielded by a parasol, is playing guitar alongside trumpeter C.J. Camerieri and violinist Rob Moose. “Come out!” sing the kids in sweet harmony to a burgeoning crowd of spectators—most of whom have come to the Joyce to see Stephen Petronio’s world premiere, Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30). “Come out!”  Their voices are quiet, but urgent.

Meanings float around above the pavement we share. “Come out” in order to proclaim you’re gay. Come out from the darkness into the light—whether that darkness is death, ignorance, or the womb. Emerge from the sepulcher, Jesus!  You, too, Lazarus!  Phoenix, rise up from those ashes! “Come out!” is also what I’ve been saying to the place in the grass where daffodils should be pushing up to confirm Spring.

It may not be entirely coincidental that we’re seeing this glorious new work of Petronio’s in the year that honors the 100^th anniversary of the Stravinsky-Nijinsky ballet The Rite of Spring; although the Chosen Virgin danced herself to death, she was responsible for another kind of renascence: she made the crops grow.

Janine Antoni in her “living set.” Photo: Paul Ramirez Jonas

Petronio wants us to experience LLD—at least in part—as an installation. We must enter the theater by climbing stairs and descending the left aisle to our seats along a pathway of light. In addition to handing out programs, ushers give us little cards that query in gothic letters, “Should I look among the living/ Should I look among the dead/ If I’m searching for you?” This is a pretty deep question. The choreographer lies supine at the edge of the stage; he’s dressed in a white shirt and black suit, but he’s barefoot. The red velvet front curtain, lit to jewel-like splendor by Ken Tabachnick, is draped up at the bottom and its hem sits just a foot or so above his head. High above the right side of the audience hangs the kind of stretcher used for lifting the injured or dead to a waiting helicopter. It appears to contain a mossy bed, on which its designer, artist Janine Antoni, lies motionless. Above her are suspended plaster replicas of dancerly legs, skeleton legs, heads, arms, and more. Who will rise?  Who will die?

A large cadre of the young singers enters to fill the left side of the U-shaped balcony; the chorus’s founder-director, Francisco J. Nuñez, conducts them from the other end of the balcony, across the house. The rest of the chorus members fill both aisles, framing us, containing us. They echo words that Son Lux calls out, such as “I want to die like Lazarus did.” Meaning, perhaps, that expiring not long before Jesus walks in, needing a miracle, is a good way to go. Many of the words that infiltrate Son Lux’s eerily beautiful score (played by Camerieri, Moose, and the composer on piano, percussion, and electronics) were drawn from slave songs of the early 19^th century, when the hope of resurrection made the labor easier to bear.

Refresh, revive, resuscitate, reincarnate, make new. These processes have clearly been on Petronio’s mind.  For the opening scene of LLD, Petronio has recycled and refurbished the white costumes that Tara Subkoff designed for his 2003 Underland. He has also reconstructed solos made for other company dancers in years past and refurbished them for individuals in the current group. Compositional devices like accumulation and retrograde come into play; perhaps he first became expert at these during his years of dancing with Trisha Brown.

Joshua Green in Like Lazarus did (LLD 4/30). Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Not all of this is visible in the dance of course. In his program note, Petronio refers to “our dancing flux,” and anyone watching the maelstroms he creates on stage, doesn’t have time to think about the process behind the work. But although he’s a voluble choreographer, he’s not a facile one, and although his dancers are virtuosos, they dance like celebrants in a carefully designed rite, never holding a pose so you can admire its beauty and as apparently effortless as we imagine angels to be.

Petronio’s works have nothing in common with those of Isadora Duncan, but both choreographers seem to conceive of the body as a kind of holy machine, in touch with the earth’s processes. A powerful motor drives the whirling arms; slashing legs; mobile hips; and rippling, canting torsos. Amid the spins; the leaps; and the explosive, straight-up jumps that Petronio creates, you can divine a compulsion like the one Dylan Thomas hymns in his poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”  You may find the choreography of LLD relentless, with the dancers as intrepid, complicit, untiring heroes, but there’s something exalted, white-hot about it.

The beginning of the dance asserts order. The singers in the aisles have left. So has Petronio. The three musicians have gathered in a corner; the conductor and the chorus members in the balcony are on their feet. Nine of the company’s ten members stand onstage, divided into three trios. You see every action in triplicate. Over and over, one person from each group dances toward the audience and then back to place, while those still at the back continue their interactions. The phrase seems to grow as the process continues; I begin to think each set of three is echoing what’s been established and adding something new. Counterpoint develops.

Joshua Green and Natalie Mackessy (center), Davalois Fearon (L), Barrington Hinds (background).
Photo: David Rosenberg

But soon Petronio develops an idea that’s particular to this dance. Intermittently, throughout it, people yield to weakness and collapse or lie down. Others catch them, cradle them, lift them, or pull them to their feet and into the ongoing tide of dancing. “These are my Father’s children,” sing the young voices. Joshua Green, Gino Grenek, and Joshua Tuason, who’ve been carefully laid out by three others, revive and leave as Emily Stone and Natalie Mackessy dance close together, each in her own way. Small Mackessy collapses onto tall Stone, just as Davalois Fearon makes her first entrance. (She, Barrington Hinds, Jaqlin Medlock, and Julian De Leon are the first to appear wearing minimal black costumes—sometimes veiled in brown—by H. Petal; intricately cut and strapped, they bare much of the performers’ mobile backs.) The smoke at the rear of the stage seems a little denser. “Allelujah!” call out the singers. A little later, to a thudding drum and cymbals, Nicholas Sciscione, Tuason, and Green treat Davalois as a colleague who needs lifting into the light.

L-R: Nicholas Sciscione, Joshua Tuason, and Joshua Green support Davalois Fearon. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The music collaborates wonderfully with this constant process of leaving and arriving, of succumbing and recovering. The disparate voices of piano, trumpet, and violin (along with Son Lux’s singing) herald what needs to be heralded, sigh or shiver when appropriate, and jangle amid stormy electronic weather. Heavy piano chords sound when the dancers enter hand in hand, like a chain gang of diverse individuals. When the four women dance in unison, we hear words from Sojourner Truth’s famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” And just as stillness occasionally vies with movement, silence pits the music.

There’s an enigmatic passage when Tuason stands alone, his back to the audience, in front of a white ribbon or rope that has descended from above. Lit from below, he undulates slowly, muscularly, gazing at it. Climbing doesn’t seem to be an option. And when that scene is over, the lighting turns rosy, and the others re-enter in new costumes that include red kilts for the men. A drum joins in. The dancers cluster and fall and pass through in groups. The sung words turn apocalyptic: “The moon will turn to mud. The world will be on fire. The stars will fall. . .”

Nicholas Sciscione reborn in the final moments of Like Lazarus Did (LLD 4/30). Photo Julieta Cervantes

There have been solos before: Grenek writhing on the floor, Green smoothly pulling and twisting himself through invisible holes in the space around him. But the final solo, performed by Sciscione, sends an unambiguous message of rebirth. He’s wearing only flesh-colored briefs, turning in circles while lying on the floor, rolling, twisting, pushing his butt up the way babies do, struggling as if on a difficult, pre-ordained journey. The chorus now slides into counterpoint. The male voices sing a variant of the words on the card: “Should I look among the living? Should I look among the dead?” The women echo Son Lux in a lullaby: “Sweet dreams; shut your eyes and dream.”  Finally Sciscione gets to his feet; he’s taking teetering, tiptoe steps toward the back of the stage as the lights go out.

Afterward, I climb up to the side of the balcony to get a better look at Antoni as she lies in her cradle. Until now, I’ve only been able to discern her motionless profile. Almost everyone has left the theater. Her eyelids are fluttering.

Souleymane Badolo in his Barack. Photo: Ian Douglas

At one point in Suleymane Badolo’s new solo, Barack, on the opening night of his season at New York Live Arts, Badolo dances with his back to the audience, clapping his hands together vigorously; when he stops, from the audience comes a small-voiced echo of his action (maybe two pairs of hands clapping) that extends the sound for a few seconds more. When Badolo turns and begins backing up in a curving path, he directs a sweet grin in the direction of the spectators who were so caught up in his rhythm. Somewhat later, he approaches a few people in the front row and walks part way up one aisle—rippling his arms for one spectator, shaking another’s hand, swinging his hips at another.

In both Barack and Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO, this wonderfully compelling dancer-choreographer performs for the most part introspectively—listening to his body, consulting his memories. But he never seems entirely alone; a virtual village surrounds him. Perhaps one in his native Burkina Faso, perhaps the community he’s part of in New York, where he moved in 2009. Barack is not about our president, NYLA’s press release informs me; the word means something like “gratitude” in Gurunsi, the language spoken by members of Badolo’s ethnic group in southern Burkina Faso. I also learn that the dance expresses his thanks to those who have helped him in his new home here.

I didn’t read that information before seeing the dance, so I had nothing to peruse but his movements and rhythms. Only now can I link to its theme his proud bearing and the slightly stiff, ceremonious bows he makes in different directions. These formal acknowledgments are in interesting opposition to his attire: belted red pants and a yellow hoodie, unzipped to show his bare chest (costume: Nora Chipaumire). The music is a surprise too, unless you recall that Burkina Faso was a French colony until 1960. While Badolo tests his joints—rippling his arms until his shoulders and elbows move like freshly oiled mechanisms—the inimitable recorded voice of Edith Piaf begins to sing “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Maybe Badolo chose the song (which plays twice during the dance) less for its language than for its meaning. Piaf has no further use for her sorrows or her pleasures; she has swept them away and “I begin again at zero.” Her life starts today “with you.”

Badolo spreading his wings. Photo: Ian Douglas

Badolo stays in one spot, while his arms churn his body and his planted feet into complex motion. He doesn’t escalate in intensity as Piaf does, but he seems to expand in space—his feet edging farther apart, his knees bending more deeply.  The solo is full of pauses and new ideas. Sometimes, Badolo rounds his arms as if embracing air; sometimes a pressure from above bends him backward. His balances on one leg seem precarious, uneasy. When Piaf sings again, he moves more slowly, rubbing his hands over his body, wiping something away. “Can I try this?” he seems to be asking himself. “Does this fit?”  New music accompanies him; this time it’s by Tabu Ley Rochereau, the Congolese singer-composer (and politician), who mixes musical elements from other cultures into his native music. The lighting, designed by Bill Schaffner and Badolo becomes a veritable rainbow of colors.

Souleymane Badolo aloft in his Buudou, BADOU, BADOLO. Photo: Ian Douglas

I don’t mean to make the action sound static. Badolo draws on African styles. He moves with elegance and great resilience. His feet skate over the floor; his pelvis undulates; his knees lift high; his shoulders circle. When he spreads his arms, he resembles a hovering bird. When he explodes into the air suddenly, as he does at times during Buudou, BADOU, BADOLO, his limbs seem to flash out from his body, and you wonder if he can collect them again before his feet have to hit the ground.

In BBB, Badolo channels his great-great-grandfather and the roads he traveled in search of help in fathering children. By extension, the piece expresses not only the ineradicable tapestry of ancestry, but Badolo’s own artistic searches; he has likened his throwing of the little cowrie shells, which traditionally divines future life strategies, to John Cage’s tossing coins to derive compositional structure from the hexagrams of the I-Ching.

Badolo: one stage in his journey, Mamadou Konate at back. Photo: Ian Douglas

This piece centers on four objects set upon the floor; they represent methods of divination. Alleyways of light lead to the zones they control (Badolo and Schaffner credit the original lighting design to Rick Martin). The first object is a mound of what appears to be dirt. Badolo gropes his way to it and kneels. As with the other “shrines,” he begins by bending over to lay the back of his hand and then his palm on the floor. His actions at each station are forthright and functional. In this rite, he fills his mouth with water from a cup and sprays it with great force over the mound; by the time he has finished, he has uncovered something, although I can’t tell what it is. Periodically he bursts into the air.

He jitters expansively while approaching the second ritual object—a flat, square containing what could be sand, but which I believe is rice. This is no easy process, whatever he hopes to gain from it. He stabs his index finger into the substance, as if writing something, rubs it out, starts again, stands up and staggers backward, returns to his task. He jabs the surface with both fingers. Only now does Mamadou Konate, the musician seated in dim light at the back of the stage, begin to play—quietly— his collection of percussion instruments.

Badolo with rice. Konate behind him. Photo: Ian Douglas.

Badolo drops to his knees in one swift move when he reaches the tray containing the small white shells. He gathers them up and tosses them out, then scans them, pointing, saying something in his native tongue. Konate responds with a word or two. The terse conversation continues as Badolo throws again. Once, a single shell lands outside the tray; that seems important and conclusive. Konate, shouldering a small drum, follows Badolo around the now brightly lit stage; recorded guitar music (by Ben Broderick Phillips) and the sounds of excited voices and other city noises accompany this last dancing journey.

The final image of Buudou, BADOO, BADOLO. Photo: Ian Douglas

Another object becomes visible, off to the side and closer to the audience. After executing an enormous jump, Badolo inverts a small metal basin onto his head; this “helmet” oozes a white substance that he spreads over his face and hands. He’s standing there thus transformed as the lights fade. I have no sure idea about the meaning of this, but I’ve seen photographs of rituals in various African countries that use white face paint in ritual performances. Perhaps this was the final rite of his ancestor’s quest. Perhaps it’s only another beginning. If the lights hadn’t gone out, I might never have been able to take my eyes off him.

Leslie Cuyjet (L) and Cynthia OIiver in Oliver’s BOOM! Photo: Ian Douglas

It’s not crystal clear why Cynthia Oliver’s 17-minute BOOM! was presented as a kind of curtain raiser for Badolo’s two solos (it’s part of a longer work to come).  Perhaps it was chosen because Oliver (performer, choreographer, teacher, and scholar) is dealing in her own way with personal and cultural history. The piece is intriguing from the outset. The argumentative voices of two women come from behind the audience; they sound like irate grandmothers. Neither of them pauses to let the other speak, as they squabble their way down the steps and into the performing area and Amanda Ringger’s lighting. They turn out to be Oliver and Leslie Cuyjet, both wearing loosely-cut white tops and colorful pants. The first thing these two fascinating women do is strike poses and check, in words and gestures, their physical dimensions and what parts of their bodies they don’t like so much. Again, they talk over each other.  Drums start galloping in Jason Finkelman’s recorded score.

Although over the course of the duet, Oliver and Cuyjet occasionally talk in a relaxed way or walk matter-of-factly to a new area, that may be just postmodern trimming. I’m coming to sense something that’s corroborated by the press release: much of the time, the two dancers are expressing aspects of a single person. This is easy to do in movies, harder to convey in dance. How does one perform an “aspect,” when the audience clearly sees two people?

Nonetheless, Oliver’s strategies yield some engaging, humorous, and highly theatrical events that support her theme in various ways.  She shows us the two women in near perfect synchrony—covering a lot of territory, swiping gestures onto the air, pumping their butts energetically. They also have their divergent moments. Sometimes they wander about, gazing here and there, as if they’ve lost track of each other, or of whatever they’re after. They may separate and dance on opposite sides of the stage and then be pulled together by some unseen bond. For some time, they stand in a close embrace, changing positions or grips to become even more of a single entity. The fact that they don’t look alike and that each is beautiful in her own way adds to the power of their relationship. Finkelman’s music molds excellently to their changes of mood.

Leslie Cuyjet (L) and Cynthia Oliver merging in BOOM! Photo: Ian Douglas

At the end, their joint self-image comes in for some serious pummeling. Crawling into a seated position, side by side and close to the audience, they start to talk. Their vocal unison is as impressive as their dancing one. “I’m a punish you!” starts a string of insults, including “I’m a turn you inside out!” that could have come from deep inside a childhood memory. Since they’re staring at the spectators and spitting the words at us, we might at first think we’re the enemy. But no. This is self-hatred, followed by self-love, followed by more threats and insults. The litany suggests it’s trailing a history we don’t yet comprehend.  Finally, temporary harmony ensues between these conflicting selves. The two finish with “I’m going to embrace you, grace you, and set you free.”  I’m crossing my fingers. And looking forward to the expanded work.

Vicky Shick’s Everything You See. Presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, April 18 through 20.

Jodi Bender, held by Donna Costello in Vicky Shick’s Everything You See. Photo: Anjola Toro

Imagine a richly busy world in which everyone is mostly at peace with everyone else, and all are serious about their work. Then think about that work. It’s unusual. The inhabitants swing their bodies and limbs into big, sweeping movements, but their patterns also incorporate small, even mundane gestures, such as pulling on one’s nose or planting a kiss on someone else in passing. Sometimes, people share a task with others—working in perfect synchrony; sometimes two or three cooperate in curious ways that make them seem at odds. This world is a wondrous new dance by Vicky Shick called Everything You See.

Jon Kinzel and Heather Olson in Everything You See. Photo: Anjola Toro

 And we, the spectators can see everything about it, if we wish to. Shick has provided us with two simultaneous related areas of action, and—given the rich amount of activity—we may choose to focus on one or the other. Our attention, however, is nudged by the set. Shick’s longtime collaborator, sculptor Barbara Kilpatrick, has constructed a “wall” that runs down the center of the church. It’s made up of seven suspended panels of what appears to be window screen. Their bottom edges rest against the floor in various irregular ways, as if they’re perhaps longer than they need to be. There are always dancers on both sides of this divider, although they move freely between them and, on occasion, wait outside the areas that the barrier defines.

Because the seating is arranged on both the long sides of the nave, the audience is divided too. So we see most clearly the action that is on our side of the partition, but also look through it to the opposite bank of spectators and the dancing that’s closest to them. Carol Mullins’s beautiful lighting plays no favorites, but the two regions often differ in hue or brightness.  Composer Elise Kermani (who has now collaborated with Shick on six scores) makes no obvious distinctions between the two zones; in some way, her sounds carry the day forward for everyone. Woven into the delicate electronic texture, for instance, are muted notes on a keyboard; trickling water; mewing sea birds; a quiet, rhythmic voice; drumbeats; the crackle of fire; cowbells; chimes; a high, quivering pulse. Three times, Kermani introduces subtle instrumental variations on the pungent country-and-western love song “What Am I Living For?”

Olsi Gjeci (L) and Wendy Perron. Photo: Anjola Toro

The dancers who populate Everything You See are marvelously diverse, and Kilpatrick’s engagingly bizarre costumes emphasize their individuality. Wendy Perron, for instance, wears a tutu of what looks like crumpled plastic over polka-dotted black leggings (plus her eyeglasses). Jon Kinzel is attired like a businessman in semi-deshabille, his white shirt open at the top, his sleeves rolled up, his tie undone. Tall, long-limbed Donna Costello is garbed in black with a piece of white fabric tied around her hips. Heather Olson wears a gray dress, while Marilyn Maywald sports a brightly patterned one.

Right after the applause for the 50-minute piece ended, the twenty-something dancer beside me said that he wanted to be like Kinzel when he got older, and went on to explain why he especially loved watching Kinzel, Perron, and Shick herself. I share his sense that these more mature dancers are profoundly at home in their bodies and in what they are doing, They perform the intricately textured choreography as if dancing is just something that they do every day, along with slicing bread and watching the traffic when crossing the street and keeping an eye on a toddler, yet they’re fully immersed in the physicality of every moment.

Vicky Shick and Jon Kinzel in Shick’s Everything You See (not the final costumes). Photo: Anjola Toro

In fact, all the dancers are marvelously interesting. Most remarkable is the fact that, although they perform expertly, they look as if they’re making everything up on the spot and deciding when to do what. Maybe they give that impression because each of them knows—and has to keep track of— so many little modules of movement.

One of Shick’s gifts as a choreographer is her ability to make non sequiturs flow together or seem inevitable. Several clumped dancers jump stiffly up and down, the way kids do while saying, “Goody!” over and over. Then they recline on their sides, heads propped on one hand, and contemplate the space. Small actions like fluttering hands or wobbling knees may follow large-scale ones, such as a sudden leap or the arc of a person’s arm as she reaches for her own swung-up leg. She’s also a master at mixing looseness with precision, an easy, voluptuous fluidity with small sharp moves.

Jodi Bender. At back (L to R): Marilyn Maywald, Donna Costello, Lily Gold, Olsi Gjeci. Photo:Anjola Torto

At first Everything You See seems to be more than you can see, because so many eye-grabbing things are happening. You learn to zero in to watch, say, Perron and Shick sitting close together on the floor and squirming around to contact each other with an elbow or a cheek. Or Costello, leaning back against Olsi Gjeci and kind of sliding partway down his body, while he stares past her, windmilling his arms. Or Jodi Bender knocking herself out, dancing as if she’s trying to shuck herself out of her clothes while evading an intruder. Or Lily Gold jittering around on tiptoe, brushing away what might be insects bent on nesting in her dark, fuzzy hair. Or a whole gang of people running in a cluster around the screens; they look back, swerve, and change positions as they go, the way people do when they’re urging one another on, or checking to see that the group is staying together.

Olsi Gjeci and Laurel Tentindo. Photo:Anjola Toro

Eventually, it becomes clear that movement passages and configurations that first appeared on one side of the fence will likely appear on the other. There’s Laurel Tentindo and Gjeci grasping hands and pulling away from each other as fully as they can without letting go. Remember that? Toward the end of Everything You See, the pace of the repetitions increases. Watching them fly by is almost intoxicating. A veritable high-school reunion of familiar faces.

Those of us on the east side of the nave may wonder whether a small wooden table is ever going to make it to our area, and at the very end of the dance, it does. Here’s Maywald standing on it just the way she did for our neighbors across the way. And Kinzel is sitting pensively on the edge of it again. As the music dies, she pulls her nose, checks one leg, touches her hair, brushes something off her skirt. The lights go out.

Everything we saw we no longer see. Except in the mind’s eye, where it’ll glimmer for some time.

Marilyn Maywald on the table; Jon Kinzel behind her. Photo: Anjola Toro

Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre, Baryshnikov Arts Center, April 18 and 19, 2013

Ivonne Batanero in Rosie Herrera’s Dining Alone. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Anyone who has ever felt fragile or off balance might be heartened by Rosie Herrera’s Dining Alone. Here’s one of many memorable passages. A woman (Ivonne Batanero) holds a stack of white dinner plates; a man (Liony Garcia), crouching beside her, takes the plates, one by one, from the pile and places them on the floor to create a diagonal trail for her to walk on. She never looks down; he gauges where her foot is going to need the next plate. A pianist plays (Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, I think). Batanero’s voyage can make your heart beat faster, especially when, unburdened, she starts to walk backward on the plates toward the corner where she began. When she reaches it, Garcia, who has been collecting the dishes, puts the whole stack back into her arms. Her legs buckle, and, just as you fear a catastrophe, the rest of the cast rushes onstage in time to catch her and save the plates before she hits the floor.

If you’ve ever felt alone, that’s Herrera’s theme. She also touches on aging and memory. Plus sensuality and greed. A young Cuban American based in Miami, she grew up in her father’s restaurant watching people eat.

Herrera has been hailed as an up-and-comer of consequence. Graduating from Miami’s New World School of the Arts, she has danced in cabaret, knows hip-hop, and sings opera. Dining Alone stirs up memories of Pina Bausch’s works, but Herrera’s approach to dance theater, in addition to being more modest in scale, is lustier, and she links a series of scenes together by common elements (such as plates and eating). When a man dressed as a waiter (counter-tenor Raymond Storms) sings an unearthly aria, he’s carefully polishing cutlery.

The elaborate opening set-up prepares you for evanescence. As spectators enter the Howard Gilman Space at BAC, they’re greeted by the sight of a silent dinner party in progress, with ten invitees seated on either side of a long table that stretches away from the audience. Pianist Fernando Landeros, sitting at the back of the performing area, plays some American Songbook classics, such as Gershwin’s “Sweet Embraceable You” and lesser works like “Part of Your World” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The party-goers are frozen in mid gesture—some conversing excitedly, some staring around, some eating. Although they are life-sized photos stiffened by some kind of backing, some appear almost eerily three-dimensional. Guest artist Octavio Campos, the very-much-alive host seated at the head of the table, is devouring his dinner and chatting animatedly at times, although we can’t hear him. Silver-haired, handsome, wearing black pants, white dinner jacket, and a white shirt open at the neck, he presides over a vanished past.

Gradually he becomes minimally more audible, identifying what we’re hearing now as the slow movement from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto offering to sing a bit of it (or perhaps the cheesy pop song, “All By Myself,” that’s based on it). He lifts his wine glass: “Bon Appetit!” Suddenly he looks confused, and, in a startling coup de théâtre, the three large objects behind him turn out to be fans, and, in an instant, their fierce wind blows the remembered guests into flat shapes on the floor.

Another surprising, dreamlike event occurs seconds later—after hurrying figures have cleared the darkened stage and David Ferri has restored his fine lighting. Campos, who has been running around the space in increasingly smaller and slower circles, holding out the skirts of a white evening gown that’s attached to his chest, runs toward a cluster of people. Suddenly a woman (Leah Verier-Dunn) is wearing the dress, and he has disappeared. How did that happen?

Liony Garica and Katie Stirman assist Melissa Toogood, while Ivonne Batanero manages the plates. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The crockery performs in a number of ways—both passively and actively. When the dancers sit on the floor and, in perfect unison, put their individual plates on edge and spin them, the objects collaborate both aurally and visually. As they lose their equilibrium, they topple unevenly and continue to try to spin even as they’re flattening out against the floor, their speed and clatter increasing until they stop dead.

One of the loveliest sequences is one in which Melissa Toogood (one of the last and finest dancers in Merce Cunninham’s company) performs a precarious supported adagio on a plate—actually on two plates, but much of the time, she is standing on one leg and flourishing the other, turning and tipping, while Garcia and Katie Stirman help her to do whatever she wants, and Batanero places the second plate should she need to change feet. Once, when Toogood skids a plate some distance away, Garcia and Stirman carry her through the air in a big leap until she can touch down on the new surface. The image is a resonant one. You think of the tale of Sir Walter Raleigh laying his cloak over a puddle so Queen Elizabeth’s feet would not get wet as she walked on. Toogood is wonderfully serene as her intricate dance gradually travels across the space.

Liony Garcia dines (alone?) on Melissa Toogood’s hair. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Two of the more nightmarish fantasies also involve plates. Garcia sits at a small table, a solitary diner awaiting his meal. Toogood comes and sits down opposite him. But she’s no dinner date—at least not in the usual sense. She bends forward until her forehead touches the plate before her and strokes her long hair out until it reaches her companion’s plate. Carefully twirling her dark locks around a fork as if it were pasta, Garcia dines on them, “eating” steadily as other activities commence. When the waiter comes to take Toogood’s plate away, she walks with him, her head still connected to it.

L to R: Melissa Togood, Katie Stirman, and Ivonne Batanero deal with Snow White. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Herrera is also aware of food as consolation or as voluptuous delight. Toogood, Stirman, and Batanero sit side by side at a long table facing the audience. In front of each is a large, snowy pile of what could be whipped cream. While the recorded voice of Disney’s Snow White sings “Some Day My Prince Will Come” in a high, girlish voice, the three women plop their faces into the white stuff and come up, shaking their heads and shoulders deliriously, pause, and drop down for more. By the time they start lip-synching a conversation among Snow White and two of the dwarves about this handsome guy, their faces and hair are slathered in white. Batanero stays on to “speak” with the voice of Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (Herrera’s source for this and other elements—such as the Rachmaninov), while Campos holds her tight. As she wriggles in sexy excitement, he licks and sucks the “cream” off her face and hair. “Don’t stop!” breathes Marilyn.

Octavio Campos licking Ivonne Batanero clean (mostly). Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Dining Alone has many such potent (and funny) images and some excellently apt music, whether recorded or played by Landeros. I can’t identify the gorgeous song (Balkan? Latin?) sung by women’s voices, as Verier-Dunn swoons around the small table top tilted for her by Garcia. There are a few irritating or unfulfilled moments, but the pleasures of experiencing Herrera’s earthy, poetic, beyond-dada imagination outweigh them.

The finale belongs to the plates. Garcia waits at his table, while unseen offstage hands roll one after another of them into the space. Some of them streak straight across and into the wings. Others embark on surprising curves. There are some near misses. Plates clatter into silence. The solitary eater puts his feet on the table’s pedestal out of harm’s way. This is your life, sir. Care for dessert?

Summation Dance, BAM Fishman Space, April 11 through 13.

L to R: Angela Curotto, Sumi Clements, Kristin Schwab, Julie McMillan, Meg Weeks, Allie Lochary in Clements’s Shift. Photo: Christopher Duggan

What’s not to love?  That is, if you—like me—are easily entranced by the combination of formal purity and weirdness. When the lights come on in the black box of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space to signal the beginning of Sumi Clements’s Shift, three women stand, separated from each other and staring through us. It’s how they stand that’s interesting. They’re slanted to the side, arms pinned to their flanks, with one foot crossed behind the other and clubbed so that’s it’s resting on its outer edge. One of the women is Clements; the other two (as I remember) are Julie McMillan and Angela Curotto. They wear dark gray, sleeveless sheaths, made of a coarse material. A loud ticking begins. They seem frozen there. Three more women enter and strike the pose, then three more. The first important move is to change feet and slant the other way. Then change back.

This is the first of two premieres presented by Summation Dance, the company co-founded in 2010 by Clements and Taryn Vander Hoop (both of whom I knew as graduate students in NYU-Tisch School of the Arts). With Clements as the artistic director and chief choreographer and  Vander Hoop as executive director and associate artistic director, the company, in a short time, accomplished a great deal in terms of securing funding, producing work, and developing an artistic profile.

L to R: Kristin Schwab, Julie McMillan, Kelsey Berry in Shift. Photo: Christopher Duggan

For quite a while, Shift plays around with the image of tilted women, who are neither uncomfortable nor fully at ease in their peculiar posture. Kyle Olson’s effective score grows and changes in texture. Simon Cleveland’s lighting creates atmospheric shifts. Clements, too, gradually expands the movement possibilities. The women—all wearing Brigitte Vosse’s simple dresses—come and go come together in brief trios and duets. Vander Hoop dances alone a couple of time. But Shift  isn’t about friendships forming or people having misgivings. Members of the strong, all-female company (including  Kelsey Berry, Allie Lochary, Kristin Schwab, Megan Thornburg, Meg Weeks, and apprentice Tenaya Cowsill) fit themselves into patterns as if these were rotating jobs in a well-ordered community.  Occasionally, some of them stop and watch others dance.

L to R: Angela Curotto, Kristin Schwab, Sumi Clements, Julie McMillan, Meg Weeks in Shift. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Clements is sparing with her well-designed movement embellishments and shifting configurations.  The performers lunge, roll on the floor, run onto the stage backward, or form a tidy line and then break away from it. Aside from that narrow off-balance stance, they move big and bold; feet wide apart, knees bent, they thrust themselves into dancing. The floor is a good place to be.

At some point in the latter part of the dance, I find myself less attentive to it and am not sure why. Does its length exceed its inventiveness?  Does the choreography voyage so far from its initial, fascinating images that we lose the logic of its form? Does the dancing begin to sew itself too tightly to the insistent beat that becomes prominent in the music?

Clements’s Pathological Parenthetical Pageantry. L to R: McMillan, Clements, Lochary, Curotto seated on Vander Hoop. Photo: Christopher Duggan

I cringe at the title of Clements’ Pathological Parenthetical Pageantry, but it does convey something about the dance. If Shift is stark and precise, PPP is all about excess, mess, and glamor with its seams showing. Also about the conflicting emotions stirred up by the act of performing in public.

This time, only Clements, Curotto, Lochary, McMillan, and Vander Hoop appear onstage, garbed in imaginatively outrageous outfits by Vosse. Whatever they’re doing, or getting ready to do, it’s clear that they are not clear about what it is. In a bluish gloom, they trot around, putting things onstage, picking up tiny things that aren’t supposed to be there. Then they stand off to one side and adjust their costumes. A spotlight beams on, making an inviting pool. They eye it and fix themselves up some more. Someone gives Curotto a shove, and the five parade in and form a line facing us—very close to the front row of spectators. They breathe heavily, like wary horses, then retreat to the sidelines. They try again, and this time they back up just a bit, step stiffly with their legs wide apart, show us they can kick, and then wonder what to do next.

Beware! L to R: McMillan, Curotto, Vander Hoop. Photo: Christopher Duggan

The music starts about now: Grammatik’s “Good Evening Mr. Hitchcock” (with the director’s unctuous British voice poking through) and “Dance Yrself Clean” by LCD Sound System. The title of this last seems appropriately inappropriate. The women definitely get dirty. In several ways. These are chorus girls from hell, each with an attitude—some snarling, some grinning crookedly, and all eager to please us. Or maybe eat us.

They run and dive to the floor. They dance like crazy, sometimes in unison. What is this all about? Do you think they know? What about that underused rope hanging at the back?  They get pelted with vegetables: peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage. They squabble in dappled light. Clements crawls off and pelts them with more food. They make the best of it. As they advance bravely toward the audience, Curotto squinting around a cabbage leaf that she has draped over one eye, you don’t know whether you’d like to add a tomato or two, tell them to go home and take a bath, or applaud them heartily (the last, of course, is what you do).

Lochary wants YOU! Or not. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Clements is a big talent, but, like Shift, although for different reasons, Pathological Parenthetical Pageantry bogs down a bit in the middle, then rights itself. She’ll figure this out, I expect, and keep pushing onward.

Mark Morris Dance Group. James and Martha Duffy Performance Space, Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn, New York. April 3 through 14.

Mark Morris’s A Wooden Tree. (L to R):
Amber Star Merkens, Rita Donahue, Dallas McMurray, Jenn Weddel, Aaron Loux, Michelle Yard, Maile Okamura, Mikhail Baryshnikov. Photo: Stephanie Berger

You can’t predict much about a dance by Mark Morris. There’s no doubt that he responds to music and —with love and respect—choreographs that response into what he hears. He acknowledges with great sensitivity a composer’s tempi and structures and atmosphere, but you never know what else the sounds will trigger.

Antonin Dvorák’s Bagatelles for two violins, cello, and harmonium, Op. 47 (1878) inspired him to present a drab waiting room into which a woman with a clipboard intermittently walks to summon one of the six assembled people to leave the stage and come with her (The Office). Carl Maria von Weber’s Grand Duo Concertant, for clarinet and piano, Op. 48 (1814-1815) leads to his new Crosswalk’s racing traffic, collisions, and intersections by eight men and three women (the latter costumed in orange dresses that evoke traffic cones).

You might guess that Morris would cast Henry Cowell’s Suite for Violin and Piano (1925) as a duet, but not that the man in Jenn and Spencer (another world premiere) would be dressed in trousers and a dress shirt with its sleeves rolled up, while his partner and antagonist would wear a loose-fitting lavender evening gown, so long that it grazes the floor, and indulge in complications not usually embarked on in such attire.

Ivor Cutler (1923-2006), the Scottish composer, singer, and humorist, wrote songs—both childlike and astutely ironic—that have an English-music-hall sound, but laconic lyrics that undercut climaxes right and left. As is often Morris’s wont when dealing with vocal music, his choreography for A Wooden Tree (a New York premiere) fits gestures to Cutler’s words, but rarely in a completely predictable way. Were that even possible.

The Office: (L to R) Spencer Ramirez, Maile Okamura, Jenn Weddel, Dallas McMurray. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The Office (1994), which opens the program, is an enigma; it’s full of robust dancing that stamps and twists and chains its way through the hinted-at Czech melodies and rhythms in the five sections of Dvorák’s Bagatelles, but this little society that Morris has created is gradually shrinking. There are hard-backed chairs in the antechamber to who knows what. The people who sit on them wear unfashionable everyday clothing (by former company dancer June Omura). They don’t look citified like Laurel Lynch, the doorkeeper; she’s dressed in a dark, tailored suit and sensible shoes. She could be inviting people, one by one, to a job interview; or they could be waiting to be transported, re-assigned, questioned for evidence. None looks happy at leaving, but neither does anyone fight the seemingly inevitable departure; few look back.

The Office: (L to R) Maile Okamura, Dallas McMurray, Billy Smith, Laurel Lynch. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Morris works with simple means—folk-dance steps given a pleasing twist and pulled into varying patterns—and he skillfully and sensitively tailors the ambiance of each section to the remaining number of people. Chelsea Lynn Acree is the first to leave, after which Dallas McMurray, Spencer Ramirez, and Billy Smith step in counterpoint to Maile Okamura and Jenn Weddel. When Smith is summoned, the remaining four form a square and energetically change places across it. At this point, the “Allegretto scherzando,” which has started out like the opening movement of the same name, asserts its difference. The musicians (Georgy Valtchev and Maxim Moston, violins; Andrew Janss, cello; and Colin Fowler, harmonium) suddenly seem to bear down on the melody, and the dancers’ stances get wider and their shoes strike the floor more emphatically.

When Weddel leaves, and Dvorák’s “Canon: andante con moto” starts, Okamura and McMurray form a counterpoint to Ramirez. No matter how few people are left, they always find ways to join hands and form a chain. They dance as if they never want to forget these steps, or one another. Okamura and McMurray seem happy in the final “Poco allegro,” but shortly before its final vigorous moments, the melody that opened the Suite reasserts itself in a mournful guise, and, when the music ends, Okamura is sitting alone in the silence, with five empty chairs and no hand to hold.

Maile Okamura (L) and Amber Star Merkens in A Wooden Tree. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Since Ivor Cutler himself favored deerstalker hats and plaids, costumer Elizabeth Kurtzman has concocted a loony assemblage of Scottish outfits for A Wooden Tree. For instance, while Michelle Yard and some of the other women wear solid-color cotton dresses, Okamura sports long plaid shorts, a short-sleeved white shirt, knee-high argyle socks, and a tam o’shanter. Cutler sings his minimally melodic songs accompanied by a harmonium (an intriguingly subtle link with the Dvorák score that accompanied the preceding dance).

Morris finds ways to enlarge and undercut the very specific images. In “Rubber Toy,” when Cutler’s deep, slightly rough voice rhymes “lips” with “pips,” Mikhail Baryshnikov (guest artist as one of the gang) opens Okamura’s mouth (she’s the toy), and mimes spitting seeds into it. But when these, we’re told, sprout into a forest of girls, a lusty group makes a tableau of foliage. In “Little Black Buzzer,” the singer complains that he’s lost at the top of the world with a cold bum and a white face, trying to get a message to the outside world. Baryshnikov sits on the floor beside a chair and, with remarkable clarity, taps Morse code on its seat in counterpoint to the music, while the five women in the piece circle him, stepping jerkily in a dot-dash rhythm.

A Wooden Tree: Rita Donohue and Mikhail Baryshnikov (foreground) and (L to R) Aaron Loux, Dallas McMurray, Maile Okamura, and (half hidden) Amber Star Merkens. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Needless to say, Baryshikov immerses himself with verve in this community. His performance skills enable him both to fit in and to draw your eye. He’s a virtuoso of modesty—never more so when he and Weddel sit on chairs facing each other for “Beautiful Cosmos” to portray a long-married couple, companionably drinking tea, with little to say.

A Wooden Tree contains much interesting byplay on the sidelines, and the dancers (the cast includes Rita Donohue, Aaron Loux, and Amber Star Merkens) are as tartly and endearingly eccentric as the music.

Morris pulls a little joke of his own. After the poignant chair duet, Michael Chybowski dims his excellent lighting, the audience applauds, and the cast takes a bow. Then: Music! Lights! And a finale: “Cockadoodledon’t.”

Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez in Morris’s Jenn and Spencer. Photo: Stephanie Berger

If you listen to Cowell’s Suite for Violin and Piano after seeing Jenn and Spencer, you may find yourself thinking of the instruments as two beings who echo each other, argue, pose questions and provide answers, and embrace in ways both calming and disruptive. That Valtchev and Fowler will make provocative and lovely music together on their instrument is, of course, a given, just as it’s a given that Jenn Weddel and Spencer Ramirez—who’ve lent their names to the title— will reveal themselves as beautiful dancers, no matter what tensions Morris sets for them.

The tensions are many; so is the attraction between these two. When they circle the stage running, they never take their eyes off each other. And they contend in stranger, more intimate ways than simply pulling their grasped hands apart or striving to push an opponent away. Once, in the opening “Largo,” they lie on the floor, flailing until the soles of their feet meet and scrub against one another’s (the piano chords suddenly seem to be saying “no, no, no”). Then the two slide together, legs apart, until, for a tangled second or two, their crotches are locked as firmly as homing jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

Jenn Weddel in Jenn and Spencer. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Throughout the duet’s five sections, Ramirez and Weddel occasionally leave the arena, but never for long. They have moments alone to assert themselves.  The couplings they create in the “Andante tranquillo” can seem idealized (he lies on his back, legs in the air; she lies on his upturned feet and swims in air) or crudely erotic (he lies face down; she lies on top of him; he sharply bends his knees, thrusting his lower legs ceiling-ward through the space between hers). Shortly after this, he crawls on his belly toward a downstage corner, and she accompanies him on foot—stepping back and forth over him, whipping one leg around each time, the arc of her satin skirt as threatening as a storm cloud in a wind.

The “Andante calmato” sounds anything but calm. The piano begins with a rumble of dark chords, and at first Weddel and Ramirez walk staggeringly, joltingly. In the duet’s most violent moment, he bends and grabs one of her ankles while she’s lying on the ground, then revolves, turning her by that leg so that she has to keep rolling; for several long, uncomfortable seconds, she looks like a snagged fish flipping at the end of a line. The final “Presto” ends with her smacking him. He falls. She exits.

L to R: Laurel Lynch, Noah Vinson, and Chelsea Lynn Acree in Morris’s Crosswalk. Photo: Stephanie Berger

Jenn and Spencer is the dark heart of the evening. The closing piece, Crosswalk, announces itself from the get-go as mostly fleet, boisterous, and busy—like Weber’s Grand Duo Concertante, for which Todd Palmer matches his clarinet to Fowler’s expert piano playing. What can you expect from the opening image?  Dancers face in various directions, crouched in on-your-mark positions, ready to launch themselves into dangerous terrain. The very first rush spins Lynch and knocks her to the floor.

This is a crowd scene. It involves the four men we’ve seen earlier in the evening, plus Samuel Black, Brian Lawson, Noah Vinson, and apprentice Benjamin Freedman. Countering or joining this octet are Acree, Lynch, and Stacy Martorana. The splendid dancers race, somersault, skip, walk in opposing directions, and vault into the air to beat their legs together. Traffic control (i.e. choreography) works very well. Pairs unfettered by gender distinctions collaborate to lift a third person, who legs drawn up, seems to be jumping a barrier (or just jumping for the pleasure of it). You think the trios may collide, but they don’t.

Crosswalk: (L to R) Chelsea Lynn Acree, Noah Vinson, Laurel Lynch, Spencer Ramirez, and Billy Smith. Photo: Stephanie Berger

There are some odd  vignettes. During von Weber’s “Andante con Moto,” while some cast members pair up and stroll with the piano’s chords—not touching, but keeping close together, their crossed arms held out—Acree and Lynch decide to grab Vinson  and yank him in two. Then they clasp his head and stroke the backs of his legs. He turns the tables though. Suddenly the two women are close together, walking on their hands and feet, as ungainly and out of step with each other as two straggling cows being urged along (my favorite moment). Vinson’s the momentary herder. Pretty soon you can’t tell for sure who’s controlling whom, let alone why. I think he dies.

But he’s not too dead to sit up when he hears the final “Rondo:Allegro.” All he needed was that green light. The leaping and rushing accelerates. Pairs form and un-form and reform. At a climactic moment, Lynch assembles the men, backs off and races toward them; she jumps, is tossed high, caught, and sent on her way. Finally someone yells “Go!” As if that isn’t what they’ve been doing all along.