![\"Anna](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/AJ-Outlier3_Anna-Nowak_Thomas-Ade\u0300s-Concentric-Paths_WL2015_Kevin-Yatarola_KY1_3123.jpg\")
<\/a>Anna Nowak lifted by James Pett in Wayne McGregor’s Outlier<\/em>. Photo: Kevin Yatarola<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cHis music moves from here to there in a way that is at heart choreographic.\u201d Music critic and historian James M. Keller wrote those words in a program note for \u201cThomas Ad\u00e8s: Concentric Paths\u2014Movements in Music,\u201d the Sadler’s Wells London\u2019s production of four dances set to Ad\u00e8s scores, an event in Lincoln Center\u2019s White Light Festival. Watching and listening during Wayne McGregor\u2019s Outlier<\/em>, Karole Armitage\u2019s Life Story<\/em>, Alexander Whitley\u2019s The Grit in the Oyster<\/em>, and Crystal Pite\u2019s Polaris<\/em> is an absorbing experience\u2014much of it due to the music. And Ad\u00e8s himself was present in the performance, conducting the first and last pieces and playing piano for the two middle ones.<\/p>\n In line with Keller\u2019s observation, Ad\u00e8s has spoken of his process the way a choreographer might speak of composing a dance: \u201cThe moment I put a note down on paper, it starts to slide around the page. And the writhing that I could see when I look at a note under the microscope, you would see with any living thing.\u201d Not only does the fascinating music heard at the Lincoln Center performances slide and writhe, it pounces, falls silent, soars into melody, crashes; elements within it wrangle, punch each other out, and bed down together.<\/p>\n The nine dancers in Company Wayne McGregor perform Outlier<\/em> (2010) to Ad\u00e8s\u2019s 2005 three-movement Violin Concerto (\u201cConcentric Paths\u201d). The title of the first movement, \u201cRings,\u201d inspired Lucy Carter\u2019s design on the backdrop: concentric shaded circles of red light, whose flaming center eventually becomes dark gray. For \u201cPaths,\u201d the circles give way to contiguous gray columns, as if a sheet of paper, folded into an accordion had been stretched out.<\/p>\n Travis Clausen-Knight and Daniela Neugebauer in Wayne McGregor’s Outlier<\/em>. Photo: Kevin Yatarola<\/p><\/div>\n In this work, created for New York City Ballet in 2010, the dancing is not intimately involved with the music, nor is it not not involved. Given the nature of Ad\u00e9s\u2019s score, the atmosphere becomes that of a dangerous playground, in which a venturesome bunch of people wearing practice clothes and no heavy makeup advance their own agendas simultaneously, connect in risky ways, and hang around to watch what\u2019s going on. There\u2019s no joy in this for them; McGregor bends the classical vocabulary into a gale of flying legs and arms, with the dancers\u2019 bodies twisting through crannies of space. The hand of William Forsythe hangs over the goings-on.<\/p>\n James Pett dances first alone (perhaps he is the \u201coutlier,\u201d isolated from the others in some way, just as the violin played by Thomas Gould is a often questing individual voice).The women\u2014as exemplified in a duet for Daniela Neugebauer and Travis Clausen-Knight\u2014are manhandled in ingeniously violent ways; their encounters seem neither sexual nor amorous. After a crash, answering thumps , and a blackout have brought the \u201cRings\u201d section to an end, and \u201cPaths\u201d has begun, Pett and Clausen-Knight collaborate to do even more complex and uncomfortable things with the remarkable Neugebauer.<\/p>\n The stage picture is highly active, busy, changeable. \u201cPaths\u201d is further complicated by the dancers\u2019 shadows edging in on the backdrop. But McGregor tidies things up for \u201cRound,\u201d and the lights brighten significantly. Nine dancers working their tails off in three lines of three. In three trios. The other fine and interesting dancers who make all this work are Louis McMiller, Mbuelo Ndabeni, Anna Nowak, Catarina Carvalho, Alvaro Dule, and Jessica Wright.<\/p>\n Ruka Hatua-Saar and Emily Wagner in Karole Armitage’s Life Story<\/em>. Photo: Kevin Yatarola<\/p><\/div>\n Armitage created Life Story<\/em> in 1999 for two New York City Ballet principals, Wendy Whelan and Albert Evans; premiered in London, it was first seen in New York during the Joyce Theater’s 2001 Altogether Different series. The choreographer made a daring decision in choosing for her music Ad\u00e8s\u2019s 1994 setting of a 1950s freestyle poem by Tennessee Williams about himself (referred to as \u201cyou\u201d) and a stranger in a one-night stand. The sex is over; they\u2019re smoking and getting up to pee and telling each other their life stories, becoming increasingly tired as they do so.<\/p>\n I hear you wondering, \u201cis this a workable topic for a duet?\u201d Well, it\u2019s certainly a strange one. And the most continuously compelling thing about this performance of it is soprano Anna Dennis, who leans indolently into the crook of the onstage piano that Ad\u00e8s is playing (pouncing on it at the start). Her voice and manner wonderfully capture Williams\u2019s take-it-or-leave-it text and the exhaustion that overcomes the protagonists.<\/p>\n Thomas Ad\u00e8s and Anna Dennis rendering his Life Story<\/em>. Photo: Kevin Yatarola<\/p><\/div>\n In a program mini-essay, Armitage refers to Life Story<\/em> as \u201ca hilarious and heart-wrenching portrait of two people who spend the night together, sharing only their complete absence of intimacy.\u201d It was Armitage\u2019s intent for the dancers to embody the score, bringing out its dramatic contrasts through their dynamics and timing. Yet never has a post-coital conversation been expressed so strenuously. That\u2019s what gives the duet its edge of weirdness.<\/p>\n The artist David Salle, who has frequently collaborated with Armitage, has dressed dancers Ruka Hatua-Saar and Emily Wagner in selective dishabille; he has his trousers on but rolled up; she\u2019s wearing a blouse and underpants. Wagner\u2014tall, leggy, highly bendable, and on pointe\u2014has wound her red hair into two buns, the way a dancer playing a dog might do. The huskier Hatua-Saar handles her with good humor and the kind of interest that their exchanges of personal histories might engender. She is pert. He is forthright. She dances intricately and energetically, often with his intricate and energetic assistance, and one or the other of the two may also convey a bit of the pique or sullenness expressed in Williams\u2019s laconic poem (printed in the program). A couple of times, he bends over and she sits perkily on his back, as if that\u2019s what he\u2019s there for. By the end, they\u2019re both drooping, falling asleep as Dennis\u2019s voice softens. However, they summon up the energy to spin offstage. In opposite directions, of course.<\/p>\n Antonette Dayrit (standing), Natalie Allen, and Wayne Parsons in Alexander Whitley’s The Grit in the Oyster<\/em>. Photo: Kevin Yatarola.<\/p><\/div>\n After two dances that show the human body as a complicated mechanism, better at expressing wayward, sometimes competing goals, Whitley\u2019s 2014 The Grit in the Oyster<\/em> (a commission by Sadler\u2019s Wells London) is something of a relief, in that the movement that he has created for a trio of dancers is texturally simpler, less dense. The music he chose is Ad\u00e8s\u2019s fine Piano Quintet (2000), and it\u2019s a treat to have the musicians of the Calder Quartet (Benjamin Jacobson, Andrew Bulbrook. Jonathan Moerschel, Eric Byer) onstage along with the composer.<\/p>\n In his program essay, Whitley has listed in part the qualities that drew him to this music as the interplay between \u201csearching melodies and driving rhythms, chaotic dissonance and tender harmony.\u201d He also found in an interview Ad\u00e8s\u2019s reference to F as a \u201cfetish note\u201d in the score (presumably akin to the irritating grain of sand around which the oyster willy-nilly creates a pearl).<\/p>\n While the instruments of the ensemble begin by chasing one around, Antonette Dayrit embarks on a solo. The steps are big and open; she may drop to the floor and rise again within a movement phrase. Lighting designer Lee Curran offers her a private pool of radiance. But this is a trio, in which Dayrit, Natalie Allen, and Wayne Parsons embrace, scrimmage, and streak along the floor. They also pause at times\u2014for instance, staring in the same offstage direction, then moving calmly toward and away from that focal point, while the piano and violin go crazy. It may be their moments of stillness amid their turns and falls that distinguish The Grit in the Oyster<\/em> from the two previous works, or maybe it\u2019s such intimations of tenderness as Dayrit helping her colleagues to rise from the floor by placing the palms of her hands beneath their cheeks.<\/p>\n Although the rhythms and textures of the choreography are more even than those in Ad\u00e8s\u2019s marvelous Piano Quintet, Whitley does create a sense of three people journeying together through a thorny landscape in the same way that the music, cast in sonata form, makes its sure way, sampling earlier musical styles as it goes.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>