I managed to get into the very last performance of Wevers/Spaeth/Byrd, the dance triple-bill performed in Spectrum Dance Theater‘s studio space, and it was easy to see why all six shows had sold out. The evening’s program featured Crispin Spaeth‘s promiscuous Only You (from 2o10), and two world premieres: the gender-calisthenic Back, Sack, and Crack from Whim W’Him‘s Olivier Wevers and incestuous A Meeting Place, from Spectrum’s Donald Byrd.
Each piece spoke to common themes found in different contexts in each: relationship, power, identity, and intersubjectivity, if you want to get into a whole Merleau-Ponty line of investigation. Spaeth’s Only You offers set after set of only-yous; there’s no arrow-launching, too-distractible Cupid hovering aloft, but there is a delight in the various forms of attraction, the way couples collide and sheer off to form new sets of two, to the scratch-and-rumble of Dale Sather’s music.
For the audience, it’s a bit of a Rorschach — which couple did you like? Who did you want to see stick together? I was struck by the teasing-testing between Shadou Mintrone and Donald Jones, Jr.; Mintrone’s grin and propulsion, the lightness of Jones’s palm on her sternum –was he pushing or she, in retreat, pulling? I also loved Spaeth’s eye for gesture; standing behind a dancer, another slowly inhales, his nose tracing a line about three inches from the arc of her neck, first left, then right side. Fun to imagine how many different scents that evoked in the minds of the audience.
Wevers’ Back, Sack, and Crack title (with its ravishing Oxford comma) instructs you that the work may have some connection to depilation vis à vis the masculine body and its unmentionables. It opens, though, with a hot yellow light cutting across the floor until about knee-height. Everyone — men and women — is in shiny black heels, and calves are in shaved definition. Can you tell who’s who? The Chopin both suits the crepuscular mood (all lighting was by Rico Chiarelli, costumes by Doris Black) and reinforces the sense of androgyny.
Wevers has one of the most developed aesthetic visions of any choreographer working in Seattle (zoe | juniper having a similar drive to present a complete vision); settings are never simply backdrops. Shoes are never simply shoes (these black shoes feel like a response to Powell’s red ones). After the dancers kick theirs off, a pair achieves the status of fetish (because denied). In a scene that feels like an X-rated Hitchcock outtake, female dancers grind their feet into the heads of prone males to the music of Michael Gordon.
Vincent Michael Lopez slinks around like he’s trying on a great pair of hips, but not all the dancers achieve his panache. In a way, the piece is made more powerful by the demands it makes on its dancers, to find a differently constellated identity, to move fearlessly that way.
They entangle into duos and trios, hands often placed across another’s mouth. Lopez is lifted by the arms, so that he lightly steps across the body of another dancer. When people talk about reinventing ballet this isn’t usually what they mean, but Wevers is offering a more nuanced take than an all-male production, or cross-dressing. It’s both disturbing in the anxiety it generates, and illicit in the way it evades norms.
The music of Gus Denhard (lute) and Munir Nurettin Beken (ud) informs Donald Byrd’s A Meeting Place, which opens with chairs in a two-row, boardroom-style arrangement, and two groups of dancers in fatigues. The piece comes in twelve parts, each set to a song. Against the history of the ud and lute (the ud birthed the lute, but the two play different music that is yet conscious of the other, explains the program notes), Byrd has set a series of choreographed statements and counter-statements, and dialogues. The chairs are cleared to the back for the dances, but will return in the same formation because the sides arrive at an impasse.
The setting (guns) and costumes (military) are here, I think, used to set stakes rather than define the actors in place and time. All you need to know is that they are alert, hair-triggered (Byrd has the troupe jump up, backwards, onto their chairs in a fleeting movement), and yet inevitably human.
By happenstance, Byrd echoes Spaeth’s inhaled scent of the beloved with Donald Jones, Jr.,’s unheard whispers into counterparts’ ears. The echo of an invisible thing is happenstance; the gesture is not. It’s how Byrd frames his work for the audience. In any conflict gone on long enough, the participants speak and react in a language of conflict, one that only they know — outside observers can only remark that something seemed to pass between the two parties.
Byrd’s choreography for the songs ranges from beautiful to brutal. Dancers face off and attempt to dominate the conversation (Lopez and Jones), and there is an escape into soliloquy (Kate Monthy), and something approaching a folk dance, once again showing off Shadou Mintrone’s elastic toughness and humor, so much communicated in the sound of foot-beat on the floor.
It’s the music Byrd wants you to see and hear –one of the dancers makes a Morris-like string-picking gesture — because the music, over centuries, is itself a counter-statement to gunfire, an alternative existing reality. The agility and precision of the string musicians shows up in the deft choreography that foregoes (relatively speaking) the high-speed pinballing of other Byrd works. At times, you simply watch Jade Solomon Curtis, Shadou Mintrone, Derek Crescenti, and Cara-May Marcus open-mouthed, with a catch in your breath. Someone jumps backward into air, back arched, and is caught aloft and carried. Even the muscular Jones gets a lift.
But then suspicion and mistrust return, whispered into someone’s ear.
