Wednesday December 10, 2008 - Works by Sidra Bell, Darrell Grand Moultrie, Johannes Wieland and Larry Keigwin were on the bill at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater tonight at Juilliard. The programme, with free admission, is offered nightly thru December 13th.
Each choreographer built his/her work around a graduating class of dancers, so that Ms. Bell worked with the freshmen and Larry Keigwin with the seniors. Each work was large-scale since many dancers needed to be included. This sometimes posed problems for the various choreographers and ideas at times were stretched thin.
Sidra Bell's Refrain for a Broken Chorus was danced to a live-onstage performance of Dennis Bell's score by the Juilliard Jazz Ensemble. Since I'm not much of a jazz enthusiast, I can't really comment except to say the musicians played very well. Ms. Bell gave her young dancers, in unisex hot-pants and fitted jackets, moves that looked good without taxing them. Nice energy here.
The flamenco-flavoured opening segment of Darrell Grand Moultrie's Exposed Sights was especially attractive and the sophomores seemed to enjoy performing it; both here and in Johannes Wieland's because there isn't any the dancers seemed to spend quite a bit of time on the floor. Wieland's piece, which includes having the dancers speak, featured a really entertaining score by Jean-Pierre Guiran for accordion duo played with blithe lyricism by Bob Goldberg and Michel Ippolito. The music alone made it enjoyable but the piece went on too long.
Probably it's unfair to single out individual dancers at a student performance but Norbert de la Cruz in the Wieland work - a compact, intense dancer with a poetic face - was particularly vivid.
Highlight of the evening for me was Larry Keigwin's retro RUNAWAY; using a pounding-pulsating rhythm set by composer Jonathan Melville Pratt we are zoomed back to the 1970s. The girls wear hot-coloured dresses and big hair and the boys wear suits. But then the clothes start to come off: some of the girls strip to bikinis and the boys to black briefs. Two beautiful Black guys take off their trousers but keep their shirts on and stroll about - at one point they break into a Saturday Night Fever tribute: the audience loved them. The dance consists mainly of walking (quickly), striking poses and looking disdainfully cool. Using the full stage and minimal lighting, the feel of the discothecque is palpable even though there's no real disco music. At the end the audience, most of whom were far too young to remember the disco era, stood up and cheered.
what, you didn't like tall and cute zachary tang?
Posted by: Hyeronimus | December 28, 2008 at 02:29 PM