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[Dance reviews]

Psych out
Crash Arts’ dream dances

BYMARCIA B. SIEGEL

The depiction of psychological states still intrigues a lot of modern dancers, and it dominated the first dance program in World Music’s new Crash Arts series, a program called “MASS Choreographers.” Dream, memory, poetic imaginings, and unspoken desire were the subject of three of the four works at the Emerson Majestic last weekend. This kind of theme can translate into highly theatrical, even visionary stage work, although it doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of dancing.

Christine Bennett’s Inner House begins with a great image. A woman sits, hugging her knees, on the sloping roof of a small tan building. By some trick of lighting (by Linda Taylor), the whole scene seems unreal. The windowless house is all out of scale with the foreshortened woman who’s improbably perched on top of it. Gradually she unfolds her body and extends one leg out over the roof, as if she would walk down the air, which she somehow proceeds to do. She reconnoiters the front of the building, finds a door, and opens it. The inside is flooded with white light, and the woman steps inside. She disappears. One by one, four other women move across the bright room, which doesn’t seem big enough to hold them all.

These remarkable events signal a long reverie. Two women on tape are heard reflecting on the past — one of them is old, one young. But their memories are very specific — a piano, dishes, a house in summer — while the women who emerge from the tiny room seem like dreamers who can’t capture specific information. They group and regroup, running and holding each other, reaching and embracing in momentary recognition. Two seem to be a set of twins, and the woman who was on the roof finds a sort of mirror-image in another woman. The fifth woman seems content to be a loner. Finally the twins and the loner slip back into the house and the first woman stands on the roof, still questioning, with her alter-ego down below on the floor.

Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett seem to be dreamers too, in their duet Cage. Literally wrapped up in each other, they seem happy or resigned to life inside a sort of cell. Slowly they move from one serpentine embrace to another, testing weight and surface, exchanging supporting roles. They don’t even seem curious to explore their confining quarters or look for any way out, until the very end — when Arvanites-Noya climbs on Neblett’s shoulder and reaches up to the ceiling bars.

In Billy Nijinsky, Richard Colton’s ambitious theater piece, a contemporary vaudevillian (Randall Jaynes) merges in his fantasy with the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, whose dancing and choreography were shadowed by an oddness that looked like genius but turned into pathology. Nijinsky broke down after his marriage and his dismissal by his lover and impresario Serge Diaghilev. He spent the next 30 years in a schizophrenic daze.

Jaynes is alone on a bare stage with a standing work light, and an oversize satchel on the floor next to him. He talks to himself and to an imaginary audience, in a stream of half-formed ideas and associations. (Jaynes wrote the script.) His thoughts about performing quickly lead to Nijinsky, and his own identity as entertainer, clown, and sensualist merges with the famous roles the dancer took in the Ballets Russes.

There are fleeting allusions to Nijinsky’s Faun and to his hapless carnival figure Petrouchka, as well as a long, wonderful scene with Edisa Weeks in a retelling of the Spectre de la rose (1911). Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina created the charming duet by Michel Fokine in which a young girl dreams of a romantic spirit who sweeps her up in a waltz and then vanishes in one stupendous leap.

Jaynes imagines a female specter (Weeks) while he’s masturbating — I guess modern psychology could unmask Fokine’s sweet vignette that way. Weeks catapults in and draws Jaynes into a series of rushing lifts and back somersaults. Suddenly she stamps her foot and becomes a dominatrix, perhaps now representing Nijinksy’s formidable wife Romola, and presides over some kinky sex. Jaynes, who’s also been talking of flight — he thinks he’s an eagle, an airplane, he shoots imaginary arrows — tries to fill his pockets with butterflies so he can become as light as the specter. I don’t know what this piece would have looked like to someone unfamiliar with ballet history, which held it all together for me. But Jaynes and Weeks gave themselves full-blast to the irrationality and role-playing.

Issue Date: March 8-15, 2001

 





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