The Offshore Project’s “The Buffoon” (Photo: Bruce Dugdale)

The finals for The A.W.A.R.D. Show! at On the Boards tonight, Sunday, January 30, are sold out; you can call the box office, beginning at 3 p.m., to get on the wait list. Last night’s winner, The Offshore Project, joins tEEth and zoe | juniper. (See coverage of the first night’s program here.)

That Olivier Wevers didn’t pull off a win leaves me nonplussed, but it’s not like Whim W’Him needs the extra attention or even, comparatively speaking, the $10,000 prize. Otherwise I was hard-pressed to rank the rest of the program, as attendees are instructed to do, because all were strong for different reasons. (Besides the audience voting, there’s a post-show Q&A and written “notes” so that choreographers get a range of qualitatively different kinds of feedback for participating–which, all in all, may be worth more than $10,000.)

“Another Dadaist provocation!” is what I happily scribbled about The Offshore Project’s offering. You may know choreographer Rainbow Fletcher’s work from the Can Can Castaways group. For “The Buffoon,” they favored a steampunk Weimar cabaret aesthetic, with a live band (cellist Dylan Rieck wrote the tipsy jazz score) backing up the absurdist obstacles the Buffoon (Ezra Dickinson) encountered while pursuing a relationship with his favorite chair, and a table. Wearing a Buster-Keaton deadpan, the Buffoon crawled on, on top of, and beneath the chair, going to great lengths to secure his seat–including making his way across the stage, prone, using his shoulder and the tips of his feet for locomotion. A quartet (Fletcher, Jonathan Betchtel, Benjamin Meersmen, and Randall Phillips) alternate between amusing themselves and frustrating the Buffoon’s attempts. The piece blends humor (Dickinson’s cartoon-sneaky, high-knee small steps) and bravura beauty (Fletcher is “waltzed” across the stage with her partner holding her upraised hand and one extended leg’s ankle).

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Yet how to rate that above SANDSTROMMOVEMENT‘s “the Decline,” with choreographer Ellie Sandstrom mustering an eight-dancer ensemble, and incorporating, by way of music, Chad Bieler’s assembly of a bass solo by Christopher Lytle; Alan Lomax recordings, an interview with Irmgard Bartenieff; “Cross the River Jordan” by Blind Willie McTell; an interview with Alphonse and Ulysses Picou; and “No More My Lawd” as sung by an unknown prisoner? If the ambitiousness of the work was not, apparently, matched by the rehearsal time required, you still got an eyeful of originality. Sandstrom deployed her forces en masse, in those quasi-martial poses that make her choreography distinctive, had them abruptly break into smaller cells–one group crossed the stage crouched down in a spider-like scuttle–then threw in a duet, a frantic, falling-down solo, and closed with herself on the floor looking up at the line of dancers, who, facing away from the audience, were s-l-o-w-l-y pulling up their T-shirts.

Far from ensembles and cabaret, you’d find Lauren Edson‘s “Part of Your Life,” a one-woman dance-and-video performance that managed to be both striking and indulgent. The video portion, projected on a huge screen that Edson appears from the wings to dance in front of, and flee from, is stop-motion glimpses of (Edson’s) life: it opened with her walking on the edges of things (roofs, concrete structures), and a voiceover spoke about both a fear of pigeons and happiness (Can you remember what it’s like?). Meanwhile an egg stop-motion fried in a pan, wine glass emptied, a dollhouse door opened, a rocking chair rocked, an armada of pennies crossed the screen, a faucet flowed. Edson’s classical ballet training has left her with a gracefulness that’s a pleasure to watch–she suggested a bird with her arms extended, elbows up to an extent that would mean dislocation for me–but it wasn’t until the music (by the Venetian Snares) gained in rhythmic intensity that her dancing left the realm of the merely pretty, and the frazzling low-level anxiety that underlaid the piece transformed into something real you could see. Unfortunately, the “home movies” continued for some time after that, until you felt a little trapped. This is why film editors make a good wage.

In contrast, Olivier Wevers’ “Fragments” was a torrent of ideas that, despite being in four parts, sped to its conclusion leaving you wanting more. Jeremy, who saw the work earlier, picked up on the seriousness that bursts into view from behind its louche set-up:

[“Fragments”] opens with a duet between Kelly Ann Barton and Vincent Lopez, both in tutus, lip-syncing to opera. Largely they perform the same movements, but Lopez, exaggerating a coquettish expression, comes off as aping the (sometimes) more serious Barton. But “Fragments” also shows off Wevers’ ability to create powerful drama […] a solo by Lopez set to Mozart’s Requiem, ends with the dancer contorted on the ground, back arched, caught somewhere between agony and ecstasy. The finely sculptured tableau is a powerful and beautiful image, achieved with neither the humor nor the light, athletic movements that are generally associated with Wevers’ work.

There’s a lot on display here, from a quarrel with gender categories to an eye for the human form. Spectrum’s Barton and Lopez are in corsets and ankle-length tutus, the kind that flow over an outstretched leg, and which in earlier days offered a not-quite-rigorous presumption of modesty. Two gestures–arms folded across the chest, a hand slid over the face–reoccur. Barton’s solo is energetic, in-your-face stuff, while Lopez’s is a slow, contorted crawl through a magenta spotlight, and has a Francis Bacon ambiance. Then Lopez, just in extremis, simply gets up, walks casually back to his corset and tutu, and rejoins Barton for a final pas de deux set to the Queen of the Night’s aria–the dancers trade a move where, seated, with legs together and knees up, they dance out on tiptoe the aria’s famous high notes.