SDP reprises Heidi Vierthaler’s “Surfacing” (pictured: Dana Hanson, from Project 2)
Across town, tEEth was winning night two of The A.W.A.RD. Show!, on the strength of “cross-platform, multi-media acrobatics,” and “performers barking, miming angst and literally chewing on each other’s face” (OtB’s Blog), but Seattle Dance Project had also assembled a sold-out crowd for their “Project 4” (at Erickson Theater Off Broadway, through Feb. 5).
“Project 4″ features works by Molissa Fenley, Heidi Vierthaler, Ellie Sandstrom (who also has a work in The A.W.A.RD. Show!), Stacy Lowenberg, and Hilde Koch–at least three of the choreographers were present last night. It’s hard to express just how exuberant Seattle’s dance scene is just now, but these two showcases happening in tandem gives you some idea.
While On the Boards crowds go in for edgy, cross-platform, boundary-defying pieces, watching Seattle Dance Project perform reminds me of how lively and virtuosic Seattle’s chamber music scene is, fed by the supply of talent at Seattle Symphony. In the same way, Pacific Northwest Ballet and other dance programs make SDP possible–and Seattle audiences get to see a range of new works, danced by mature artists with an amazing store of technique in just their fingertips.
Molissa Fenley’s “Planes in Air” is one of her “Prop Dances” and just had its premiere last November. Two dancers (Betsy Cooper and Oleg Gorboulev, last night) hold 3-foot balsa-wood-and-rice-paper fans, whose resistance dictates that arms become wings–they can push air or slice through it, but always with regard to the space the fan takes up. So the dancers’ arms are necessarily extended, and sweeping. In turns, one foot drags lightly behind. The cello music accompaniment is by Joan Jeanrenaud, and Fenley occasionally rhymes the foot-drag with the bow-drag on the strings. It is a delight to watch elfin Cooper perform–she finds a joyfulness in Fenley’s repetitions, and glee in a few runs down a diagonal that interrupt the more serene ambulations. At points, one dancer shares a fan with the other, so one is fully “winged”–it’s not a statement so much as an experiment, a “Here, see what you can do with this.”
“Surfacing,” the program says, is brought back by popular demand. Choreographer Heide Vierthaler shares credit with the dancers, which you sense as you watch. This and “Torque” initially put me off slightly–the style of movement used in “Surfacing” is eye-catching, angular contortions that emphasize the mechanics of jointed limbs, but a whole piece of twining arm around ankles, or impersonating irrigation sprinklers, would get boring. The title “Surfacing” may put you in mind of waterborne-life, large and small (at times I thought of paramecia under a microscope). But it turns out the dancers interact, in addition to forming shapes, and are curious creatures. They inspect each other–and, with equal interest, a lamp–and approach each other hands behind head, pointing with their elbows or an uplifting chin. The piece becomes a discovery of a new world of gestural behavior–a freshness I felt was undercut by the spotlight-going-out-on-single-dancer close.
Ellie Sandstrom’s “Al Poco Tiempo” uses excerpts from Mozart pieces (well, it is his birthday), arranged by Chad Bieler, and counterposes Mozartean heights with a heaviness of foot, with awkwardness, with effortful movement, and with collapses to the floor. For some reason, there was a fan blowing streamers one side of the stage, and a trail of crumpled papers, though the dancers (Julie Tobiason, Alexandra Dickson, and Timothy Lynch) take no notice of any of it. They may well appreciate having a fan blowing, for all I know, but I couldn’t discern an artistic motivation. Tobiason has a solo in a shaft of light, reaching upward, then falling, and has little to do with Dickson and Lynch. (This is a work I bounced off almost completely–I just could not find a way in. I’ll be interested to see if someone else can illuminate it.)
Stacy Lowenberg’s “Rodin,” on the other hand, invites immersion. It’s a short, but sensual, balletic piece, danced to perfection by Michele Curtis and David Alewine, who seemingly never come to a full rest before reconfiguring in another dynamic pose. Lowenberg, who is leaving PNB after 17 years, knows to let the momentum build, and I liked the way she used the space: at one point, Alewine catches Curtis in a corner downstage, and Curtis at first puts the arrest into a slow forward rotation, her head ending up near her feet–and then she rotates all the way through, popping up again, unstoppable. Let’s see a statue do that.
Hilde Koch’s “Torque” comes with a little program note on “torque, moment of inertia, and angular acceleration,” and music from Arvo Pärt that is at the outset a little grating–loud bursts from silence. From an informal beginning–one dancer lying flat on the floor, others walking on–the piece constructs itself, with one or two of the eight-member ensemble dancing while the rest hold their position, facing offstage and rotating forward and backward slightly on the axis of their hips. Then two lines of four intersect, curving and swerving through each other, before all eight join in unison. The trio of Alewine, Gorboulev, and Lara Seefeldt is worth the price of admission–Seefeldt is held between Alewine and Gorboulev, one leg free and torquing like loose electrical cable. Gorboulev grabs the free leg, dropping the other, and that one comes to alarming life. The work closes with a backwards retreat in a darkening room (all the evocative lighting is from Peter Bracilano).