The Cambrians Summer Season

The Cambrians Review

June 8, 2015

 

A refreshing zen calm dances across time and seeps into your skin watching “Clover” (premiere), The Cambrians’ latest escapade in something completely different (playing in tandem with “The Nexus Project with Autumn and Jamy” at Uptown’s Preston Bradley Center through June 28).

That’s not to say “Clover” isn’t dynamic, exciting, or fascinating in concept, architecture, and performance, but rather a tribute to the naturalness of its flow. Choreographed and performed by its three collaborators, Creative Director Benjamin Holliday Wardell, Michel Rodriguez Cintra, and Melinda Jean Myers, “Clover” expands upon Wardell and Cintra’s germinating quest for depth and meaning in the male duet, begun as “The Nexus Project” in 2013. 

“Clover” asks what happens to the fine-tuned duet symbiosis when you add a third, who happens to be a woman with a new baby (Myers) into the mix. Relationship in all its ramifications--spatial, rhythmic, organic, interpersonal--drives the 75-minute reverie in shared breath. 

The structural clarity of “Clover” makes it easy for the audience to track that process. Beginning with Wardell and Cintra’s supposed pre-performance audience greeting in street clothes, the duet relationship is already off and running by the time time they freeze mid-sentence, and we’re thrown for a loop.  That’s when we realize the jig is up; “Clover” is the entirety of their presence on stage, from the get-go to a subtle progression of duets, solos, monologues, and dialogues that range in style, texture and tone, from high-octane performance to rehearsal mode nonchalance, from percussive to lyrical, to atmospheric, to disco beat mechanics. "Clover"

The common thread throughout is movement that is highly organic, reactive, fluid, and inventive in its use of isolation, balance, breath, level, and weight. A touch of one arm ignites an arc in another; the swing and swoop of one torso around another spirals onto the floor and back again, over and through a living maze of ever-changing shape.  Pacing never lags between dance and dialogue, with plenty of surprises to keep the audience smiling and alert. Wardell and Cintra’s smooth transitions rely on a kind of inevitability of momentum that stems from their ability to be completely present, available, and honest from moment to moment.

Even when Wardell and Cintra each take a solo turn, each watching the other from the sides of the cavernous performance space, relationship is palpable and cumulative, so that when they reunite on stage together, the culmination is something akin to happy atoms colliding in a nuclear accelerator lab. 

Enter Myers. Solo. She begins with “opening remarks” replicating Wardell and Cintra’s audience greeting, peeling off street clothes, and reprising each segment previously performed as a duet, only now with Wardell and Cintra joining her. You feel her separateness, how the trio is slowly figuring how this will all play out. Gradually, she becomes thoroughly integrated into their process, to spectacular results, which expand the duet of part one into a joyous trio romp with baby gurgles in the background and a breast pump providing rhythmic accompaniment. 

The sheer inventiveness of movement that blends so effortlessly with theatre and spoken text is a delight in itself, but each of these three dancers brings a unique personal presence, dramatic honesty, and understated virtuosity to the mix as well. Their dancing never screams technique but rather whispers its estimable underpinnings in all the intricate and amazing movement places their bodies inhabit together. 

It’s not often that you chance on dance performance that promises innovation and truly delivers on originality. With The Cambrians, it’s so unassuming and authentic and personal, you can’t help feeling they’re just living life and you happen to be there, behind the fourth wall, which they repeatedly break and rebuild with engaging capriciousness. And never mind that “living life” includes courageous forays into flight, daring dives to the floor, and a level of acrobatic partnering that redefines leverage. 

“The Nexus Project with Autumn and Jamy” pairs two superb dancers, Autumn Eckman and Jamy Meek, in a duet project that riffs on Wardell and Cintra’s first foray into “Source Material” composition using multiple choreographers, in this case nine instead of twelve, to provide individual choreographed segments which the dancers then rearrange, cut and splice however they see fit, interspersing the whole with storytelling and dialogue.  

Less evolved in its storytelling process, the dramatic conceit of Meek and Eckman’s work together hinges on a thin story line--they are supposedly rehearsing for a dance contest--and an adversarial relationship in which Eckman is constantly disgruntled with Meek, who has been distracted by a short story he is reading out loud about a boy who has the gift of finding lost things, and lost people, it turns out. 

The connection between these two themes is tenuous, and neither seems especially connected to the dancing, but when Meek and Eckman dance, sparks fly. Not only are they a joy to watch, but, miraculously, their onstage personas crystallize in the choreographed segments with dramatic clarity and compelling believability that is missing in their spoken interchanges. 

Extraneous dialogue hampers pacing, and lack of specificity in the dramatic need of each character renders the short spoken scenes unfocused and self-conscious. One reason for this is that when they are talking to each other, they are not doing anything, either physically or psychologically. An exception to this is when Meek asks Eckman to re-stuff his bead chair with a bag of synthetic styrofoam beads. She reluctantly complies and proceeds to attempt the impossible, the result being a genuinely hilarious bit worthy of “I Love Lucy.” As a dancer and mover, Eckman understands this innately. It works so well because she is actually doing something with complete dramatic commitment and authenticity, rather than “pretending” to act frustrated or impatient. The emotion is inherent in the simplicity of the action and needs no further embellishment or overlay of “acting.” By living in the moment of unified intention and activity, the drama fulfills itself. More active scenes like this would add muscle to their relationship and could provide a potent link to unite dance and storytelling. 

Using multiple choreographers to collect source material for creative development is an intriguing and exciting collaborative venture with lots of potential. As it stands, “The Nexus Project with Autumn and Jamy” is in its nascent stage.  Its strength, and I suspect the key to its ultimate fruition, lies in what these two know how to do supremely well, which is to create and sustain dramatic believability through their oh-so-marvelous dancing.