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Cryptography
Jody Weber at Green Street
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

All five short recent dances on Jody Weber’s program at Green Street Studios last weekend suggested that the dancers knew something they weren’t necessarily going to share with the audience. Although one piece used words that hinted at a mild feminism and perhaps the others tapped into the same theme, they all preserved a certain occult charm.

The text for She’s Going, the program told us, was put together from responses to a questionnaire. Taped voices of well-known female dancers in the Green Street community enumerated ambitions, career decisions, and testimony from " over 100 women of all ages. " The live performers for this and the other dances were women too, but the evening added up to something more than a hen party.

Weber has a gift for the bizarre in all the elements of a dance, and an inexhaustible ability to make up odd movement. She can pile up visual images, costumes, sounds, and action, strangeness upon strangeness, without allowing the whole effect to become any more sensible than its parts. Weber credits a costume designer, Wanda Strukus, a sound mixer, Jerry Bussiere, and a lighting designer, Dan Scully, but I would guess it’s she herself who conceives the whole loopy picture.

She’s Going opened with the apparition: a woman in a poufy pink skirt standing and gesturing, her back to the audience, with a long swag of pink material that trailed down behind her and ended downstage at the pink poufy skirts of three other women crouched on the floor. Perhaps prompted by the soundtrack, I thought of a bird on her nest, but that was the most specific reference that occurred to me all evening.

To the alternating sounds of the women’s voices, a tango, and some Arvo Pärt chord progressions, the women minced and glided, made spidery gestures and did crooked falls, played with their skirts and glanced at their companions. I always had the sense that their moves meant something, that they weren’t simply moving for the movement’s sake.

Some narrative scheme might have been at work in Wide Expanse, a smily, flirtatious duet for Weber and Shannon Humphreys Culver. They say in the program that they worked it out by e-mail, but they don’t reveal how. In the trio Crave, one person’s move would trigger the other two into action, but the responses looked less like imitation than like a diffusion of energy, as each individual spiked into her own new shape or direction. In fact, they seemed to be resisting real unison. Twice, Nicole Pierce and Heather McQuiston picked up Erin Gottwald under the arms and dragged her backward while she remained stiff as a board. A third time, she escaped their clutches and they retreated, leaving her to pace tensely back and forth in a harsh spotlight that faded only as she crawled backward on her elbows.

Gossamer Descent also seemed to have some kind of adversarial scenario. Bare tree branches hung straight down from the ceiling, and occasionally birds and flutes were heard. A white cloth twisted into a rope bisected the floor diagonally, and Weber solo’d downstage of it while four other women hovered in the background. When the group wafted close to the boundary, Weber picked up Pierce and lifted her over. The others repositioned the cloth to clear the space, and for a time they all wafted and leaped and made small, finicky gestures. Weber periodically entrapped Pierce in a body grab. And then, abruptly, the dance ended with a new placement of the cloth, as if to signal that a new phase was about to begin.

Something about Jody Weber’s dances reminded me of Paul Taylor — the absurdist use of the body perhaps. But it wasn’t until the final piece, Gloria’s Delight, that her movement inventions, prompted by the accompanying Vivaldi violin concerto, coalesced into a dancelike continuum. Even so, the sweeping runs and tippy-toe traveling and open spiraling arms got interrupted by falls and collisions before they extended very far into the musical phrase.

The dancers, wearing individual taffeta cocktail dresses, were divided into a trio (Gottwald, McQuiston, and Pierce) and a duet (Weber and the luscious Irene Lutts). One group was in dark reds and mauve while the other wore cool blues. The color coding may have aided some greater compositional scheme, but in the final section they danced together. The last thing I remember they were skittering around, stopping to kiss the tops of each other’s heads.

Issue Date: June 13-20, 2002
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