E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ropework ‘Launch’ at BU, Jody Weber at Green Street BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

The most interesting site component of Dance Collective’s site-specific event "Launch" last weekend was outside the door, and it didn’t reveal its identity until after the concert. Videographer Mike Hall filmed the skyline across Commonwealth Avenue from Boston University’s Sargent Gym as a backdrop to Not Never Anywhere, an improvisational duet by Olivier Besson and Liz Roncka. The buildings and sky looked pretty anonymous projected onto the back wall of the Sargent performing space. The camera apparently did nothing during the real time of the dance, about 40 minutes, but the skyscape gradually darkened. Lights glimmered on in buildings. Planes and helicopters crossed from east to west. Once in a while a bird flew up. A bright star came out. Before we learned whether the clouds gathering around the edges were going to produce a storm, the dance ended.

As far as I could tell, the only other properties of the site that influenced the performance were the steel girders that anchored two hanging ropes for Besson & Roncka’s piece and a mechanical tennis ball server that operated on cue during Micki Taylor-Pinney’s new work Constellation. The ropes served Besson and Roncka as props, as vehicles for extending their movement range, and possibly as metaphorical objects in what seemed to be a power game or a courtship. Moving slowly and carefully, they sized each other up, reconnoitered the space, discovered the ropes and took possession of them. Roncka seemed territorial about the one Besson wanted and drove him off. They climbed and swung from loops that supported them, whether they were curled up, dangling, stretched out, or cantilevered precariously. Some of their sculptural moves suggested emotional states, but no definite story developed from these.

Besson seemed wary of the rope at times, chasing it once as it swung in a diminishing orbit. But when he secured himself in its grips, he launched out. At one point, he and Roncka soared in tandem across the space, and a couple of times he swooped in a big circle near the floor, using his feet or his knees to push off and continue the momentum. Every so often, they’d descend to the floor and confront each other again. Throughout, Roncka seemed to be the aggressor, provoking or interfering with Besson’s actions. Sometimes they bonded together — I wouldn’t exactly call it embracing — but I felt a distinct sense of caution, as if something were preventing them from going out of control.

It’s mysterious how dance duets can "read" as competitive, or impersonal, or intimate, without actually prompting the audience in any particular direction. Jody Weber and Brian Crabtree created a sense of trust that’s closer than love in Weber’s A Steadfast Season, which premiered Friday at Green Street Studios. To Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s gorgeous recorded performance of the aria "Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen," from Bach’s Cantata No. 82 (Ich habe genug), they wheeled and reached into space, drew close, separated, met again.

There wasn’t anything of anguished romance about it. They were just two individuals in black everyday clothes, he with his pedestrian physicality, she with an elegance made for the stage, old friends meeting and dancing a wordless conversation. When they came together, they’d be nested like spoons, or one would be pillowed in the other’s lap, comfortably, as if it weren’t a big thing to seek each other’s bodies. As the music ended, on an unresolved chord leading to the next section, Weber dove softly into Crabtree’s arms. He caught her securely, unsurprised, and the lights went out.

In this concert, I was more interested in how Weber conveyed expressive tone than in the ways she can invent and organize movement. Some of the dances seemed like choreographic studies, though they probably all intended some bigger meanings or content. But one of the new works, Vestige, wove movement together with a verbal text and avoided the pitfall of letting the words dominate. Andrew Arnett’s text (read in voiceover by Elizabeth Callahan) quoted medical-book passages about brain chemistry and memory, then switched to the actual memories of several generations of women. Audra Carabetta, Ann Fonte Abbott, and Julie Pike Edmond bustled in with red Samsonite suitcases. They began to mime what might have been keepsakes packed away, but their dance gradually changed, from a comic illustration of Callahan’s stories to evocations of feelings — what it was like to experience fresh mornings on a farm, driving too fast through the countryside. Finally, there was the bewilderment, the desperately held-back terror, of a grandmother’s failure to recognize her own neighborhood.