'Dive into Dance' at Temple's Conwell Theater

For her final magic trick in a month-long virtual festival of weekend dance programs and workshops, Terry Fox created an evening of unexpected synergy and excitement in a "Dive into Dance" program at Temple's Conwell Theater.

With Fox as curator, Philadelphia Dance Projects presented artist performers of diverse aesthetics, who created fascinating and seemingly serendipitously-linked works from the SCUBA National Touring Network for Dance. The assemblage joined two stellar newcomers to Philadelphia, a trio of performers from Seattle's Salt Horse (Corrie Befort, Beth Graczyk and Angelina Baldoz), and Shinichi Iova-Koga from inkBoat of San Francisco (reviewed separately for BSR by Steve Antinoff) with two excerpted works from Philly's Pew Fellowship recipient, Charles Anderson, and his dance theater X. A prescient curator's touch formed a unique quartet of performances that mined existential issues with heightened intensity as they all connected to a Zeitgeist of foreboding and malaise that proved overwhelming in its emotional synergy.

A cosmic (or comic?) accident

Iova-Koga's Milk Traces begins with the soloist in stillness teetering back in a chair held up with the toes of one foot still connected to the ground as micro-movements of that foot ever so slowly release the foot to a loud fall backward. A red cloth tethered rope from above is revealed attached to his body. And as the universe was realized in a Big Bang, so Iova-Koga emerges into life with a bang that suggests a cosmic, or comic accident. As Iova-Koga appears to experience various ages of life, his continuing connection to this umbilical cord-like tether richly suggests the constraints of DNA and destiny.

Iova-Koga himself is a master mover who embraces Butoh and other movement training; he's not at all tethered to all the accoutrements of Butoh dance, like the white body paint or continuous, extra slow movement. Yet he maintains Butoh's expressiveness with a minimalism that heightens the viewer's concentration, reminding this writer of Jerome Bel's words rehearsing a group of us for the Live Arts Festival's The Show Must Go On last September. Bel observed that doing less in performance results in the audience seeing much more, and Iova-Koga repeatedly achieved this effect through the power of slowed, reduced movement and dramatic image-making.

A fall backward from a chair revealed Iova-Koga in what looked like a collapsed plow Yoga position, showing only his motionless rounded back and rear and the soles of feet brought closely to his rear, as his fingers slowly emerged and disappeared between feet and back, producing a cinematic image of abstract movements. He could disappear within yet render corporeal a hanging set of a monk's tattered clothing, and then make a sudden exit, leaving another spotlighted, ghostly white garment swinging in a spotlight, with multiple meanings suggesting the body and soul in transformation.

Iova-Koga's dark trajectory throughout his piece was broken with wonderful humor as he transformed himself into an aged person rhythmically tottering to traditional Japanese music, muttering in Japanese that something was not right in his head (a phrase borrowed from his own grandmother's musing to him during a night-time encounter). Philadelphia has rarely seen such memorable, metaphoric image-making movement since the days when Steven Krieckhaus brought his hypnotic solos to audiences here.

Urgency driven by anxiety

Also from the West Coast, the Seattle based Salt Horse brought a trio of performers— two dancers and a versatile musician and vocalist— who, like Iova-Koga, entered into the realms of the personal and transubstantiated. In This Was A Cliff, Beth Graczyk and Corrie Befort pursue a relationship of distance, attachments and confrontations through both lyrical and frenetic movements; the decided awkwardnesses of the latter movements made them especially puzzling and exciting. The two appear to be driven by anxieties that may be personal or societal, offering ambiguous narratives challenging to the viewer. The striking improv sound accompaniment by Angelina Baldoz via trumpet, whistles, electronic music and strange vocalizing gave heightened urgency to the narratives.

The Salt Horse dancers run in tandem in circles on stage, disappear in the wings, with only one returning with her extended arm carrying the clothes of the other. These characters later exchange their troubled bodies and identities for beings from a mythic dream world where one of them becomes a creature totally encapsulated by hair that descends from head to foot, and the other gains seven-foot-long arm extensions of a bird-like creature. These transformations are punctuated by Baldoz's solo vocal appearance in a long blue gown, providing a mournful, moaning dirge to transport us to another realm. The work leaves us in a state of dark disquietude that's also a state of grace— the effect of having witnessed something so weird and beautiful.

Southern folklore and its African origins

Fully at home with these spirits from the West Coast were Charles Anderson's two excerpted pieces, a segment from TAR (presented in full length at the Painted Bride in 2007) and an excerpt entitled "evidence of things (un)said," from a new work in progress, World Headquarters. As a self-described kinetic storyteller, Anderson also leaps across worlds— the secular and the mythic, the sacred and the profane.

As Iova-Koga's tethered baby's existential romp concluded, Anderson's TAR begins with the incantation, "We are in the thick of it, we are in the tar— baby." Anderson reinvents Southern folklore— here with the Br'er Rabbit stories— as well as reconnecting us to its African sources, and his movement vocabulary contains the strong grounded movements of African dance fused with the westernized language of modern dance. Anderson returns often to his own solo movement, accompanying the larger ensemble in TAR and a duo in the newer work, often providing a strong dramatic contrast via frenzied, staccato gestures suggesting a shaman who has materialized for a time on a stage.

A wake-up call for Philadanco?

In the new excerpted work, Anderson sets a beautiful love duet upon his expressive dancers, Willie C. Brown and Karama Butler, while Anderson— sometimes in synch with them as a trio, sometimes in a more isolating solo role— adds his measure of mystery to their relationship. In the program notes, he describes the larger new work as addressing the subject of the fall of civilization, but this excerpt suggests his fall contains a redemptive light.

I was struck by how fresh and engrossing Anderson's work was, and wondered that it may be time for other strong dance companies such as Philadanco to begin employing Anderson's choreography.

Last month's previous performances included compelling work from Jennifer Monson and Kelly Garfield Dance, both from New York, Philadelphia's Headlong Dance Theater and Zane Booker, and ARENA Dances from Minneapolis. Philadelphia needs more creative curating like this month-long series. With the Wilma's "Dance BOOM!" series in limbo, I long to see Terry Fox working her magic during the other 11 months of the year.





Jonathan M. Stein is a board member of the presenter, Philadelphia Dance projects, but has no other connection to any of the dancers or troupes reviewed here.


To read another review of inkBoat by Steve Antinoff, click here.