Friday June 8, 2012 - The main hall of St. Mark's Church down in the East Village was transformed into a vast performance space for Marie Christine Giordano Dance's presentation of IN AND OUT. Full theatrical lighting by Michael O'Connor created a spacious, luminous setting in which the three dancers moved with unimpeded grace.
I first encountered Ms. Giordano when she performed a solo with BalaSole in July 2011; that solo has become an emblematic part of IN AND OUT, a dancework which largely evolves in weighted, slow-motion movement and a mysterious gestural language.
The score, by Al Comet, commences with static. Ms. Giordano, topless and clad in a long white skirt, appears as a priestess-like figure before a blue-neon sphere. She slowly traverses the space with sustained port de bras, using her marvelously delineated dorsal musculature as an expressive instrument.
Kana Sano (above) is one of two young acolytes who now appear; the three women warily approach and draw back from one another, gradually establishing a sisterhood.
Above: Andrea Lanzetti and Kana Sano. As the music unfolds with solo piano, mechanical elements and a passage of ominous heavy beats, the three dancers explore their relationships to one another and to the space.
A duet for Mlles. Sano and Lanzetti, above, is sculpted with streched out motifs as they seek to possess or share a single chair.
Kana Sano
Ms. Giordano's solo weaves into a trio set to electronic humming and pulsing; the blue sphere continues to generate its mystic energy.
As the space brightens, the women do billowy white shirts. Ms. Kano is momentarily chased and threatened before things settle back into more peaceful atomsphere.
Darkness settles in; the rituals of the sisterhood continue as the light is extinguished.
The overall impression of IN AND OUT is hypnotic; the chiaroscuro effects of the excellent lighting and the poetic movement of the three dancers sustain the atmosphere throughout the work's 50-minute duration. Two slight reservations: a sustained passage where the dancers remain on the floor could be edited considerably; and at one point a vast tidal wave of sound does not inspire a comparable visual effect. But the work certainly has a unique aura, and the communicative power of Ms. Giordano's physique is something to behold.
The photos here are by Kokyat, taken at the dress rehearsal of June 6th.