Return, “a meditation on what we have lost,” set out its premise clearly enough. One of three dances set on the company by Gina Gibney, Return had been choreographed during Gibney’s artistic residency at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Every time we’ve seen Return, it’s been impossible not to picture Gibney in the park, coming up with the movements of the dance.
Return’s First section, 10 minutes long, brought lights up on Amy Miller center stage. Silence gave way to the sound of rain. The dancer’s postural and gestural references to the vertical, which set the scene and recur throughout the dance, might have initially suggested standing outdoors in the rain, but it’s a hard rain that falls in Return; Gibney’s initially static poses, Miller’s rapt persona, composer Ryan Lott’s electronic score and Dennis Dugan’s darkly lit stage combined to remove the dance from the potentially trite to the darkly elemental.
The second section, 14 minutes long, was a rich and varied quartet for the dancers, Felise Bagley, Mark Otloski, Artistic Director David Shimotakahara and Miller. The tempo was upbeat but there was more than one reference to a kind of frantic seeking; in one oft-repeated canon, the men ran toward upstage left as if to escape but were pulled back by the women. Many big partnering moves in canon developed out of Gibney’s contact-style movement vocabulary and yet took full advantage of the dancers’ strong ballet background. Both of the women showed their still intact 6 o’clock panches. Spectacular high lifts and rolling supports repeated in precise canons. The magnitude and complexity of Return’s abundant female / male partnering was all the more noteworthy for being the product of a choreographer who works by choice with an all female company. Taken all together, the second section suggested a stage of loss when, whatever has already been lost – the natural environment; youth and innocence; a connection with the divine (?) – there’s still enough left for one last blowout. The postmodern/ballet doomsday hoedown ended when two of the dancers eventually left amidst the evocative tolling of bells.
In the shorter final section the duet continued to music in the slow tempo of a dirge or a lamentation. Did we see a hint of the dancers missing connections? After a while, Shimotakahara took his exit, leaving Miller to bring the dance to its conclusion in what we saw as a reprise of the first section, evocative of a kind of depression and restrained despair among diminishing possibilities.
As strongly as Lott’s score supported the development of Return, we seldom discerned a connecting pulse that the dancers could use. We assumed that they took their cues from each other, using their own internal metronomes. The second dance in the program, Shimotakahara’s Book of Water, built on half a dozen short pieces by John Cage, Meredith Monk and others, was more clearly connected to the pulse of the music.
As we recall, the fifth section was the most obviously musical, with fairly conventional small ballet jumps set to violins. But even in an earlier section, which sounded like a random ringing of anvils, the dancers would walk on in an apparently casual way only to move in synch with the musical accents.
Mulling over Book of Water, we happened upon an article (Ms. Monk’s Master Class by Anne Midgette, NYT 1/29/06) describing a professional training workshop in which Monk taught some of her music. “The basic elements didn’t seem hard…but the tune was repeated in canon and varied subtly with each repetition…there wasn’t much margin for error.” The description of Monk’s music reminded us of Shimotakahara’s ballet classes – wonderful classes, but bring your personal secretary to help you keep track of the combinations. These are ballet classes which, like Monk’s music, don’t seem hard but, acquiring complexity through layering, make considerable demands on the dancer’s combination memory. They don’t leave much margin for error.
One finds similar interesting complexities in Shimotakahara’s on stage choreography. Even if Book of Water were a completely abstract music visualization, we’d find it worth watching for its choreographic patterns. Somewhat like Return, however, its program note poses a philosophical conundrum – are we separated like cups of water or connected like the water in the sea? Does the dance make specific answer to the questions it poses? No, nothing quite so obvious; instead it creates an atmosphere worthy of the question.
Next opportunity to experience Ground Works’ not so obvious work will be at Cleveland Public Theatre, 3/23 – 26.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas hidden-email:ivparyfn@rneguyvax.arg?
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