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Snow flurries
Seán Curran Company at the Tsai Center
BY DEBRA CASH


Bank of America Celebrity Series PR director Jack Wright had to shovel snow off the steps of Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center before Seán Curran’s New York–based company presented its Boston Marquee program last Saturday night. Despite the blizzard, almost half of the sold-out house showed up, and we were lucky, too, because the Sunday-afternoon performance was cancelled.

Curran’s deft footwork and signature devilish eyebrows are well known to locals, whether they saw him first as a kid in Belmont doing Irish stepdance, as a modern-dance dynamo with Bill T. Jones, playing peekaboo via his life-size video image in a dance he choreographed with Dance Collective’s Dawn Kramer, or illustrating how movement and music can create an impression greater than the sum of its parts in Robert Kapilow’s "What Makes It Great" music series. Sonata: We Are What We Were (2001) doesn’t have the punch and spatial clarity of his anti-Riverdance piece Folk Dance for the Future (1997), but it offers its own pleasures as it ricochets between folk idioms and formal abstractions. Curran hears, and asks us to see, the way the drone in the piano passages of Leos Janácek’s Sonata for Violin and Piano hauls in the baggage of Balkan instrumentation. He does the same thing with his contemporary æsthetic and the folk steps haunting them just under the surface. When one of the men in a line slips out of formation, the arms that were linking him to the others remain in place, empty and shaped by his absence. The folk motif has been pared down; what remains is pure abstraction. Curran’s company of appealing younger dancers hadn’t gotten the piece into their muscles yet: Sonata looked under-rehearsed.

Where the stage for Sonata is ornamented by rows of kindergarten-sized white wooden chairs, the seats lined up behind Companion Dances are chic red biomorphic Arne Jacobsen–style chairs. They signal a subtle valentine. Companion Dances pairs Curran with his long-time associate artistic director, Heather Waldon-Arnold, whom some may remember from the Boston Ballet corps de ballet. Taking off her toe shoes may have been the best choice she ever made. The silly, graceful Arabian-girl arm waving the two of them riff on sharpens into geometric shapes. Curran, having grown a dark beard and a pudgy middle, looks slightly menacing behind Waldon-Arnold’s freely swinging battements. As trance rock from Young Marble Giants and Radiohead floats in and out, the couple’s shapes mesh, but their attitudes couldn’t be more different: his spiky urgency coexists with her calm aplomb. When Waldon-Arnold reaches over and covers Curran’s mouth with her hand and then kisses him through that barrier, I couldn’t help thinking that Companion Dances may be the sweetest, most undisguised statement about the relationship between a gay man and a straight woman ever choreographed.

Last November, six choreographers marked Meredith Monk’s 40th-anniversary season with a tribute at New York’s Dancespace. Curran must have confounded every expectation with his St. Petersburg Waltz set to a piano section of Monk’s Volcano Songs. Dressed in a fedora and an Old World vest festooned with a pocket-watch chain, Curran channels a character from some bitter story by I.L. Peretz. He claps his hands overhead in a wedding mazel tov, strikes back onto his heels, whorls and challenges the space around him, and ends with swaying private worship that may be grief. St. Peterburg Waltz distills a complete novel about the unmet expectations of revolutionary Russia and its aftermath in eight minutes. It must have made Monk, the great-granddaughter of a Russian cantor, cry.

Although dance fans might prefer he push the envelope of his own invention, Curran has already branched out to choreographing shows for Playwrights Horizons and New York City Opera. Art/Song/Dance is set to the songs of Ricky Ian Gordon with lyrics by the composer and poets including Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dorothy Parker. Devising vignettes for each song, Curran runs through a standard repertoire of types: the girl in her summer frock who can’t choose between two men and loses both; the world-weary gal considering suicide; the loving couples of various persuasions and degrees of commitment (Curran avoiding any outmoded heterosexist presumptions). Some of his choreographic choices are plain odd: in the ravishing "Run Away," the dancers’ jogging plays like an in-joke, and it takes many verses for the gestures to catch up with the song’s discouragement. Crafted rather than inspired, Art/Song/Dance is a patent audition for more Broadway work. Seán Curran can handle the assignment.

Debra Cash is dance critic for WBUR Online Arts.


Issue Date: January 28 - February 3, 2005
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