This weekend only, Seattle dance fans can jeté between On the Boards and the (Intiman) Playhouse at Seattle Center, and see new works from three young rising-star choreographers: Catherine Cabeen & Company is presenting Fire! at OtB, and over on Mercer Street, Whim W’Him brings you Crave More, with works by Olivier Wevers and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Both short runs end Sunday, January 20.
Cabeen’s Fire! is a loose, baggy monster — powerful at time, discursive at others, an assemblage that in its idiosyncrasies manages to conceal as much at it conveys. Where I could write of Cabeen’s first work in this series that “it’s possible to see Into the Void knowing very little about Klein, the new realists, or the critical appraisals of his work, and still be struck almost dumb by the display,” I think Fire!’s structure is likely to baffle anyone who knows little of its presiding genius, Niki de Sainte Phalle.
It may also be that commonalities obscure things — while the work draws on de Saint Phalle’s interest in Tarot and archetypes, it feels perhaps too comfortable with these structures, too aligned with de Saint Phalle’s experience, to open up a substantive gap. The evening opens with Cabeen, in archetypal mode, seating herself on a living, gold-mylar throne, while her documentary-style voiceover discusses how, just as you feel you’ve got a handle on things, the deck is shuffled again. The deck here is Tarot, and so the handle is on identity, purpose. It’s a little stagy.
The gold mylar becomes a dress train, a chrysalis, that Cabeen steps out of. She’s a dancer of such technical precision I spent much of the evening watching just her wrists. There is also a repeated phrase where she balances on one leg, the other extended so she can link her hands behind her back, lifting them up to their limit, then releasing.
The central image, though, comes when Cabeen, wearing a sort of knitted corset, is turning in circles to unravel it as her troupe maneuvers the thread back onto a loom (created by Lou Cabeen). At one point she slips it off and forms a little baby bundle with it, cradling it in her arms, while the unravelling progresses. At that point, a gap did open up.
Much of the latter half of the evening is devoted to dance that is less narrative in tone, allowing Cabeen to “shuffle” her dancers (Sarah Lustbader, Karena Birk, Ella Mahler, Phylicia Roybal, Jana Kinci) into duets, triplets, and intertwined ensembles. They confront, evade, and catch each other — it’s lively and a little Mark-Morris-esqe in its working through of personnel personality combinations. The boldly patterned costumes by Val Mayse added a welcome flair.
As influential on the evening as the dancing was the music composed by Kane Mathis and Julian Martlew, a profusion of such variety that I’m not going to try to describe it except to say the effect was entrancing. The digital media projections (Susie J Lee, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Soyoung Shin) had a more hit-or-miss impact, sometimes resonating cosmically, sometimes simply a juxtaposition without apparent relevance. As Cabeen often stretched your attention with groupings across the stage from each other, a third, changing point of reference was taxing.
Crave More, Whim W’Him’s overstuffed outing, brings back Annabelle Lopez Ochoa (whose Cylindrical Shadows is familiar to PNB fans) for two works, the premiere of Crave, and Before After, in which Ochoa partners with Lucien Postlewaite. For his part, Olivier Wevers presents More, which had its premiere in October 2012 at the Men in Dance showcase, and The Sofa, which had its premiere in April 2012 at Grand Rapids Ballet.
Crave, with both pounding and minimalist pulsing music by Olafur Arnalds, Max Richter, and Scanner, features the dancers in glittery sex-me-up costumes and black socks by Aviad Arik Herman. It’s a Dorian-Gray portrait of club life, full of hyperkinetic, amphetamine nights on the dance floor with hot young things (portrayed with phenomenal energy and charisma by Jim Kent, Mia Monteabaro, Tory Peil, Lucien Postlewaite, Lara Seefeldt, and Andrew Bartee), punctuated by staggeringly hungover half-lives. The signature move is a head inclined on someone shoulder, with the prospect twisting and pushing away in disdain.
Andrew Bartee’s character suffers not just romantic rejection but also (if I’m interpreting the “additional soundscape” by Wim Selles correctly) gets busted, and goes through a period where his old friends no longer return his calls. He’s the kind of sadsack who’s not careful enough in his abandon, in his desires, and Bartee makes you love him. Ochoa has an eye for turning human gesture into dance: at one moment, the dancers circle, each reaching out and slowly tracing a line down the back of the dancer in front — it’s an attempt at connection with deniable plausibility.
One caveat: the work wasn’t designed for the Playhouse’s thrust stage. If you sit on the far sides (more than halfway down the row), you’ll miss seeing one of the couples downstage right or left.
Before After tells the story of a relationship that heightens in intensity the closer it gets to its end. You get to see Ochoa dance it with Lucien Postlewaite (who’s now with the ballet in Monte Carlo), and for most Seattle dance fans that will be reason enough for the ticket. Postlewaite’s occasional mistakes as a dancer (not here, in general) might be recast as gravity’s error in interfering, for no good reason, with desire. The lithe, petite Ochoa matches that with her fearlessness — after a break-up, she springs toward Postlewaite with an amazing blend of taut lift-off and absorbing embrace. It’s a bit like a rubber octopus hitting a glass window, which normally makes a funny splat, but here you see that Ochoa takes the impact into her body.
Ochoa provided the costumes and lighting design, in addition to the choreography, so it’s not surprising that the lighting here in so integrated in telling the story — what looks like a single ring of light separates into two spots that follow the dancers as they move apart. They’re two strong-willed people, and a touch is not always a loving caress — Postlewaite sweeps Ochoa in circles by one leg, where the strength to hold on carries the threat of the will to let go. The relationship’s progress is revealed as they remove layers, ending naked from the waist up.
Wevers’ More is a solo for Andrew Bartee. It begins with gray clothes launched from the wings, which Bartee emerges, en déshabillé, to try on. You can see they have that new clothes feel — Bartee tugs and itches, but maybe they’ll do. That is, until a bright red shirt flashes past. Bartee’s right hand, possessed, trembles frantically with a sudden desire. Bartee excels at the whiplash gymnastics that come next, as he fights to overcome the fatal attraction — when I see him dance, there’s always a moment I look around to see if the projectionist has speeded up the film. The struggle is doomed, but then, so is the desire — the red shirt also turns out to have that scratchy new clothes feel.
The Sofa, set to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9, has an unusual guest artist: a beautiful purple sofa that gets carted around, turned over, hidden underneath, and even strung up. It begins, trippingly, like a drawing room farce. Grand Rapids Ballet dancers Yuka Oba and Nick Schultz are in ballet-formal wear (Oba’s purple tutu-train is remarkable –costumes are credited to Melissa Leitch and Clare Gardeski, with Wevers’ input) and they’re joined by four other couples: Lara Seefeldt and Andrew Bartee, Tory Peil and Shane Ohmer, Amber Willett and Jim Kent, and Mia Monteabaro and Kyle Johnson.
Wevers stacks the couples up on the sofa, in a series of non-traditional configurations, while Oba tries to keep a roving Schultz on a short leash. In the second movement, Oba and Schultz divest of the formal plumage, as if they’re alone after the party, and the feeling is more intimate. But by the end, the gang is in back in action. As Lysander once put it, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” and here it is no different; even when the couples try to embrace, they’re just as likely to end up slapping a hand across their partner’s face.
I don’t know if Wevers has a larger goal than Robbins-like observation of how people behave, and the fun of turning a sofa into a people-flipping contraption. Every so often someone will look up to the heavens, which gesture comes into focus later when you notice two ropes hanging from the fly space. Will it end in tragedy? No, not with Mozart, don’t be silly.
