A Soldier's Tale & Catch and Release @ Cleveland Play House 4/25/10

Rain was coming down by the bucket and rivers ran down the streets as we drove to Cleveland Play House on Sunday afternoon for the final performance of SOLDIER’S TALE and CATCH AND RELEASE. If anyone was delayed it seemed no one turned back, for scarcely a seat stood empty in Baxter Stage as the house lights went down.

Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote CATCH AND RELEASE in 2006 as a companion piece to Igor Stravinsky’s SOLDIER’S TALE (1918). Using identical scoring, the same instruments, the 22-minute companion piece nicely filled out a 90-minute program.

Companion piece though it is, the music of CATCH AND RELEASE presented a powerful contrast to the bitter irony that oozes from every element of SOLDIER’S TALE. Written tongue-in-cheek, and with dry humor, CATCH AND RELEASE sounded sweet and hopeful rather than bitter, and choreographer David Shimotakahara and his dancers – Amy Miller, Felise Bagley, Kelly Brunk, Damien Highfield, and Sarah Perrett -- made the most of that contrast in their danced visualization of the music.

After a provocative beginning in which all the dancers posed ‘downward dog,’ bottoms up to the audience, with the women’s petticoats showing, CATCH AND RELEASE settled into being a sweet, upbeat dance that treated of romantic heterosexual yearnings amidst references to social dance. We were reminded of the tone in one of Shimotakahara’s earlier dances, MAJOR TO MINOR (1998), which he described in a program note as “a bittersweet and sometimes humorous take on people in the pursuit of love.”

The costumes designed by Kristine Davies said it all in their clear, fresh colors, especially Perrett’s light pink dress. Nothing very bad is going to happen in this world; not that Ground Works didn’t come to dance all-out. There was finger popping with the jazzy aspect of the music, aspirational hands reaching up, and impressive turning from all the dancers. Most of all, there was the swirling complexity of the dance patterns in the first and last of the 3 movements. Never mind the steps, how did the dancers keep all those patterns straight?

Ground Works’ use of contact partnering is not showy, but it’s an elegant tool in their kit, and dancers and choreographer use it well.

Consider, for instance, the end of the slow middle section, the Aria, in which the theme of romantic yearning was developed most strongly between the couples. A long duet between Bagley and Highfield contained an unlikely support which they held for a while – he, standing upright with his back turned to her, she, horizontal from her head to her knees, supported with her head on his calf. The couple’s partnering skills allowed her to get down into the pose and back out of it with only one of his hands to the back of her neck.

Throughout CATCH AND RELEASE, Kasumi’s video was projected from overhead – swirling numbers, hands, dancing feet. Multimedia artists would do well to take Kasumi’s work here and in SOLDIER’S TALE as a model, for it was richly allusive but never overwhelmed the live performers.

We were familiar with Stravinsky’s music for SOLDIER’S TALE, but the libretto by Kurt Vonnegut was completely new to us. Like so many so-called “anti-war” texts – CATCH-22, SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 – Vonnegut’s SOLDIER’S TALE doesn’t develop an anti-war argument so much as it drops us into the middle of the horror and follows the story of one guy who tries to say, “No.” Like Stravinsky’s ironic score, Vonnegut’s libretto undercuts itself, as explained by one of Vonnegut’s characters, the General, played sympathetically by Robert Ellis. The Soldier is not a real soldier, any more than the score’s initial victory march is really a victory march. “Almost, but not quite,” the General says. Relieved of any need to reproduce reality, the dancers and choreographer were freed to do their work, embodying the destruction and carnage and formally framing the action.

In the Soldier’s makeshift jail, dancer Highfield tossed off a solo depicting a sniper’s death while the actor MP, Zac Hoogendyk, described it. Later, when music and plot cranked up the tension, dancer Brunk cranked out a series of pirouettes with a perfectly controlled, heels-over-head finish. Apropos of a discussion of body lice, actors and dancers joined together and encircled the playing area in a stately polonaise, periodically punctuated by frantic scratching. “We’re all in this together,” said the circle.

There was some marching and saluting which the dancers joined in on, but Stravinsky’s rhythms moved the dancers so often to Russian folk dance that precise footwork and snapped back heads became a metaphor for the military procedures that moved inexorably to put the Soldier to death. Actor Justin Tatum’s Soldier joined in on these dances with the same spirit that his character talked back to the military. He sketched an occasional step but to him it was all a joke that he was so through with.

SOLDIER’S TALE is over and done with and it’s not often that such auspicious constellations of powers – Cleveland Play House, Cleveland Orchestra, Ground Works – come together at all, much less collaborate to such excellent effect. We hope to see soon, however, a reprise of Shimotakahara’s choreography for CATCH AND RELEASE, even with recorded music. SOLDIER’S TALE with CATCH AND RELEASE ran April 22 – 25, 2010 as part of Cleveland Play House Fusion Fest.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.