![\"Cedar](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/AJ-2-pairs-M.G.jpg\")
<\/a>Cedar Lake dancers in Richard Siegal’s My Generation<\/em>. V\u00e2nia Doutel Vaz with Guillaume Qu\u00e9au (L) and Ebony Williams with Joaquim de Santana. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n The news that Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet was folding came in March. The entries on the company\u2019s Facebook page seethe with shock, sorrow, and profound disappointment from those who cherish Cedar Lake\u2019s dancers. And those dancers were rightly cheered at their farewell performances at BAM.<\/p>\n What happened? No one is revealing the details. A spokesperson for the company\u2019s founder and principal funder, Nancy Laurie, gave an statement to the New York Times <\/em>that raised more questions than it answered: \u201cOver the past decade we have dedicated substantial resources to Cedar Lake. Unfortunately, prevailing circumstances make running Cedar Lake no longer viable in this community.\u201d<\/p>\n Laurie, a Walmart heiress, is said to have been responsible for over seventy-five percent of the company\u2019s budget. Thinking back to another wealthy ballet patron, Rebecca Harkness, who shut down the Harkness Ballet in 1964, I can imagine that Cedar Lake\u2019s directors either failed to line up other funding sources, or that potential contributors figured, \u201cWhat the hell, she\u2019s got money; let\u2019s help less fortunate groups.\u201d<\/p>\n And it was, indeed, a fortunate group. I first saw its beginnings as the Cedar Lake Ensemble in late December of 2003, when it performed at Dance Theater Workshop. Three of the five pieces on that program were by the company\u2019s artistic director, Jen Ballard, a name new to the New York stage, and three of the dancers were from another company that had disbanded: Eliot Feld\u2019s Ballet Tech. One of those three, the terrific Nickemil Concepcion, is still aboard the sinking ship (another founding member, Jason Kittelberger, fairly recently dropped off the roster).<\/p>\n In 2005, when former Ailey dancer Benoit-Swan Pouffer took over as artistic director, the company moved into two renovated buildings on far-west 26th<\/sup> Street that included a handsome black-box theater. Pouffer could invite choreographers from Europe, some of whose work he knew from his pre-Ailey career in France, and the dancers (with 52-week contracts and health insurance) could luxuriate in the excellent new quarters, as well as rising to new challenges that included touring and unfamiliar ways of moving. Over the years, when auditions were held, hundreds showed up.<\/p>\n Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Alexander Ekman, Didy Veldman, Stijn Celis, Jo Str\u00f8mgren, Ji\u0159\u00ed Kyli\u00e1n, Ohad Naharin, Crystal Pite, among others, created (or in Naharin\u2019s case, adapted) works for the company that was renamed Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet and boasted fifteen stunning dancers. You had<\/em> to head west on 26th<\/sup> Street to see what new boundaries they were crossing.<\/p>\n Pouffer resigned in 2013, and since then, former ballet mistress Alexandra Damiani has been artistic director, aided by Brian Reeder as rehearsal director. I was buttonholed in the BAM lobby by someone who needed to make sure I knew how valiantly Damiani had been holding the enterprise on course until the end by making sure the works were polished to a high shine for Cedar Lake\u2019s last two engagements.<\/p>\n Ebony Williams displayed by Joaquim de Santana in My Generation<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n That was evident. At BAM, the company presented two programs of three works each; some of these were double cast. Those company members that I saw in Program A danced as if every moment were their last night on earth and they wanted to make it one to remember.<\/p>\n Looked at from one perspective, the program order seemed slightly askew. Richard Siegal\u2019s world premiere, My Generation<\/em>, which came first, has all the earmarks of a closer. On the other hand, Crystal Pite\u2019s elegantly and ardently somber Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue<\/em> (2008) showed just how sensitively the dancers could perform, and the last work on the program, Johan Inger\u2019s 2014 Rain <\/em>introduced elements of kinky humor in ways more controlled than Siegal\u2019s bash. So perhaps the thinking was to flood the audience with eye-popping costumes and virtuosic craziness and then announce, \u201cwe can also have dark thoughts and allude to postmodern gender politics.\u201d<\/p>\n Siegal (best known here for his appearances with William Forsythe\u2019s companies and for his own Germany-based group, The Bakery Paris\u2014Berlin) took his title from The Who\u2019s 1965 hit, \u201cMy Generation.\u201d The song is part of the recorded score for the dance, along with three pounding\u2014and intriguing\u2014 techno numbers by Atom\u2122 (Uwe Schmidt). A look at a montage video of The Who (https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=594WLzzb3JI<\/a>) gives a sense of the pacing and flurry of Siegal\u2019s dance. No guitar swinging and smashing, of course, but there\u2019s a pretty amazing performance by Matthew Rich (a Cedar Laker for ten years). Lip-syncing at us, strutting, flouncing, banging out his moves, his long hair and pieces of his outrageous costume swinging around him, he\u2019s crazed and unstoppable. The curtain has to descend on him. It almost immediately rises again, however; and the stage lights are turned on us as the dance begins to end for sure.<\/p>\n Cedar Lake’s Matthew Rich in Richard Siegal’s My Generation<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n Whatever generation(s) Siegal is putting onstage, its members are not your ordinary hippies (for one thing, the women are on pointe). Flamboyant, erratic, glamorous, the twelve dancers add to, subtract from, or change their attire almost every time you see them. Bernhard Willhelm\u2019s costumes, not all of them becoming, have things patched erratically onto them and hanging from them. Cotton meets satin meets fringe. Fashion stylist Edda Gudmun collaborated with Willhelm. Stan Pressner\u2019s lighting design adds to the gaudy imagery.<\/p>\n The dancers are often confrontational. They put their hands on their hips, take a stance, and fix hot stares on us. \u201cWe see you, baby,\u201d they might be saying. \u201cTake a good look.\u201d This is such a clich\u00e9 that I\u2019m not sure whether Siegal meant to send it up, or whether he thinks it an important part of the \u201cscene.\u201d<\/p>\n Navarra Novy-Williams playing with (L to R) Jon Bond, Joaquim de Santana, and Guillaume Qu\u00e9au in My Generation<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n But they do dance, and how they dance! The choreography ventures into extremes of strength, flexibility, and partnering. They spin, they swing their legs insanely high. The pointe shoes are almost beside the point, unless they stand in for stiletto heels and small weapons. Navarra Novy- Williams, alone onstage at the beginning of My Generation<\/em>, isn\u2019t alone for long. Jon Bond joins her, then Joaquim de Santana and Guillaume Qu\u00e9au. She\u2019s a party girl, although maybe they get a little too possessive. The men leave her in the lurch, but almost immediately return. Some hip action on their part turns the spectators on: \u201cWhooo!!\u201d they yell.<\/p>\n Ebony Williams, another ten-year veteran of Cedar Lake, and a favorite of the audience, pairs up with de Santana. To \u201cI Love You Like I Love My Drum Machine\u201d (Atom\u2122), she stares as if daring us to come onstage and inspect her at a closer range. Qu\u00e9au partners V\u00e2nia Doutel Vaz in similar outr\u00e9 ways. In this hopped-up ballroom, people come and go, stand and watch, as colorful as birds in an urban jungle. In the final Atom\u2122 number, a man\u2019s voice begins by announcing, \u201cZwanzig hertz, und ich bin meine maschine;\u201d the music gets denser and the units of frequency called out by this self-identifying machine increase from twenty to millions. The dancers clap along. The stage ought to explode from all this voltage, but it holds steady.<\/p>\n Ida Saki and Jon Bond in Crystal Pite’s Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue<\/em>. Photo: Sharen Bradford<\/p><\/div>\n Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue<\/em> is one of Cedar Lake\u2019s most enduring commissions. Unfortunately, it is not seen at its best on a proscenium stage like the Joyce. In Cedar Lake\u2019s own theater, you could see that it was various of the dancers who, from time to time, repositioned some of the tall standing lamps that form a semicircle around the back of the stage. In Jim French\u2019s purposely dim lighting, all you see the first time this happens is a light being moved by invisible hands.<\/p>\n Pite\u2019s work employs a small cast (the one I saw: Bond, Concepcion, Qu\u00e9au, Williams, and Ida Saki) and is set to music drawn from Cliff Martinez\u2019s score for the film Solaris\u2014<\/em> quietly ringing sounds with urgent repeated rhythmic motifs,.<\/em> The structure of the dance reflects the title in various ways: saving another, saving oneself, being saved. Two duets are struggles, the first between equals\u2014pushing each other down, pulling apart, dragging\u2014the second with one person stronger than the other. In the shadowy lighting, I thought that the second pair was Concepcion and Qu\u00e9au and marveled at how Concepcion can swing his partner around his body, bending and twisting to make it happen.<\/p>\n Nickemil Concepcion hoisting Guillaume Qu\u00e9au in Crystal Pite’s work. Photo: Sharon Bradford<\/p><\/div>\n The movement that circulates the five performers through ten duets is driving, pitted with pauses, and always expressive. Whether combative or tender, the dancers move their bodies with sinuous care as if adapting in advance to the next encounter. In at least one partnership (for Bond and Williams), two people dance side by side in vigorous unison. One duet bleeds into the next. The most remarkable is one for Bond and Saki. She walks slowly across the stage in a path of light, one hand trailing behind her. Bond follows her, running in place getting almost nowhere, reaching for her hand. By the time he touches her, he\u2019s collapsed at her feet. As he makes his way offstage, Williams enters and backs Saki into a very different sort of duet. Facing each other, gentle at first, they might be having a quiet discussion; it\u2019s hard to tell who is manipulating whom.<\/p>\n Inger created Rain Dogs<\/em> for the Basel Ballett in 2011 and Cedar Lake\u2019s dancers offered its New York premiere. Set to seven songs delivered in Tom Waits\u2019s gravelly voice, it organizes and disorganizes a squad of nine into what suggests an urban dystopia. The dancers wear street clothes. Smoke appears and fumes or clouds pass on the backdrop via Peter Lundin\u2019s lighting.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>