BalletX: Ochoa, Del Cuore and Neenan (1st review)

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Still @ Life casts her dancers as figures from a painting. They start drab and dreary, an unrealized idea in the artist’s mind. As the piece progresses, they come to life and explode into vibrant colors.

Ochoa’s playful and buoyant piece has aged well since I first reviewed it two years ago, and her revisions have dialed down the juvenile humor and replaced it with a more spirited defiance.

Anyone watching BalletX’s performance might have wondered what Ochoa meant by the repeated motion of one dancer dragging another across the floor. In real life, this movement could indicate a soldier pulling a wounded comrade to safety, a bratty schoolyard prank, or a protester’s act of non-violent resistance. I like to imagine that the dragging represents Ochoa herself—as the painter-cum-choreographer— retrieving her now unwilling subjects back into a work that’s starting to slip away. Painters often labor for years on a single canvas; many have admitted to losing a painting whose original conception has escaped them.

Whether or not my interpretation fits doesn’t matter. The subtle joy of this piece lies in the richness and versatility that could inspire such thoughts at all.

Big themes, latent promise

BalletX dancer Tobin Del Cuore’s Beside Myself lacked this complexity. To be sure, this ambitious piece for four dancers tried to tackle even larger themes of consciousness, memory and awareness of ourselves and others. These ideas have always fascinated artists and philosophers, but unlike choreographers, they enjoy the advantage of words to clarify or obscure their ideas.

If Del Cuore receives any commensurate advantage, it lies in the talents of BalletX’s lighting designer, Drew Billiau. His visual contributions plunge us deep inside the subterranean realm of consciousness, where light dances in and out of corners that, once plumbed, occasionally reveal another body or image to reflect upon. Throughout the first section, Billiau’s lighting pours in from behind a partially drawn curtain to create a mystical, temple-like setting for Del Cuore’s self-searching acolytes.

A few moments of Beside Myself suggest its latent promise. Del Cuore’s use of paired dancers conjures notions of a duplicitous reality: Anitra Keegan pokes a finger into her forehead to question her reality and later revisits the gesture on Laura Feig, perhaps to confirm her existence. Still later, the two women mirror-image each other’s movements.

Del Cuore’s couplings— either all men or all women—evoke a similar duality of perspectives. His plodding, ponderous, anguish-ridden female dancers stagger about to a screeching electronic static. The two men bound around the stage athletically to more melodic music. Unfortunately, the style of the dancing and the contrasts didn’t always suit the piece’s high-minded conception.

Neenan as storyteller

To be sure, BalletX hired Del Cuore as a last-minute replacement for Tania Isaac, and Beside Myself is a work in its infancy. I’d love to see what Del Cuore could reclaim from it in a year or two. The revival of Matthew Neenan’s Frequencies on the same program inspires hope that Del Cuore might grow into a similar status as a choreographer.

BalletX’s revival of this piece highlights all the promising qualities of Neenan’s choreography that demanded attention a decade ago. Throughout, Frequencies bursts across the stage in frenetic tempos; the dancers spin or glide out of one series of movements and into the next and the whole piece unfolds in a visually thrilling fashion.

Frequencies also reveals the kernels of Neenan’s ability to tell a story through emotional segments rather than a narrative structure. Neenan drew his inspiration for Frequencies from the Biblical story of Jacob (played here by Colby Damon). The piece opens on two dancers pulling a scrim across the stage; behind it, we see a backlit Damon crouched in a wrestling stance as he battles an angel until dawn.

If Frequencies shows nothing else, it affirms that even a decade ago Neenan had fashioned a unique sense of life as well as how to translate his sensibilities into art.