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Pièce de mai
‘Dancesongs of the Birdozoic’ at the Dance Complex
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL


The Dance Complex performance space in Central Square felt more like July than the middle of May, but Rozann Kraus didn’t seem at all fazed by the heat when she welcomed the audience to the Complex’s faculty concert Saturday night. Kraus and the Complex were revved up for their annual Dance Month blast, a series of concerts, parties, and open-studio events that continues till the end of May. All eight pieces on the concert, "Dancesongs of the Birdozoic," riffed on selections by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. The band, a bunch of 40ish guys in long-sleeved buttoned-up black, were playing live, and the whole thing lasted an hour.

Seems it was the band’s idea to collaborate with dancers, and through Kraus, they cooked up the idea of distributing their CDs and letting prospective choreographers select tracks to work with. Birdsongs’ funky-techno-minimalist-new-age music is a weird mix of keyboards, winds, guitar, and occasional homemade percussion. Stylistically eclectic, rhythmically driven, and atmospherically suggestive, it’s a natural spur to dancing, and it even accommodated the different dancing sensibilities on the program.

Honey Blonder’s Apart looked like an aerobics routine, with six women bopping energetically in unison and separating into some rudimentary counterpoint. Irish step-dancer Kieran Jordan did an improvisation, Step and Sound, with easy lower-leg swings and casual attack. Her heavy clogging shoes provided an extra percussion element to the band’s unpredictably shifting rhythms.

Mesozoic pianist Erik Lindgren, who composed most of the music on the program, arranged sections of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps for a pastel garden party by Margot Parsons, The Right of Spring. The ferocious 1913 musical classic sounded surprisingly authentic as played by Ken Field’s breathy saxophone and the tense assorted keyboards of Michael Bierylo, Rick Scott, and Lindgren. Idy Codington, in a summery print dress and floppy hat, daintily wielded a toy watering can over three languid maidens in flower hats (Rebecca Bromberg, Daisy Giunta, and Courtney Peix). Perked up by this imaginary dousing, the flowers swayed and glided until, to the Sacrificial Maiden’s theme, they had surrounded their benefactress and, I thought, were about to make a meal of her.

Two group pieces seemed to be formalist takes on the Mesozoics’ steady underlying beat. The one with the descriptive title Grandé 1/2caf Orange Mocha no foam extra hot skim Latte Break served up a trio of women (Amy Donovan, Michelle Lawlor, and Tracy Morse) rolling and falling in synch, with a swingy resilience. Daniel McCusker’s 4 x 4, for himself, Kraus, Amanda Kwiatkowski, and Wanda Strukus, traveled across the horizontal dimension of the space. Striding and leaping back and forth, the dancers avoided the frontal orientation that keeps a lot of dances glued to the audience.

Two duets described basically the same scenario, from remoteness to intimacy, between drastically different pairs of dancers. Andrea Blesso and Carol Hong made a serene couple in Rozann Kraus’s Loom, beginning in unison and gradually escalating their almost accidental contacts into a full embrace. Although they began side by side in exact unison, with a small vocabulary of basic steps (plié, relevé, tilt, brush, reach to the side), they performed quite differently. Blesso kept a neutral temperament but did the movements from deep in the center of her body. Hong’s gestures emerged from a solid torso, but her focus and her overall quality were intense, even dramatic.

In Liz Lapuh’s Affinities, Kim Stegmaier in a black bathing suit and pointe shoes projected herself at bare-chested Jim Banta, who seemed to be there only in order to lift her up. But their slow, high-contrast encounter melted to the floor in steamy increments, and they were wrapped around each other and about to kiss when the lights went out.

Kraus orchestrated the last number, Rock & Bull, a goofy dance class for the Mesozoics themselves. The musicians, ripping off their jackets, made their way onto the dance floor — probably this alone was a pleasure, since by then it was about 95 degrees in the room. They got into some semblance of a line-up as Margot Parsons entered, in tights and soft shoes and a tiny dance skirt. They attempted to follow her port de bras, then gave up this effort at classroom protocol and simply became a galumphing corps de ballet as she performed half a minute of peppy chaîné turns and other advanced steps. Then they all tumbled grinning into a pile-up, as if they’d just won a friendly teenage scrimmage.


Issue Date: May 21 - 27, 2004
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