Thirdbird's "Seen & Heard'

When you follow the Jewish High Holidays by catching an evening of combined contemporary dance and spoken word, perhaps it's not surprising that you carry the idea of self-reflection into the performance venue— in this case, a theater attached to an 18th-Century church. In an evening entitled "Seen & Heard," choreographers revealed their disequilibrium with the chaos of the world, exposed human relationships as well as the dance-making process itself, and uncovered the life of a dancer compelled to seek audience connections. Religion urges us to look inward; these secular artists look both inward and outward to their audience.

In abun/dance, Christina Zani reworked a piece that this reviewer saw in 2005 at the Mascher Cooperative Space, an engaging Lower Kensington venue for new dance. In this version, Zani surrounds herself with a strewn array of Smarties candies and recites, in a text by Tom Frick, a catalogue of multiplicitous articles— natural, manufactured, and bizarre ("12 types of love affairs")— as she gestures to an outstretched hand and circles the space in anxious association with her incantation. Zani physicalizes the excesses of abundance with more than a mouthful of Tastykake, which garbles her delivery.

This version of Zani's work lacked the original's mad velocity of words and gestures that better conveyed her disquietude with consumerism and over-stimulation. Her last saccharine words— "I think we shall all be very happy"— left this current piece flat and aban/doned.

"'May I make myself miserable?'

Permit (1994), was the first and a signature early work of Headlong Dance Theater's co-directors, Andrew Simonet, Amy Smith and David Brick. Simonet and Smith, using an improvisational structure, explore the boundaries of social relations, especially gender relations, to reveal aspects of the dance-making process as well. Slyly playing off university social codes of those times that ordained seeking permission before intimacies, the two pose to each other a series of questions whose responses generate improvised actions.

The duo offers an array of questions like "May I change direction dramatically?" (we see Simonet turn quickly with fierce determination), and "May I become a burden?" (Smith grabs Simonet's leg as he tries to move). When the questioners ask, "May I make myself miserable?" or "May I send you mixed signals?"— the latter leaving Smith distanced on the floor and out of synch with Simonet's dance— we're reminded that a dance duet remains above all an exercise of human relations.

This flaying of an enforced social convention could have amounted to a mere one-note piece, but Headlong also exposed the equally intentional decision-making behind the creation of dance itself. The performers descend at times into lackluster cuteness when their questioning or improvisatory responses fail to hit the mark.

A humorless dancer's life

In his new work, Intimacy, the New York-based choreographer Levi Gonzalez invited us— with an excess of sincerity— into his life as a dancer. He exposed his life as a dancer through a too-long series of self-portrait vignettes, starting with a five-minute silent meditation and moving on to a repeat showing of "some material I've been working on," a scene of implosive convulsions, a one-leg balancing over chairs, and a segment of joyful club dancing.

Gonzalez achieved his goal of connecting us with him as an artist and person, although doing so required us to overcome his plaintive earnestness and humorlessness. Performers who offer little more than confessional presentations should probably choose the church rather than the stage as their venue.