Jean Butler, meet Tere O’Connor
November 15, 2010
Solo dancer Jean Butler’s long, articulated, piano player hands command our attention in Tere O’Connor’s Day. Side by side, they make a flat fringed paddle. When they lead her long arms in space-grabbing port de bras, it could almost be called uplifting. In a workaday Danspace early show November 13, 2010, her character's resignation is infectious. We join her in prayer when she shakes her fingers or touches the floor.
James Baker’s variegated and engaging score, with its unintelligible words and non-sequitur sentences, is a perfect match. In a memorable tinkling passage, Butler runs sideways, facing the backdrop of translucent white curtains, returning like an old-fashioned typewriter carriage. With her arms extended, her fingers ply imaginary keys on either side of her. However, she imbues her moves with appealing softness that belies the mechanical.
Her dance looks like a string of responses to unseen happenings around her. Thus, her bodies innovative and evocative positions, transitions, and locomotions are the actual subject. What got done, or did not get done couldn’t be more hypothetical. For in the end, we empathize with her about pointlessness and about the Sisyphean nature of daily activities. What has changed?
Butler changes her states of rigor and relaxation and her crescendos of movement, which are signature O’Connor. Through his idiosyncratic modern vocabulary, dancers speak volumes with inventive steps. Butler is mostly vertical, running or reaching in a standing pose. She circles the room, en manège, with her knee raised. It is more difficult than it looks, balance-wise. She is very rhythmic in her musicality, as she would have been in her famed Riverdance career. In Day, when she walks like a one-person segmented creature, comment is inherent in her alluring movement. Wearing a simple royal blue dress, the creature glows.
Speaking of light, Michael O’Connor’s design is a memorable aspect of Day. If an oversize shadow of the dancer looms in the beginning and again about two thirds through, these are highlights of the spare set design. But Day eschews a narrative, linear, thread that might lead us to love it. For example, Day could go from sunrise to sunset: (1) rise, (2) shine, and (3) sleep. It does not.
Jean Butler. Photo: Michael O'Connor
Butler’s face can unexpectedly change, expressing holy terror or lyricism. She expands her cheeks like a blowfish, and then exhales a strong, audible, puff of windedness. As she moves through her stream of possibly purposeless activities, her extreme effort and her vulnerability are both on display.
There are some familiar signals. Butler swings her arm like a metronome to its percussive counterpart in Baker’s wonderful music, which includes a stringed instrument and electronic sounds. She is not seizing the day. Her lovely arabesques, where she spreads her long arms and legs, end with a fall and a thunk. O’Connor’s dances speak for the everyperson and they are not particularly palliative. There are several humorous bits that could provide relief and release. Our audience never laughed. We remained in suspended disbelief.
In a break from the world of competitive and commercial dance, Butler reportedly went to see O’Connor’s Rammed Earth five times and then commissioned him to create for her. In her long (30-year) career she made her name as an Irish step dancer. In that form, her head was “locked,” she said. That she dances in these different worlds, perhaps with equal facility, demonstrates the possibility for change, transformation, and survival.