Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell at DTW
January 20, 2011
Two companies brought opposite ends of the spectrum to Dance Theater Workshop January 18. The seeming anarchy in a Gallim Dance work contrasted Sidra Bell's sleek and rigorous nightscape. We were split on the results.
Gallim gave For Glenn Gould, about the celebrated pianist’s retreat from performance. Choreographer Andrea Miller took a personalized look, in her oddly musical and engaging work. The movements are large, noisy, and at times contorted. Yet her consistent style has unwitting elegance. They begin in classical near nudity, but then don various American Apparel underthings. The dance is athletic, but gentle. To J.S. Bach, each stakes out floor space to build small constructions of found objects, including traffic cones and Christmas lights (timed to a dancer’s ta-da appearance center stage.) Two bring in some folding chairs as if they have made a mistake. Later, Troy Ogilvie dives into a neat setup of five chairs, only to stand and walk upstage with them all around her shoulders. Then, Arika Yamada surfs on a plastic Great Bear bottle— with its accompanying crunching sounds. It ends with apt inconclusiveness. “I feel like I’m disappearing in the dances,” we hear, as Francesca Romo stands far upstage looking forlorn.
Sidra Bell's Pool was inspired by an experience of near drowning. Its stark tableaux and slick, rigorous couplings fascinated.
In the spare setting, seven fluidly moving dancers suggest a surrealistic nightclub scene— and perhaps its stereotypical companion, hell. The main characters are Jonathan Campbell and Austin Diaz. Campbell wears an edge of magenta on his leotard and long, black finger attachments. Diaz has a fringed mane on his back. Everyone else wears black in various combinations of mesh, Lycra, and Vinyl. Bell dancer Alexandra Johnson designed the creative costumes.
Campbell and Diaz return to each other at least three times, as if hashing out the unfinished business of a developing love relationship. As per the inspiration, let's say that Campbell is a death figure— he and tall Zach McNally, who stands very still, ahead of a diagonal line of four gesticulating women. McNally later goes to the foot of the stage and spreads his long, articulated limbs. In one duet, he and Johnson tango or tangle. Bell creatively mines nightlife for vocabulary.
The positions are severe. Toes are pointed to the max (in socks?) Think vogue, Édouard Lock, Euro. The score is as esoteric and mesmerizing as the movement: Agoria, Gudrun Gut, Senking, and other otherworldly, mechanistic selections that, in this case, resist musicality.
Vigilante creates a dystopia using haze and carry-on spotlights. Dancers appear to climb in and out of light-filled ovals on the black cyclorama. We can imagine them as mirrors, exits, or heavenly planes. At other times, the stage is an icy white arena setting off silhouettes of the shape-shifting bodies. They only need to walk forward in a ground of dizzying, rotating limelights.
Bell uses lines of dancers to effect. In one quartet, while looking up, they loudly suck in the air, and here is the first, direct clue to her inspiration— drowning in a pool. The feeling of suffocation is, in itself, not one that everyone will want to cozy up to. But in the end, the main duo stand apart in a parabola of light on the floor. Campbell seems to levitate as he takes an audible breath…and so do we.