Of particular interest was “Skirting the Heart,” a Cleveland premiere set on the company by Stephen Wynne. Currently a professor of dance at Belhaven College, Wynne’s performing career was spent in Europe dancing and choreographing in the style of tanz theatre or European Dance Theatre.
Our own experience with tanz theatre largely begins and ends with a few performances of “Green Table.” Oh, and Heinz Poll, Ohio Ballet’s founding artistic director, who was trained at the Folkwang School in Essen Germany where Kurt Joos and later Pina Bausch taught, choreographed some pieces in the tanz theatre style, notably “Elegiac Songs,” which Verb Ballets performs at the Ohio Theatre March 25. Poll’s credo, “motion and emotion,” and the heavy-duty subject matter of “Elegiac Songs,” the firebombing of Dresden, exemplify the method and subject matter of tanz theatre. Or, as Bausch put it, “I’m not interested in how people move but in what moves people.”
All this to say that we were not particularly surprised at the choreographer’s program note for “Skirting the Heart,” which asserted that, juxtaposed with religious ritual, “truth stands separate… on uncharted shores.” What pleasantly surprised us was how thoroughly Wynne and the dancers of Inlet delivered on this tall order.
Through most of its 25 minutes, “Skirting the Heart” is not particularly pleasant to watch. Wynne seems to take a dim view of religious ritual and so, to a thumping Euro Pop beat (“halleluiah, halleluiah”) the dancers enact a sort of worship service / yoga class in Hell. Interesting movements and group patterns are all bent to the service of creating negative tension. This portion of the dance and the thumping euro pop end abruptly when a large drop cloth is pulled over the dancers. After the dancers have rolled around under the drop cloth to the sound of ocean waves for a while, they emerge on the very uncharted shores Wynne promised in his program note. Please don’t mistake our tone here: with considerable economy of means, “Skirting the Heart” articulates some deep thoughts in a theatrically effective manner. See this dance and find yourself rethinking your ideas of what dance can “talk” about.
If the final section on the uncharted shores of truth seemed thinly choreographed to us, we consoled ourselves with the memory that Dante’s Divine Comedy could not make Heaven as interesting to read about as Hell.
A world premiere, Steve Rooks’ “The Door,” is set to Brahms variations on 4 hands piano. We would have expected the music’s changing time signatures to present formidable problems for the 10 dancers but they took the music in stride. Watching a recent rehearsal of the piece, we learned that what might at first seem an abstract exercise in music visualization is chocked full of references to the recently deceased Cleveland artist Jim Whitney (www.WhitneyStainedGlass.com), to whom the dance is dedicated and with whom Rooks and Inlet had close and longstanding ties. Unfortunately, the program note doesn’t share that information with the audience, leaving many aspects of the dance obscure. The costuming, for instance, with its shift from white to black and back to white, seems to clearly refer to mourning colors. And most striking of all, dancer Joshua Brown’s agonized solo while the ensemble stands by, unable to reach him.
The three other works on the program, Wade’s “Wondrous Beasts,” “This Could Hurt” and “Ascension,” all feature non-traditional partnering. Like Pilobolus’ best pieces, they take movements which may at first seem merely acrobatic or gimmicky and give them meaning. In “Ascension,” the lifts and supports convey the transformative power of legacy, here literally standing on the shoulders of one’s predecessors.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net
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