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THE A.W.A.R.D SHOW 2010!
The first three nights of this unique four-day competition proved a wild ride. As Dance Center chair Bonnie Brooks said on Friday, every dance created its own world --- so you're negotiating four worlds a night.
The A.W.A.R.D. Show! has ground rules, and I set a few for myself. I didn't stay for much, or usually any, of the postshow discussions. I didn't look at the posted winners on the Dance Center's site until each evening's review was finished. And I haven't rank-ordered the works the way audience members did at the shows, instead discussing them by order in the program, first to last.
Tonight, Saturday the 31st, the three finalists compete for the $10,000 prize; the winner and runners-up will be posted Sunday.
Wednesday, July 28
The battle of the Titans circa 2010 got off to an uneven start on opening night. Those vying for a chance at the big prize, to be used for the creation of new choreography, ranged from a recent Columbia College grad to the artistic director of a five-year-old ballet company.
Jacqueline Stewart's stylish, lyrical duet, "It's Not Enough to Close Your Eyes," is circumscribed by its focus on a downstage Fresnel light. Though the unusual lighting creates some cool effects, overall the stage is too dim during much of the piece to see the dancing. Hands fluttering above and near the light, which is pointed up, inevitably suggest moths drawn to a flame --- and the dancers, just as predictably, snatch each other’s hands away from the fire. Charlie Cutler and Grace Whitworth looked well rehearsed in Stewart’s sometimes challenging choreography.
Alicia Wilson, the recent Dance Center graduate, performed her own promising solo, "Sometimes/Always." Daring to be different, she dramatizes insecurity --- seldom seen in the dance world, which lionizes self-confident, decisive performance. Fiddling one hand at her side, Wilson allows the fussy, nervous motions to reverberate through her entire body until she’s twitching and swaying. Later, standing on half-toe, she reaches her arms forward while gradually leaning back with her hips, literally pulled in two directions. Though psychologically suggestive, Wilson’s solo is also more than a little self-involved. But her courage and emotional instincts are strong.
Mike Gosney, of Elements Contemporary Ballet, contributed an excerpt from "Curiosity." The only work on pointe in the A.W.A.R.D. Show's two years, this septet was also Wednesday’s most ambitious piece. Gosney’s take on contemporary ballet is both respectful of tradition and intriguingly, expressively new; he uses romantic longing as a metaphor for curiosity in a larger sense. A male solo and a duet by a central couple (Joseph Caruana and Gabrielle DelRe Ashley, both up to Gosney's challenges) set the mood of yearning. When a subsidiary couple and three corps dancers join the action halfway through, it does open out the meaning from the personal to the universal --- but it also dilutes the energy.
Kate Corby collaborated with her dancers on "Go," a trio filled with abrupt movements as succinct as the title. The piece essentially dismantles the opening section’s chaos into smaller, more comprehensible pieces --- though "Go" retains an agreeable mystery. Corby plays off the odd-woman-out aspect of a trio, suggesting swift, easily broken alliances and distracted, birdlike animosities. The dancers’ stares and changing expressions are amusing --- and crucial to the work's conclusion, when the audience becomes the odd woman out. With its strong structure, unusual movement, and half-menacing, half-humorous air, "Go" creates its own strange world.
Wednesday's winner: Jacqueline Stewart
*
Thursday, July 29
The second evening sandwiched two duets by relative newcomers between excerpts from longer works by two experienced choreographers. Apples and oranges doesn’t come close to describing the experience. More like escargots and ice cream.
Peter Carpenter's excerpt from "My Fellow Americans," last October's evening-length dance-theater piece, suffered from the drastic cuts he had to make. (A.W.A.R.D. Show! rules don’t allow works longer than 15 minutes.) The highlights winnowed from the longer piece: Carpenter’s rendition of Tommy Womack’s funny song "I Miss Ronald Reagan," cross-dressing performers vamping in Reagan masks, Donnell Williams’s reminiscence about the Reagan years. But this truncated version doesn’t begin to approach the political and dramatic complexity of Carpenter’s original. It feels like an overture, then a jump cut to the conclusion.
Rebecca Lemme offered a very presentable romantic duet whose intricate, occasionally inventive partnering was well performed by Hubbard Street dancers Kellie Epperheimer and Jason Hortin. "Rooms for Them" has a beginning and an end: two lonely, prickly people achieve rapprochement. But it's a rocky road. Conflicts are swiftly established, then resolved, all within seconds. Almost indistinguishable repetitions of the same psychological dynamic don’t create much of an emotional arc.
Conflict is more overt in Michel Rodriguez’s duet "Moi Aussi," which he performs with Jessie Gutierrez. The opening is basically a shoving match, and it too gets monotonous. But then the piece opens out. Something happens to Rodriguez; he turns away from Gutierrez, though she keeps pummeling him. While she watches him, he slides into a series of contorted moves near the floor. It’s no mistake that these resemble capoeira, a much more evolved martial art than adolescent shoving; hostility is sublimated, and each fighter must access the other’s mind. "Moi Aussi" also ends in rapprochement, even an embrace --- but it's equivocal, qualified. The arms drop, lax, and the dancers’ poses suggest the dance's beginning.
Like Carpenter's excerpt, Molly Shanahan's suffered from being forced into the A.W.A.R.D. Show! mold. In May, at the Epiphany church, Shanahan's evening-length "Stamina of Curiosity: Our Strange Elevations" developed her unique movement ideas over almost an hour, and set them in a magical historic space. The quintet "Gossamer Dominion" --- part of a new version of "Stamina" --- did not come across the same way. Shanahan's principles often read as self-indulgence, and her organic approach as a lack of structure. Despite the highlights (a repeated unison collapse and whirl apart, the still consideration of an extended arm, fingers curved), there wasn’t time to absorb Shanahan’s aesthetic or comprehend her storytelling.
Thursday's winner: Michel Rodriguez
*
Friday, July 30
The final free-for-all proved the most eclectic of the bunch. It veered from the utterly conventional to the totally bizarre, with stops at locations less easy to categorize or define.
Mary Tisa's sextet "Ecarg Grace" begins intriguingly, with recorded texts delivering isolated words that then are spoken backward, creating an incomprehensible language. But the songs that follow are all too comprehensible and ordinary, and the dancing is even less remarkable. Inventive movement is clearly not the point, but I'm not sure what is. In combination with the mellow music, the cheery bursts of the choreography begin to deaden the senses.
"Dot and Dash," by dancers Ginger Krebs and Andy Braddock, has a circuslike sci-fi flair. Sporting white shorts, camisoles, bathing caps, and fake-fur stoles, Krebs and Braddock exhibit a tortured symbiotic attachment, manifested most clearly in a complicated, laborious back-to-back roll across the floor. When it all becomes too difficult, Braddock begins propelling himself around on a little hassock on wheels; meanwhile they've attached white paper funnels to their bodies. Clinical, mechanical, puzzling, but with a certain “Godot”-like humor, the duet ends in pathos: the two are separated.
Philip Elson's "Mode of Duration," which he performed with Matthew McMunn, creates a strong emotional undertow. Also a bit mechanical at first, it begins with the limbs snapping open and closed like the blades of a jackknife. Elson’s sound score resembles industrial noise but also sometimes a heartbeat; the motley costumes hint at jesters, though these two are dead serious. Elson’s acrobatic choreography doesn’t look like wrestling, yet weight and counterbalance are crucial, and the men begin to seem respectful, even loving combatants. Elegant and powerful, the dancers create a strong sense of connection that makes their occasional swift attacks even more chilling.
Joanna Rosenthal of Same Planet Different World Dance Theater dives into the half-light of film noir in an excerpt from her "Grey Noise." Extremely well danced by two women and three men, it revels in the power wielded by the femme fatale --- a premise established, in the excerpt anyway, during the opening half-violent, half-tender duet. Rosenthal has a gift for the truly sexy, essential to any treatment of film noir, as well as for highly kinetic, electric, emotionally telling choreography, essential to building character. These characters, though, interact in ways that define them only as film noir archetypes and their world as dangerous, deceptive. The ground keeps giving way under their feet --- and under ours too. I longed for the whole story.
Friday's winner: Joanna Rosenthal
Congratulations to all the finalists! Shake hands, and may the best choreographer win…
