Restless choreographer Donald Byrd posed himself a perhaps unsolvable riddle near the end of Autopsy of Love (having its world premiere run June 20 to 29 at Emerald City Trapeze Arts; tickets): How to make the recitation of Heinrich Heine’s poetry to a corpse engaging. Actor Andrew McGinn, in sonorous voice, climbs on top of the gurney where the body lies, dismounts, and sequesters himself on a lower shelf.
It didn’t really work for me — no one recites love poetry at an autopsy; by then the damage is done. McGinn fares much better in the rueful prologue, where he’s a ghost of sorts to Jade Solomon Curtis, rhapsodizing about her as she studies her options.
The corpse in question is played by Spectrum’s Shadou Mintrone, who’s been dolled up to look a bit like Amy Winehouse; in Autopsy, Winehouse’s music is joined with Robert Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (The Poet’s Love), so you could read the coda as McGinn’s Schumann-Heine avatar mourning Mintrone’s Winehouse, as a kindred spirit — a doubling of Heine’s regretful envoi not so much to a past love, as to the madness of Love itself itself, how frustrated or denied it seeks death.
The superposition, though, lacks dramatic support. McGinn’s poet works better as a framing device, studying the dancers in their slinky black numbers (by Doris Black), clipboard in hand: an image of the mind replaying events.
The power of Autopsy of Love – besides the visceral satisfaction of watching Spectrum’s elite dancers dive into this meaty work — is in how close it slices to the bone, to use the evident metaphor. Byrd isn’t one to take Heine’s often florid protestations of what love is at face value (neither was Heine, in different moods). If his choreography captures the blood’s heated froth, he doesn’t skimp on the fickle reversals or intransigent, doomed attractions.
Though it’s sweet the way Stacie L. Williams and Derek Crescenti gambol across the stage, refusing to let go of each other’s hands, their feet beating little ecstasies, it crosses a line when Crescenti becomes an addled puppy, hopping on all fours. And though it seems that Solomon Curtis and Alex Crozier-Jackson have a rapport in their stepping dance, it’s one you can almost see severed at the appearance of Donald Jones, Jr.
While it’s true Solomon Curtis reaches new heights in this relationship — literally, Jones pressing her up toward the ceiling as if he hopes to leave her shining a light on the world below — you also notice the way he controls her by grasping an ankle, a wrist, back to an ankle. Solomon Curtis’s leg extensions don’t create space for her; they collapse her, as if she’s foldable. Conversely, at one moment she flies across the stage, straddling Jones’ neck as if he’s her elephant.
The couple played by Shadou Mintrone and Ty Alexander Cheng are similarly conflicted, caught in a sneer-and-leer cycle. Something is between them; one always seems to give in before they break. For the highlight reel, Mintrone jogs around in a semi-circle, then without warning leaps just in front of Alexander Cheng, who catches her in mid-air. She’s pleased with his reflexes, but he’s not, sliding out her embrace.
Davione Gordon’s movements have a touch of Merce Cunningham to them; like a poet, he’s trying out new shapes and forms. Soulful Cara May Marcus has Crozier Jackson, but he doesn’t seem to notice that while he’s looking at her, she’s looking upward at something not visible, fingers fluttering, hugging herself. Then she sees Alexander Cheng.
They’re dancing, largely, in this first section, to Schumann’s songs, as sung by the expressive bass-baritone Clayton Brainerd, with Judith Cohen on piano. Byrd works in a few oversexed ensembles as well: The women put their hair down and jeté, exciting everyone to no end. They’re mobbed by admirers with twitchy pelvises. The group plays a game of Red Rover that ends with almost everyone grabbing everyone else in fits of randiness. In the second half, music and hard-lesson lyrics are from Amy Winehouse: “What Is It About Men,” for instance, “I Heard Love Is Blind,” and “Love Is a Losing Game.” Bits of the choreography come by again, Byrd noting that it’s always thus, the lustiness and heartache and, for some, a cold slab.
Across town at the Seattle International Dance Festival, I’d had the chance to catch one of their “Spotlight on Seattle” nights. (The organizers were out of programs, so my review can’t include work titles or dancer names, unfortunately.)
Initially completely charmed by the extraterrestrial duo from Coriolis Dance — there should be more dance featuring aliens who move like Martian rovers! — I felt I saw them running out of ideas about the time the explorers seemed to be running out of fuel or air or whatever it was they gave them their original pep. The women of badmarmarDANCE are a striking group, and choreographer Marlo Martin displayed deft and inventive ways of assembling and disassembling them that kept rewriting the imaginary grid of the dance floor. The dancers would form up, only to have an unexpected two slice through the rest at an acute angle. Each time, the space seemed to come alive with transgressed expectation.
Closing out the evening was quirky, subversive piece from Shannon Stewart, which may or may not have been called Come. Get. To. This., or which may have been excerpt from that work, or may have been a work about that work’s development. It began with Stewart acting as if she were reading from a dance-directive list; “Relocate!” she’d call out, and move somewhere else. “You can, too!” she told the audience (I’m paraphrasing, really), and a surprising number did, moving, reversing seats, and so on. Stewart went on to explain that she was working on building a piece, and — taping the floor off into a 4-section rectangle — this is what she had so far. She stationed herself in one box, and invited audience members to join her, or just come down to the floor and watch the goings-on from there. Four chairs took the place of a missing quartet. You can see some of the choreography below, but you miss something of the way Stewart created the space for her work from the ground up. When she first walked on, house lights up, the audience wasn’t reading it as dance — but at some point, with the aid of some tape — her movements and those of people who were simply walking into or out of the space became dance. Then it went away again.