{"id":2551,"date":"2014-05-10T19:41:28","date_gmt":"2014-05-10T23:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=2551"},"modified":"2014-05-12T13:52:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T17:52:51","slug":"the-new-in-the-old-the-old-in-the-new","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2014\/05\/the-new-in-the-old-the-old-in-the-new\/","title":{"rendered":"The New in the Old, The Old in the New"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Limon Dance Company performs at the Joyce; Miki Orihara debuts a solo program.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>

An earlier group of Lim\u00f3n Dance Company members performs Jos\u00e9 Lim\u00f3n’s Psalm<\/em>. Photo: Beatriz Schiller<\/p><\/div>\n

It was several days after I saw the Lim\u00f3n Dance Company at the Joyce Theater that I suddenly discerned subtle connections among the four works on the program that artistic director Carla Maxwell put together for the company\u2019s 68th<\/sup> anniversary\u2014two by company founder Jos\u00e9 Lim\u00f3n (1908-1972) and two new works, one by Dianne McIntyre and one by Sean Curran.<\/p>\n

Lim\u00f3n\u2019s Mazurkas<\/em> and Psalm<\/em> reveal two strains of his choreography\u2014the dramatic and the choric. He made Mazurkas <\/em>in 1958 as a corollary to his Missa Brevis <\/em>of the same year. The latter magisterial work was prompted by his company\u2019s visit to the destroyed Polish cities of World War II. If in Missa Brevis<\/em>,he celebrated the Polish people\u2019s heroic, undying spirit by building cathedrals of dancing around the particulars of the Mass. Mazurkas<\/em>, set to Chopin piano music, paints the joy of a community gathered to celebrate some unspecified occasion\u2014perhaps (all too appropriately this year) the coming of Spring. It\u2019s full of leaps and bounds, the men displaying their strength, the women flipping their skirts as they twist and turn. The formations that in Missa Brevis<\/em> suggested shifting walls and choral prayers here become the festive circles and lines of a folk dance.<\/p>\n

Psalm<\/em>, made nine years later, re-stated a theme that pervaded most of the dances in which Lim\u00f3n himself appeared. But this time, his protagonist wasn\u2019t Othello, Judas, Julian The Apostate, Eugene O\u2019Neill\u2019s Emperor Jones, or any other famous figure from history or literature struggling with a moral dilemma. The solo figure in Psalm<\/em>, called The Just Man, embodies the thirty-six just men of Hebrew tradition, who unknowingly bear and help contain the evils of the world. In 1967, Lim\u00f3n may have already been looking ahead to his end, and his words, printed in the Joyce program, speak of the \u201cheroic power of the human spirit, triumphant over death itself.\u201d At Psalm<\/em>\u2019s premiere, Louis Falco danced the role of the burden bearer amid the interweaving throngs of people moving in synchrony.<\/p>\n

\"Roxane<\/a>

Roxane D’Orleans Juste in Dianne McIntyre’s She Who Carries the Sky<\/em>. Photo: Joseph Schembri<\/p><\/div>\n

The very diverse choreographers of the two new works echo themes and elements of the Lim\u00f3n works, as their titles suggest. McIntyre\u2019s solo for Roxane D\u2019Orleans Juste is named She Who Carries the Sky<\/em> and the full-company piece by Sean Curran is called Nocturnes for Ancestors. <\/em><\/p>\n

McIntyre has cast D\u2019Orleans Juste, who is celebrating her thirtieth anniversary with the company, as a hero, who, like The Just Man of Psalm<\/em>, is unaware that she is one of those people strong enough to bear any burden and have been chosen by God to carry part of the sky on their heads (a program quote from Edwige Danticat\u2019s Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/em> makes this statement).<\/p>\n

D\u2019Orleans Juste\u2014eloquent at conveying nuances both choreographic and emotional\u2014appears as a powerful figure, a shaman maybe. Standing in a pool of light (lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker), she seems to stir the air, to conjure things from the earth. Once, twice, she staggers backward, as if her exertions have stirred up a bee hive.<\/p>\n

Aware of everything around her, D\u2019Orleans Juste bows to the four corners of the stage and often peruses the sky, as if anticipating a storm. She performs the familiar gestures of covering her eyes, her ears, her mouth, except that she pries that mouth open wide to let who knows what escape. She holds up a scarf as a kind of talisman or wraps it around herself.<\/p>\n

The sounds of a rainstorm interrupts music by Jon Hassel and by Farafina and R. Carlos Nakari, then fades into silence. Did she cause that?<\/p>\n

In this portrait (a trifle drawn out, but vivid), McIntyre capitalizes on D\u2019Orleans Juste\u2019s gift for tempering small explosions of movement and sharp little gestures with bigger, more melting steps and space-covering runs. If you\u2019re carrying the sky, you\u2019d better be adaptable. Sheer muscle power won\u2019t cut it.<\/p>\n

\"Daniel<\/a>

Daniel Fetecua Soto and Logan Frances Kruger in Sean Curran’s Nocturnes for Ancestors<\/em>. Photo Joseph Schembri<\/p><\/div>\n

Sean Curran\u2019s \u201cancestors\u201d are not the Judeo-Christian ones that attracted Lim\u00f3n, nor are they exclusively Curran\u2019s own Irish forbears. As in some of the works he makes for his own company, angled hands and elbows and poses that evoke Indian dance mingle with hearty footwork about which I scribbled \u201cBalkan\u201d at some point. Rolling on the floor is included along with springy steps. The dancers wear fancy, gypsy-bright costumes by Amanda Shafran, and the music\u2014commissioned from Lucia Caruso and Pedro H. da Silva\u2014becomes wonderfully raucous at times, sweet as a love song at others. This is a festival for sure, but a more bumptious one than Lim\u00f3n\u2019s nostalgic fete for an idyllic Polish village.<\/p>\n

I found the opening slightly off-putting; the dancers, spaced out and facing us, going through their precise gestures in unison, might be about to open a Broadway show. But after that, the piece takes off. Like Lim\u00f3n, Curran plays all manner of skillful games with circles and lines that cross, dissolve, and re-form. He even channels a favorite traveling step of Lim\u00f3n\u2019s: the dancer skims sideways on tiptoe with bent knees. Counterpoint is a friend of his. And in the spirited comings and goings, he points up the dancers in brief duets, trios, quartets, and more.<\/p>\n

The dancers are wonderful. They open the evening with Mazurkas<\/em>, and in their white clothes with small touches of color, they look like Sunday-best, real people, who just happen to know all these energetic, playful steps and to enjoy doing them. An extra pleasure: Vanessa Perez played the Chopin piano works live. The cast I saw (Elise Drew Leon, Daniel Fetecua Solo, Durrell R. Comedy, Kathryn Alter, Logan France Kruger, Brenna Monroe-Cook, and Francisco Ruvalcaba) gave fine performances in this luminous work. As did Kristen Foote, Ross Katen, Dante Puleio, Aaron Selissen, Rapha\u00ebl Bouma\u00efla and D\u2019Orleans Juste, who joined them in the full-company pieces. Bouma\u00efla was eloquent as the Just Man in Psalm. <\/em><\/p>\n

For years now, some people have dismissed Lim\u00f3n\u2019s work as pass\u00e9. Granted he could be ponderous or sanctimonious on occasion, and, unfashionably, he wore his heart on his sleeve in the years when postmodernism was on the ascendant. But his gifts were very great and his themes timeless. So the dissent must have to do with style, and perhaps he worked too close to our own time for us to see his work in perspective. After all, dancegoers don\u2019t generally say of Swan Lake <\/em>\u201cthat is so <\/em>old-fashioned.\u201d (True, 19th<\/sup>-century ballets get their updates, but still. . . .)<\/p>\n

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\"Miki<\/a>

Miki Orihara in Adam Barruch’s Memory Current<\/em>. Photo: Juan Vargas\/Ellen Jacobs Associates<\/p><\/div>\n

Coincidentally, the week following the Limon Dance Company\u2019s season, Miki Orihara debuted Ky\u014dmei\u2014Resonance<\/em> at the start of the annual LaMama Moves Dance Festival that runs through May 24 in LaMama\u2019s three performance spaces. On her solo program in the Ellen Stewart Theater (May 8 through 11), Orihara dances a work by Martha Graham and one by Jos\u00e9 Lim\u00f3n, a 1978 vignette by Martha Clarke, a new solo she choreographed herself, and a premiere by the young choreographer Adam Barruch. Her program note explains her interest in \u201ccontinuity and lineage,\u201d and in the course of it she remarks that \u201cA \u2018New Thing\u2019 is not necessarily new the next day, and an \u2018Old Thing\u2019 is not necessarily old, even a half century later!\u201d<\/p>\n

A member of the Martha Graham Company since the 1980s, Orihara has given some of the best performances I\u2019ve seen in roles that Graham created for herself. She enters the character, the movement, and the moment in time so completely and without artifice that she seems to be creating and embodying something, not just representing it.<\/p>\n

Ky\u014dmei\u2014Resonance<\/em> is an elegantly arranged program. Orihara takes no bows until the end; she hurries away in the blackout after each piece. Three times composer-pianist Senri Oe fills the brief span of time when she\u2019s changing costumes to entertain us with one of the interestingly varied pieces that he terms \u201cMusic Reflections.\u201d The first is spare and occupies the upper reaches of the keyboard, the second, deeper, fuller; and more rhythmically vigorous, suggests a dance tune; the third hints at piano jazz in a cocktail lounge. (I like it that Oe plays suited up but barefoot.)<\/p>\n

Orihara\u2019s choreographic choices reveal how finely she can accommodate herself to very different styles. In Graham\u2019s Satyric Festival Song<\/em>, she\u2019s drolly antic. Actually, this isn\u2019t actually the work that Graham created and performed in 1932; it\u2019s a simulacrum devised in 1994 by Diane Gray and the Graham company\u2019s current artistic director, Janet Eilber. The impish gestures and stances that Orihara unleashes were drawn from still photos of Graham, joined in a coherent sequence, and set to perky new music for solo flute by Fernando Palacios (Daniel James plays the flute, and the dancer includes him in her inquisitive gaze). You can glimpse Graham in her late thirties in the way that Orihara cocks her hips to press against the long, narrow skirt of a dress banded in green, black, and gold or flips her long black hair into the air.<\/p>\n

\"Miki<\/a>

Miki Orihara dances Jos\u00e9 Lim\u00f3n’s Maenad<\/em>. Photo: Juan Vargas\/Ellen Jacobs Associates<\/p><\/div>\n

When she reappears for Maenad<\/em>, she\u2019s costumed in a short, filmy red tunic over a flesh-colored leotard (I found the costume distracting: too short, too skimpy). This luscious solo is one of those that Lim\u00f3n choreographed in 1971 for the women in his company and grouped together as Dances for Isadora (Five Evocations of Isadora<\/em> Duncan<\/em>). Now Orihara is a wild thing, rushing about, rolling on the floor. She is not quite as earthy as a Lim\u00f3n dancer would be, but she captures the joy in suspending a movement until gravity lures her out of it. Mark Stuparevic played the accompanying Chopin piano music.<\/p>\n

For Clarke\u2019s macabre Nocturne<\/em>, set to recordings (by pianist Walter Gieseking) of Mendelssohn pieces, Orihara appears in sepulchral light, wearing a long white tutu. She\u2019s naked from the waist up and shields her breasts with a crooked arm; translucent veiling is tied over her head and face, making her look like a discarded rag doll. This is indeed a dying swan, an aging ballerina perhaps\u2014making wan gestures, drooping, recalling grace. She remembers how to cross her wrists and flap her hands like wings, but not much else. In the end, fallen to the floor, she unwinds the red ribbon that secures her veil and makes herself and us believe it\u2019s a cane, frail though it is. Planting it, step by step, she hobbles away into darkness.<\/p>\n

\"Miki<\/a>

Miki Orihara in Martha Clarke’s Nocturne<\/em>. Photo: Juan Vargas\/Ellen Jacobs Associates<\/p><\/div>\n

Orihara\u2019s own Prologue<\/em> contains very little dancing, but speaks eloquently of\u2014perhaps\u2014 loss and not giving in to grief. A tall narrow screen holds a video by Tobin Del Cuore that shows her sitting erect and motionless on a wooden chair. Three other chairs are scattered around the space. She looks about her, leans her cheek down as if to place in on the seat of one chair but doesn\u2019t actually touch it; she starts to sit on another, but straightens up as if burned just by proximity. Her film image stands and leaves the frame, while she sits on an identical chair beside the screen, her clenched hands on her lap. The music that starts up quietly is a recording by Janis Ian of \u201cI Hear You Sing Again,\u201d a song Ian wrote with Woody Guthrie (music by Mica Nozawa is also heard).<\/p>\n

All that Orihara does now is very slowly unclench her fists and spread her fingers out against her skirt; her actions, seen in close-up, appear on the screen. She doesn\u2019t look at her hands, only gazes straight ahead into some infinitely bleak memory or thought. And then, very slowly, she folds her hands back into fists, and the lights go out.<\/p>\n

Oe composed the score for Barruch\u2019s Memory Current<\/em>, and he begins playing it on the piano in the dark, while Orihara appears in a pool of light at some distance from him (Clifton Taylor lit both this and Prologue<\/em>). Now she\u2019s wearing simple, lightweight gray pants and a matching long-sleeved top. Having passed through debility and minimally revealed despair, she returns to lyricism, but not exactly to joy. She seems to be reliving private moments and dilemmas, although not in any literal way. A marvel at creating nuances within movements, Orihara goes from big, swooping steps to ones that loosen and wilt. She performs Barruch\u2019s sensitive, well-made solo with utter simplicity and honesty. She can stand completely still, her arms at her sides, her face calm, and make you understand that tides of thought are ebbing and flowing through her.<\/p>\n

Old and new. Memories and plans for tomorrow. Tradition and innovation. The second depends on the first; the ghost of the first glows and sparks within the second.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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