World Dance performances

World Dance performances

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

Compelling style, choreographic dead-end

Tania Perez-Salas Compania de Danza. October 26, 2006 at Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut St. .

For their first appearance in Philadelphia, Tania Perez-Salas’s company of dancers left the audience standing and applauding long after three group bows and individual nods. Certainly this is an electric troupe, but their dancing also exposed static-to-labored technique and Perez-Salas’s choreography displayed a mixture of compelling style and choreographic cul de sac.

“The Hours,” inspired obliquely by Michael Cunningham’s novel and scored to Vivaldi, begins with women on a giant spoked wheel caught in various beatified positions. Perez-Salas undulated atop a huge hoop skirt, and when she moves, three women in a group hoop dress remain. Inventive choreography here fits both the baroque music, the dress and the dancers’ comic shenanigans. Curtains drawing across the stage and spotlight fadeouts framed dramatic dance pictures, such as two women writhing on red fabric, à la Marilyn Monroe‘s calendar shots. Yet the ending tableau of women dangling and hoisting themselves on ropes was sloppily executed and thematically deflating.

“Anabiosis” creates fade-in sepia frames of nude dancers and erotic couplings, one reflected voyeuristically with a mirror. Set to Bach and house-techno, the dances eventually broke into duets that had the feel of Bob Fosse’s “Aerotica” from the film All that Jazz with crowded choreography that had dancers hurling themselves through the phrases.

“The Waters of Forgetfulness” featured dancers in pools of water and creating a primitive and naturalistic environment for the body. There is something about light hitting wet skin that is trance-inducing, but there is little actual dance more than there is splashing around and the male-female supine couplings was heavy-handed. The spell is broken most effectively when a dancer walked in front of the pools and a curtain of sand rained down on him, dramatically ending the dance. I would have liked to have seen what was on Perez-Salas’s creative mind after that.


Kagemi: The audience moved up

Sankai Juku. Directed and choreographed by Ushio Amagtsu. October 31, 2006, at Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut St. .

There is no shortage of metaphysical reflection while you’re experiencing Sankai Juku, the Japanese Butoh dancers who literally carve their dances’ environments, explore transmutations of the body and adapt decadent 20th-Century expressionism into the austere physicality of Butoh. Butoh is an isometric dance discipline developed after World War II; the whited-out bodies and shaved heads allude both to Kabuki and to the nuclear ash left by two atomic bombs. Director-choreographer Ushio Amagtsu, who works more in the theatrical aesthetic of Butoh outside of its mystical aestheticism, is the art form’s main presenter in the West.

He begins “Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirror”’ in solo, beside a field of lotus blooms. The flowers take flight and hover over the rest of the dancers, and for the next 100 minutes it is a wondrous, meditative journey of contrasts— beautiful bodyscapes morph into grotesque contortion, elegiac choreography evolves into agitation, the dancers’ stoicism gives way to comedy/tragedy masks of grotesque survival. Amagtsu uses elements of martial arts and gestural subtext from Geisha and Samurai, and the overall techniques dramatize the body’s dramatic architecture.

The communal dances are executed with martial arts control. At one point, dancers lurching forward on their knees— skinned up from the abuse, with their torso bolt upright and their arms over their heads— are beating away at rhythms in the air. In one section, four dancers, dressed in splatter gowns, interrupt Amateur’s solo and dance an ugly modern minuet, painting their skulls with blood under a concussive slash-and-gore soundtrack.

The lotus descends, and a long ending movement is a catharsis of survival and renewal, but paradoxically, the message seemed played out. Kagemi explores a singular aesthetic, but that artistry doesn’t carry the second half of Kagemi theatrically. Still, this was one of the highlights of the dance season this year. About half way through the performance you heard people moving up the aisles.

At the curtain, the audience stood (some remained seated, some were still waking up). When Amagtsu joined the troupe for a formal choreographed curtain call it was pure show biz. For all of the obvious artistry, I haven’t seen such a grand bow since Martha Graham gave Rudolf Nureyev a diva nod one night at Studio 54.


Tango for export

“Tango Fire.” November 4, 2006, at Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

Estampas Portenas is choreographer Carolina Soler’s tango troupe, consisting of five dancing couples plus Quatrotango, the four-piece tango orchestra, on their first 33-stop U.S. tour. “Fire” is a polished, unfussy showcase of de Salon tango, presented in two acts: the Milonga, which sets up a night at the cabaret, and "The Show," which formally introduces the dances. The framed simplicity demonstrates the cross-cultural attraction of tango. Tango’s signatures— dancers’ legs darting and kicking, freeze embracing (abrazo) and, highlighted with this group, airy lifts and death drops, left the audience panting at Verizon Hall’s sold-out matinee performance.

The couples’ individual personae radiated through the dances, even without much choreographic variation. Momentary geometric unison lines by Soler, à la Busby Berkeley, were also effective.

The popularity of dance-heavy musical shows can be choreographically one dimensional, as evidenced in the brittle theatricality of the Tony Award-winning Contact on Broadway and Twyla Tharp‘s frenzied tricks in Moving Out. Nothing seemed overcooked in “Tango Fire” because authentic Argentinean tango has been stylized in various ways from the beginning (into so-called “tango for export”). So the inherent de Salon tango transfers well in a show like this even without the need to state anything new.

An unexpected surprise in this concert was the full sound in Verizon of the Quatrotango led by Bandone Ûn virtuoso Hugo Satorre. As much as the audience salivated over the tango flash-dances, they gave their heart to the band, pounding the boards and coaxing the musicians off the bandstand.