Live Music Moves Toward Innovation

 

 

Experimentation with process is an essential component of creating a new work for any artist, but few dance companies can devote the kind of resources Cerqua Rivera Dance Theater has brought together to develop four new works, premiered this past weekend at Links Hall.  The company’s fall season was the culmination of CRDT’s innovative “Inside/Out” initiative, with residencies at Old Town School of Folk Music, Stage 773, and High Concept Labs over the past seven months.  

 

During that time, each of four choreographers—Sherry Zunker, Stephanie Martinez, Monique Haley, and CRDT artistic director Wilfredo Rivera—worked with company dancers, musicians, and visual artists, experimenting with improvisational techniques, and exposing audiences to their process along the way in informal public performances at the three venues. Informative, exciting, and promising, these public forums gave audiences insight into the making of a dance work. While any theatrical performance necessitates collaboration, for CRDT, collaboration is what it’s all about, in particular, the  equal partnering of dance, live music, and visual art. While CRDT is to be applauded for taking bold steps toward realizing that goal, this concert represents varying degrees of achievement.  

 

Process can be a performance end in itself, an outcome that remains fluid and suggestive. In this instance, the four premieres were staged as finished products, which inspires some speculation as to how much of the exciting process-oriented work in the rehearsal studio actually found its way onto the stage in the finished product. 

 

The successful balance of process and product was most evident in Sherry Zunker’s sensual “Between Us.” A lush movement palette splashed across the somewhat confined stage space, with audience seated on three sides. Lay-outs and grand ronde jambes, classic jazz caresses and shoulder shrugs, jazzy sissones, tossed arms and expansive extensions filled Joe Cirque’s original score with keen movement/music correspondence.  A breathy, happy ambience carried the dancers in several improvised interactions with individual musicians who left their places on an elevated platform at the rear of the hall to interact with the dancers on the dance floor.  Zunker’s innovative process was in clear evidence as dancers and musicians alternated in manipulating each other’s impulses and responses. In one segment, the tension created by Juli Wood’s soprano saxophone improvising over recorded music by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins sent dancers into a kaleidoscope of floating and falling. The improvised segments set dancers and musicians at intriguing spatial angles, a departure from the predominantly proscenium-front orientation of the staging in the choreographed segments. A poetic conclusion had dancers and musicians dissolving into stillness and silence as they disappeared one by one into darkness between two banks of audience seating.

 

With no bows or clear lighting conventions to delineate the end of one piece and the beginning of the next, it was especially hard to tell when “Corner Sketches: A Tribute to Miles Davis” left off and “Shiver” began. Neither piece distinguished itself with decisive endings, and murky program formatting added to the confusion. Of course, it would have helped if I had been familiar enough with the music of Miles Davis to know when Davis’s “Waltzing Matilda” ended and James Sanders’ score to “Shiver” began. One has to ask, should that have been necessary? At first it wasn’t clear if we were simply moving into a new chapter of “Sketches.” Eventually, the movement styles of the two pieces delineated themselves, but there was no artistic advantage gained by blurring the endings and beginnings of each piece. 

 

“Corner Sketches,” presented four Miles Davis works, individually-choreographed by Monique Haley, Raphaelle Ziemba, and Marc Macaranas.  Generic 50’s jazz dance idioms missed a deeper connection between movement and music in all four segments. The center stage placement of saxophonist Juli Wood was visually interesting, and a great idea that had minimal impact on the movement.

 

Stephanie Martinez’s “Shiver” found an organic connection to Sanders’ original music, with Chloe Bigelow, Frederica Cocom, and Madison Hom in pleasing, impulse-based movement portraits.

 

Rivera’s “American Catracho (part 1)," to music by Sanders and Cerqua, depicted the heartache and drama of immigration in a layered and ambitious group piece. Especially compelling were Rivera’s use of contrapuntal group patterns and strong rhythms, tying the Latino culture to the plight of other cultural groups that have struggled with exile.

 

Throughout the concert, three screens above the stage displayed an ongoing montage of illustrations, somewhat distracting from the live action on stage and not especially integrated into the fiber of the performance whole.

 

On the other hand, we had visual artist Lewis Achenbach painting in tandem with both music and dance, his body rhythm and gestural strokes capturing the essence of live performance on his canvases right before our very eyes. This was unique, fascinating, and something to explore further. It would have been delightful to see his work projected onto the screens as the paint moved with the dancers and the music. And how could Zunker’s improvisatory give-and-take between a dancer and a musician translate into similar interactions in “one-on-ones” between visual artists and dancers?