E-Mail This Article to a Friend Partial view Neil Greenberg at Concord BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
	Related Links The Concord Academy Summer Stages' official Web site Neil Greenberg's official Web site

The Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance series continued last week with two versions of Neil Greenberg’s Partial View, a new work that could be about seeing and being seen, meaning and performing meaning, or the always uncertain dialogue between dancer and audience. When you get down to it, every view is partial, from whatever angle, whatever vantage point in life. Greenberg piles layers of extra stimuli onto the movement, pressing home the point.

Partial View begins with a solo for Greenberg that, you realize later, provides the seeds for what the four other dancers do in the hour-long version that follows. He balances for a long time on one pliable leg while sending the other leg and the rest of his body pulling off to the side or scooping out huge circular gobs of space. At a standstill, he juts his limbs out, bending and rotating them as if for close inspection. Curving and lifting back from the waist, he peers up in all directions, intently looking at nothing the audience can see. He clumps around vigorously, almost falling into the traveling leg; later he does fall, lunging forward into an incipient handstand and then rolling back out of it.

All this action is accompanied by intermittent harp music by Zeena Parkins that encompasses odd combinations and configurations of plucked and bowed strings, marimba and vibraphone, drums and voice. Greenberg’s dance goes on in segments and stillnesses, building and subsiding without an apparent structural destination. When he travels, he remains in the right half of the space. I assumed he’d given himself that limitation, but it didn’t seem to bother him when, perhaps by accident, he veered across the center line.

In the group dance that followed, Justine Lynch, Paige Martin, Luke Miller, and Colin Stilwell revisited Greenberg’s lexicon of generous gestures and internally focused adjustments, elaborating the vocabulary but keeping the idea of short, non-linear episodes that were often cued by changes in the stage environment. Video cameras were set up at the sides to film the dancers. They positioned themselves to be shot in particular ways, but their images as projected on the backdrop seemed more mundane than what they were doing in real life.

The projections alternated, in no apparent order, with minuscule video loops by John Jesurun. The most baffling element of the evening, these images disappeared just when I thought I’d figured out what they were. A swimmer with something on her head — a book? a bird? Objects flying through the air in what might have been a tornado. A million eerie pinpoints of light rushing toward us, as if the camera were stationed in the middle of an asteroid belt.

Parkins’s musical variations featured fast Arabic rhythms played with the fingers on a frame drum, twangy harp chords that slid off pitch as the volume decayed, acrobatic flute riffs, ascending and descending marimba tattoos, and a lot more. The dancers often picked up on these colors and just as often ignored them.

They stretched, bounced, and twisted through all this with exaggerated unconcern, sometimes overdoing what shouldn’t have taken any intensity, or underplaying what could have been spectacular. Except for a couple of unison duets and offhand canons, they worked alone until near the end, when they all got caught up in a huge gallopade, pumping their arms and driving one foot into the floor.

Greenberg’s movement looks original, but its eccentricity, and the determined avoidance of linear logic, reminded me of Merce Cunningham’s work in the days before his dancers made themselves comfortable with it. Greenberg must have absorbed that wayward æsthetic in his seven years with Cunningham, but though his dance doesn’t go so far as thematic specificity, it’s more than strictly neutral.