![\"Christine](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/AJ-singer-dancer_MG_1512.jpg\")
<\/a>Christine Andreas (singer) and Charis Haines (dancer) in black-and-white as Edith Piaf in Pascal Rioult’s Street Singer<\/em>. Photo: Paul B. Goode<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n To get myself in the mood to write about Pascal Rioult\u2019s Street Singer<\/em>, a work celebrating what would have been Edith Piaf\u2019s hundredth birthday, I dug up a relic from my family\u2019s past: a 10-inch LP from the 1940s, Chansons Parisiennes<\/em> (it had cost three dollars) and listened to Piaf sing \u201cLa Vie en Rose\u201d (by Louis Louiguy, Mack David, Marcel Louiguy, and Piaf). How enthrallingly that voice\u2014now raw-edged, now defiant, now mournful\u2014hymned and cursed love\u2019s ecstasies, pitfalls, and tragedies. When I was a teenager, listening to her made me shake in anticipation.<\/p>\n Pascal Rioult must have had a similar encounter with Piaf (plus he\u2019s French), and Street <\/em>Singer, a the music-dance-theater piece that he created in collaboration with Drew Scott Harris (dialogue and staging) and music director Don Rebic, vividly evokes her power. It\u2019s always a treat to see a choreographer push himself in a new direction, and who would have imagined that a one-time member of Martha Graham\u2019s company and a choreographer of works set to masterpieces of music or edgy works by contemporary composers would enter so boldly and so affectionately into an intimate relationship with cabaret?<\/p>\n Street Singer<\/em> was not presented by RIOULT Dance in a theater. Instead, the audience members in 42West Nightclub sit at tables on either side of a runway that leads to a very small stage, part of which is occupied by Rebic (at the piano), Patrick Farrell (accordion), John Miller (bass), and Chris Parker (percussion). Projections (by Brian Clifford Beasley) of grainy old photos and newsreels occasionally appear on the back wall. The bar lounge (with live entertainment) opens an hour before curtain time. I\u2019m feeling happy already, and a man sitting at my table has ordered one too many glasses of wine (merci, Monsieur).<\/p>\n Christine Andreas and Pascal Rioult in Street Singer<\/em>. Photo: Paul B. Goode<\/p><\/div>\n Without singer Christine Andreas\u2019s immense gifts, these evenings could not have been as enjoyable as they were. Andreas\u2014whose career encompasses performing in Broadway musicals, symphony orchestra concerts, and cabarets\u2014 channels \u201cLa m\u00f4me Piaf,\u201d the street sparrow, superlatively. Wearing (as Piaf did) a simple little black dress, she digs deeply into the mood of each song. Her voice is powerful, her French accent excellent. Nor does she just stand and sing; she also strides along the runway, occasionally moving among the dancers or addressing her words to them. The lights (by Jim French) imply her various milieus, as well as occasionally isolating her in a spotlight, which suits the atmosphere of a club and also suggests in its surrounding gloom the darkness that often crowded into her life. Street Singer <\/em>begins and ends with that most blazing of songs associated with Piaf: Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire\u2019s \u201cNon Je ne Regrette Rien,\u201d with its underlying, but inexorable rhythmic march and its message of beginning afresh and to hell with the past\u2014joys and griefs alike.<\/p>\n Rioult himself not only embellishes Andreas\u2019s rendition of \u201cSous le Ciel de Paris\u201d by reminding of the artists and poets who lived and worked there, and speaking some of the song\u2019s lyrics. He also dances briefly, with wonderfully leonine power. No longer the slender young guy he once was, he movingly shadows Piaf\u2019s great love, the champion boxer Marcel Cerdan, who was killed in a plane crash, and simply by turning his back to the action and then coming forward again, he evokes the ghost of the man and the days of love that Andreas sings about.<\/p>\n The members of RIOULT Dance (six men and four women) are kept busy illustrating the events in Piaf\u2019s life and career that colored her songs. Pilar Limosnar\u2019s costumes aid in their many transformations. Sara Elizabeth Seger, Candace V. Perry, and Charis Haines cluster and flutter around Catherine Cooch, evoking the years little Piaf spent with her paternal grandmother, who operated a brothel in Normandy. Sometimes the dancers fleetingly assume roles or reveal crowd behavior. When Piaf, manipulated by her father, becomes a street performer, Jere Hunt steps out of the group to command her: \u201cSing!\u201d and \u201clouder!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>