Two couples bent their heads and whispered; one of the men jabbed his finger at the cover of Spectrum Dance Theater‘s program, showing four dancers in sexy disarray on a bench, and said with mock-indignation, “That’s false advertising.”
Walking into Spectrum’s fall studio series (through October 24, one more weekend left!) expecting dances about “relationships” to be fun and flirtatious will lead to a severe correction.
It’s not exactly date-night fare–the most disturbing work on the program, La Valse, takes place in a color- and oxytocin-deprived world. To Mio Morales’ electronic “clouds” of sound, four women in cross-front gray dresses that expose glimpses of black bras and four men in gray shirts and black pants glare at each other across the room, Tory Peil looking like a modern-day Valkyrie. (Costumes are by Kasia Walicka Maimone.) The women stride over to feel the men up, slapping asses and hefting pecs; then the men return the favor, giving breasts a squeeze, inspecting teeth.
Choreographer Donald Byrd underscores here not just the process of assessment that comes with sexual relationship, but the indignity of it, and the liveliness of the resentment at being judged and chosen or passed over.
When the dancers take up waltz positions, they confront each other with them, as if this is a karate pose. Instead taking in graceful swoops and coy looks, you watch as the two groups chase each other around the space, in a circle, halting when one or more dancers slip and fall, which serves only to increase the sense of animosity. There are aggressive slaps to the outside of the thigh, there’s a sort of barefoot stomp, each adding to a sense of menace.
When they do pair up, to bombastic Ravel, there’s no melting submission; the women’s heads “stick” to the men’s outstretched arms in a parody of intimacy, they jump up and wrap their legs around the men’s waists as if they plan to scissor them in two.
The women drop to the floor, spread-eagled, and one by one, the men “fall” on them and perform a dance that reminded me of the knife game from Aliens, jumping from one side to another at top speed, landing on one leg between a woman’s arm and torso, pushing off from a hand that slaps down between her legs. Occasionally the women bleat in pain, but otherwise they’re motionless, flopped from front to back.
Then the men hit the floor and the women take charge. There’s no afterglow. Kylie Lewallen looks like she’s about to take a bite out of Joel Myers the second his attention slips. When the two tire and slump, it’s in mutual disgust and incomprehension. The dance ends with the dancers on the floor, some sitting up, some flat on their backs, all worn out and panting (for good reason: The giant Patrick Pulkrabek has had to move with the same speed as wiry, compact Vincent Lopez, despite the far greater sweep of his legs and arms).
Donald Byrd
This is vintage Donald Byrd (well, from 1993): the work is brutally fast-paced and unsparing when it comes to placement and timing, the relationships are deeply abusive, and the dance points you both toward and away from literal readings. Toward, in that sexual codependency and abuse exist, and away from, in that the sexual metaphor is powerful enough that it can be used to engage an audience with more abstract concerns: What are relationships, what do we want from them, what do we actually get, are we without choice? (The teeth inspection is particularly chilling, in evoking slavery.) Are we so magnetized by them that we can’t see anything else?
All of the works in the studio series are “interrogations” of the proscenium effect–the privileged view–but La Valse most implicates you in the reality of dance, not just its representations. Whatever the frame you want to put around it, or interior life you wish to affix to the “people” in the story, you’ve just watched them poke and prod each other, both suggestively and invasively, and risk injury for your benefit. When someone cries out in pain, you are not entirely sure whether it’s an act. In other words, there are stakes at play that a proscenium can’t protect you from, and this is dance that is beyond dance.
(I’m thinking of Christian Rizzo’s non-danse and the attempt to rein in dance as “performance,” to integrate its importance with the totality of what’s staged. I didn’t particularly thrill to his latest attempt–I didn’t feel asked to–but you might agree that dance appreciation is not the end of dance; art appreciation is not the purpose of art, generally speaking. With Byrd’s La Valse, you’re as much in awe of the capacity we have for trust in each other as you are of the dancers’ technical skills.)
Le Bal Noir, which opens the show, is set to the second, third, and fourth movements of Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor. (Brahms, who, according to Byrd, “never completely lets go, lets go a little in this piece.”) Early on, Myers lifts Lewallen to shoulder-height, where she poses a second, then tumbles backwards over his shoulder, to be caught by Ty Alexander Cheng–it catches you by surprise, but heedlessness is her catchphrase. Lewallen embodies an unquenchable drive for relationship itself, though you can also see her as a heroine in a Romantic-era novel, trapped in a loveless marriage (to Myers), proposing a series of fantastic affairs to the men (Cheng, Pulkrabek) she meets.
(“I really am a romantic,” said Byrd in a post-show chat, to laughter, so he clarified that perhaps it was that he was a Romantic, someone who believes in the transformative power of ideas, of love, who’s fascinated when the ideal and the world “bump into each other.”)
In 2006’s Le Bal Noir, the scenery design (Jack Mehler) really comes into play–yards of red velvet curtain drape the walls, two chandeliers hang for the ceiling, and five full-length mirrors stand against the back wall. Myers is stuffily tuxedo-clad, Cheng all in black, Pulkrabek in a white suit (Hiroshi Iwasaki did the costumes). Myers pulls Lewallen away, scoops her up, she faints in his arms. Byrd times her falls to expiring little figures on the piano. Lewallen sweeps up Cheng, but Myers hunts her down. Pulkrabek arrives at the ball with Amber Mayberry, with whom he seems to have a connection (they traverse half the room with his knees locking hers, and also, when he lifts her, you feel the elevation), but once Lewallen takes his coat for him, and bears it away like a trophy, you get a bad feeling. Troy Peil, Bonnie Boiter-Jolly, and Sarah Poppe make up a corps de ballet who try to distract the lovesick, cast-aside Cheng; they surround him, and he pushes through their arms. Byrd is kinder here, the dancers seem a bit like children playing at love, the women hopping up onto the men’s extended legs, kittenish, and the object of momentary desire always in someone else’s hands.
For Longing (2005), the dancers first appear seated, and you get to hear the complete Brahms Piano Quartet, as hear the dance is set to the first movement–but then we’re back once again to the perversity of desire: A wants B who pines for C who’s making eyes at D. The costumes by Christine Joly de Lotbiniere are subtly gorgeous, flowing rich, brown dresses with a red silk lining underneath. The women become pretty dolls, skated along the floor in frozen positions by the men, or spun around like pinwheels, arms and legs static. Lewallen is hoisted from behind and she bicycles the air with delight (but later, the angle changed slightly, it reads “Put me down!”). Cheng brusquely unhands himself from a clinging annoyance. The troupe dances in a happy circle (take that, Mark Morris!), then the men circle the women. Things got out of hand for a little bit there, but they settle down again. They take their seats, then one by one, step over the line of the proscenium and leave the stage.