Sunday October 12, 2008 matinee - OtherShore are a new New York City-based dance company founded by Sonja Kostich and Brandi Norton (above in a Nicholas Roberts photo) who are having their premiere performances at the Baryshnikov Arts Center this weekend.
I had never been to the Baryshnikov Center on West 37th Street before. The Howard Gilman Performance Space is a nice venue for dance, with steeply raked seating and a good-sized playing area. It was good to see an almost-full house for today's matinee.
Two of the three works presented made strong impressions; an inability to connect with the third is most likely my own failing: it is simply a kind of dance piece that I dislike. In all three works, the dancers were excellent, revealing a variety of personalities and individual appeal.
As the audience files in, the dancers for Stacy Mathew Spence's SMALL EARTHQUAKES ALONG THE WAY enter one by one and sit or lay down on the floor. The house lights fade as projections of clouds begin to drift across illuminated panels at the back of the stage. Violinist Ariana Kim, onstage, begins a scraping motif which will later expand into Cornelius Dufallo's eccentric and enticing score. The dancers move at times in slow motion, dreamlike to match the music. They fall in repose, rise and sometimes rush only to halt abruptly in frozen poses. Energy fades, and as the violin stutters and sputters the mood darkens. Three of the dancers surrender to dreams as Ms. Norton slips off into the clouds. Joining Ms. Norton and Sonja Kostich were Robbie Cook and Miguel Anaya; all of them conveyed the other-worldy, un-anchored feeling of the music with real beauty of movement. (In the Andrea Mohin photo above: Cook, Norton, Kostich, Mr. Anaya on the floor).
Edwaard Liang's LIFT was the high point of the afternoon for me; all of Edwaard's previous works that I've seen have been duets of an abstract nature - whether romantic (VICISSITUDE) or cosmic (DISTANT CRIES) in tone. LIFT has a more dramatic context. Two pairs of lovers sit at a table. The dancing begins with seated, mirror-image gestures and then develops into an interwoven set of duets. One couple (Ms. Norton and Robbie Cook) are clearly at the end of their rope; the breakdown of their relationship is sometimes almost violently expressed. Ms. Norton is buttoned-up and dumbed-down, barely able to hold her own against her partner's abuse while still attempting to communicate with him. Robbie conveys frustration and borderline loss of control compellingly.
Ms. Kostich and her partner Peter Brandenhoff (photo above) are still in love although the course of it is not entirely smooth. Their duets have a lyrical and more tender quality. The balletic background of these two dancers strongly permeates everything they do: you can see the danseur noble lurking under Mr. Brandenhoff's contemporary facade. Ms. Kostich's delicate strength, pointed feet and lavish extension would be the envy of many an aspiring ballerina.
All in black, Miguel Anaya is the odd-man-out in LIFT; he could be a death figure...or a psycho-analyst. His solo phrases both here and in the opening work especially attracted me today; he has an earthy grace and subtle sexiness which continually draw the eye.
Clint Mansell's music for LIFT was darkly marvelous, with a sense of foreboding. I'm off to find it at Amazon.
Above, Miguel Anaya and Sonja Kostich in a Julieta Cervantes photo from the closing work, THE SNOW FALLS IN WINTER choreographed by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar. Taking Ionesco's The Lesson as a springboard, this is a work in which the dancers are called on to speak extensively; props are used and there are 'characters': a schoolgirl, a professor, a maid. For me it was gimmicky and mildly annoying, saved only by the commitment of the dancers. Possibly my dislike of it stemmed from an unhappy association with Ionesco from my high-school years when we performed his Rhinoceros as our senior play. It was a miserable time for me and possibly subconsciously I never recovered from it.
But being put off by this dance-theatre of the absurd piece hardly infringed on my admiration for the first two works and for all the dancers, and most especially for the founders of OtherShore, Ms. Norton and Ms. Kostich. I look forward to their future work.
Above: Miguel Anaya, Brandi Norton and Sonja Kostich. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
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