The venerable Boston Dance Collective offered a surprising new work last weekend at the Tsai Center. Walk in Progress was a collaboration among Dance Collective artistic co-director Dawn Kramer, guest choreographer Seán Curran, bassist John Clark, and videographers Antony Flackett and Sabrina Zanella-Foresi. Unlike some many-pronged would-be extravaganzas, this one turned out to be modest and satisfying. And even original.

For the first part of the dance, Curran and Kramer appear on the screen, with Clark on stage providing a lively rhythmic floor for their walking patterns. The dancers, dressed in everyday clothes and comfortable shoes, seem to be riffing together the way old friends do. He tries a little step, she follows one beat after. They shuffle-tap, do some turns, runs. They link arms and take a few big sideways strolls, hitch steps, nothing fancy.

The rhythm changes to an eight-count phrase and the dancers embroider it with extra steps, syncopations, and internal accents. Curran suddenly falls with a shout, falls again, and keeps falling, in the first of several sequences where the video editors have cut and repeated the same image so fast you can pick up only a stutter. The effect is disconcerting. The dancers get wiped out and restored over and over again, as if foretelling and denying their own death. In between these visions the duet resumes.

Kramer arrived in person and soon she was dancing a duet with the video’d Curran. This part worked exceptionally well. A film can often overwhelm an on-stage dancer, but the videomakers here scaled Curran to Kramer’s size and filmed him against a dark almost-no-space, to preserve the illusion that the pair were still working side by side.

As they continued dancing, Kramer and Curran began two different stories in alternation. She talked about doing Tibetan meditation in slow motion; he told how his friend (dancer Homer Avila) was back working in the studio on crutches after having a leg amputated. One of them, I forget which, had just remarked optimistically on doing " what’s possible " when Curran strode toward the camera and with a giant step seemed about to dance through the screen, right into the audience. Blackout.

The other three pieces on the program appeared to belong in some older, cuter realm of dancemaking I thought no one would have to endure any more. We got generous excerpts from Endangered Species, a series of dance skits choreographed by Micki Taylor-Pinney followed by another series choreographed by (could it be?) the same Dawn Kramer who’d just done the appealing Walk in Progress.

Taylor-Pinney’s part began with a modern dance solo that blossomed into a Doris Humphreyish quintet that mutated into a swamp full of unrelated creatures. To a tango, two women waved five-foot silken sleeves. Three women pranced in with poufy pink plumage on their backsides. And Taylor-Pinney and Olivier Besson did a duet where he positioned her in various awkward ways; they both were dressed in black tailcoats and white tanktops, and she wore one roller skate with pink wheels. When these types had all gathered and found suitable roosting places, some stage managers came and moved them into different ones.

In part two, several women in baggy bathing suits and bathing caps mimed dipping their toes in cold water, then acted like maidens in a Maxfield Parrish painting, accompanied by Bobby Freeman’s " How To Do the Swim. " To an Edith Piaf song, Liz Roncka and Besson inched toward a seduction that fizzled as they became embroiled in plastic picnic utensils. The whole cast with their props and decorations eventually turned into a trash heap, to be bundled up in yellow police tape by the stage managers.

Endangered Species also had some nice nature film shot by Harvey Nosowitz. I especially liked watching a heron walking across a wetland with stately avian arabesques while listening to Bach on the soundtrack. But even the birds and rainbows were tricked out in goofy editing — perhaps a sign they’re headed for the dump with the rest of us.

Guest choreographer Ruth Benson Levin contributed My 80’s, a dance for four women, three of whom looked as if they were doing chorus-line movement from several different Agnes de Mille musicals while each on in turn stepped from foot to foot and clicked her fingers. The program opened with Benson’s solo Not Yet, Camille, which was " dedicated to all the dances I’ve started and never finished. " The ensuing dance didn’t live up to its first derailment, where the curtain went up on an empty stage and went down again after a long pause and a malfunctioning loudspeaker.

Issue Date: November 8-15, 2001

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