![\"Molissa](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/AJ-trio-03_FoundObject_PhotobyIanDouglas.jpg\")
<\/a>Molissa Fenley’s new Found Object<\/em>. (L to R): Rebecca Chaleff, Peiling Kao, Molissa Fenley, and composer-vocalist Erin Gee. Photo: Ian Douglas<\/p><\/div>\n Elizabeth Streb is in the house!\u00a0 Not everyone at New York Live Arts for the opening night of\u00a0 Molissa Fenley and Company\u2019s season would understand the exclamation point. I don\u2019t deny Streb\u2019s celebrity status in the downtown dance world, but the enthusiastic punctuation is there because, over 30 years ago, Streb was one of four young performers in Mix<\/i>, one of the first works that introduced Fenley\u2019s choreography to a New York audience. The year was 1979, and the place was the Kitchen Center for Video and Dance, then situated at the corner of Broome and Wooster. Eric Bogosian was the dance curator.<\/p>\n Sally Banes wrote in the Soho News <\/i>that Fenley\u2019s was the best new choreography that she had seen to date. And she understood that Mix<\/i> didn\u2019t display over-the-moon newness. Fenley, it was clear, was in love with repetition. And we knew repetition. Lucinda Childs and Laura Dean had taught us to look at dance steps and geometric patterns over and over, patiently watching them change in minimal ways. They had also re-investigated what footwork had to offer dance; with the exception of Merce Cunningham, few choreographers outside ballet kept the performers\u2019 feet busy, preferring to give the torso and arms a workout and let the legs carry them along.<\/p>\n But Fenley had her own style, born of her heritage and her influences (her early upbringing in Nigeria had much to do with her love of ongoing rhythms, as did the fact that she came to dance late and from athletics). There was a kind of shared jubilation among the performers; a boisterous, peppy look to the steps; and a sense of ordeal gladly faced.<\/p>\n Energizer <\/i>premiered the following year at Dance Theater Workshop, 19th<\/sup> Street quarters were then owned by Jerome Robbins and called the American Theater Laboratory).\u00a0 So Energizer<\/i>, the revival of which closes Fenley\u2019s NYLA program, is 33 years old. You\u2019d never know it, except for the fact that no one born the year it premiered makes work like hers today.<\/p>\n Fenley’s Energizer<\/em>. (L to R): Peiling Kao, Cassandra Neville, Christiana Axelsen. and Rebecca Chaleff. Photo: Ian Douglas<\/p><\/div>\n The fastidiously reconstructed piece seems to inhabit an arduous, invigorating, ongoing present. Fenley constructed its patterns to grow, shrink, and shape-shift, but while watching it, you can\u2019t remember (or don\u2019t want to bother to remember) what has come before or how it might turn out. Even so, within its fierce minimalism, there\u2019s a lot to see in its three sections.<\/p>\n Jill St. Coeur has recreated the original costumes by Ariel\/Hayes Design and Yonson Pak. The four women who perform the first and third sections wear jumpsuits of different colors: persimmon (Christiana Axelsen), blue-gray (Rebecca Chaleff ), navy blue (Peiling Kao), and lavender (Cassandra Neville).\u00a0 David Moodey\u2019s lighting includes a backdrop whose shadowy, luminescent gray patterns sometimes suggest ocean, sometimes stratus clouds, and sometimes tree branches.<\/p>\n The colors vivify and particularize the patterns. The women, in other words, don\u2019t look like worker bees. As they circle, pin down the corners of a square, criss-cross, meet in the middle, and go back where they came from, their individual colors in motion could imply weaving, but, of course, no static, finished tapestry results. Mark Freedman\u2019s recorded score maintains a strong percussive beat with other sounds feeding in and out. You can hear the women\u2019s feet too, as the women walk, run, gallop, sashay, hop, leap, kick, and turn. \u00a0Fenley has always used her arms distinctively, and the dancers have learned how to slash theirs through the air, the palms of their hands flat, the fingers held together. For her, a curved arm isn\u2019t a sweet frame; it\u2019s an arch constructed of something substantial yet malleable. \u00a0Occasionally the four women do little things with their shoulders, or swing their hips jauntily around, or touch one another lightly. The springiness of the steps gives a buoyancy to the patterns, but also contributes to the dancers\u2019 labor. How can they keep doing this?\u00a0 How long will they be able to look spirited and at ease?<\/p>\n There are two breaks in which they catch their breaths offstage, and we contemplate the backdrop. But there are also costume changes. For the second section Axelsen reappears in a sleeveless outfit with Fenley, who is dressed similarly. It cools the eye to watch just the two of them join and separate their patterns. After the second pause, the dancers feed in one by one\u2014Kao first, then Chaleff, then Neville, then Axelsen (back in her original attire). Now they\u2019re damp and beginning to tire, but they perform with undiminished verve. If you\u2019ve dared to tune out briefly, their valor, their rhythmic acuity, and your own desire to figure out how Fenley devised these designs add a kind of drama to the over and over and over again steps.<\/p>\n Molissa Fenley in The Floor Dances<\/em>. Photo: Ian Douglas<\/p><\/div>\n Between 1988 and 1997, Fenley focused on creating solos for herself. \u00a0The first of her two NYLA programs opens with one she made in 1989: The Floor Dances. <\/i>It was, she has said, her response to an ecological disaster: the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil spilled in Alaskan waters by the tanker Exxon Valdez. In the space of several days, oil covered the coast, the waters, and the wildlife inhabitants. Fenley performs the dance in a circle of rocks created by the British land artist Richard Long. The setting invokes an ancient ritual place, and Moodey\u2019s beautiful lighting suggest both the artic sea and its lowering skies.<\/p>\n The subtle and eloquent solo, as its title implies, is not about brisk footwork. Nor does it depict struggle in any realistic way. Just as part of the accompanying score, Henryk Mikolaj G\u00f3recki\u2019s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for soprano and orchestra, op. 36, memorializes a prayer written by a Polish girl on the cell wall of a Gestapo prison, Fenley seems to be remembering the trapped and immobilized wild life along the Alaskan coast. She performs almost entirely in a sitting position\u2014stretching her arms and legs, inching slowly forward, curling in, reaching out, scanning the distance. Sometimes she moves her hand toward her mouth, fingers gathered like the beak of a bird, and, for a second, with that single gesture, she becomes the hungry, the feeder, and the fed. She also briefly uses one hand like a mirror (perhaps to test her breathing) and points her elbows upward like straining wings.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>