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Expect the unexpected

Aszure Barton's "Blue Soup' and "Busk' at Annenberg

In
2 minute read
I'm drawn to dance for the same reason that I'm drawn to world music — both are highly expressive, time-based art forms in languages I don't speak. Dance provides a welcome refuge from how I spend much of my life as a writer and editor: absorbed in words and language. Thus I found the recent performance by Aszure Barton & Artists at the Annenberg deeply refreshing to those overworked verbal portions of my brain.

Barton, a Canadian, has worked with Baryshnikov Arts Center (Baryshnikov called her "one of the most innovative choreographers of this generation"), American Ballet Theater and Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal, among other companies. On this evening, her own troupe did two pieces: Blue Soup, a collage of her previous work, and Busk, a series of vignettes on the theme of street performance. It was an utterly riveting evening of dance that had me unanalytically absorbed in patterns of movement.

Skewed perspective

Barton uses her dancers to create those patterns with poses and gestures that they repeat and recombine: bent knees and elbows, strong diagonal extensions, leaps in place, waves and beckons. The movements are presented in solos, in canon, in counterpoint, in unison.

The staging can be unexpected. The second segment in Blue Soup had the troupe at the back of the stage, facing away from the audience, lit eerily from above. This arrangement created a tension that was resolved quickly— for me at least— and moved me past the expectation that I would see the dancers' faces. The movement becomes more purely movement by being presented "backward." That skewed sense of perspective is central to Barton's aesthetic vision.

Hidden faces


Another example came in Busk, in which the dancers wore hooded costumes. The monkish effect was tweaked and transformed when the dancers stood in a clump, moving their hands and heads, showing and hiding their faces— evoking a choir, an audience, an abstraction.

Barton uses— and subverts— our expectations about how dancers move and how meaning is communicated in dance. She excels at creating moments in which surprise dissolves immediately into a sense of aesthetic inevitability.

In a few places, for instance, a dancer's movement is so completely perfectly synched to the music that it seems uncanny— but she'll move the dancer past that, treating the moment as incidental.

Surprising, meditative, thought-provoking, thought-transcending: Barton is definitely a choreographer to watch.


What, When, Where

Aszure Barton & Artists: Blue Soup and Busk. May 5-7, 2011 at Zellerbach Theater, Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St. (215) 898-3900 or www.AnnenbergCenter.org.

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