The festival, now in its 16th year, has found a fresh new focus this year, with carefully plotted programs that emphasize quality over quantity. The first week’s “4 x 4 series” offered a quartet of evenings, each centered on the work of a particularly notable, up-and-coming choreographer (Kate Weare, Christopher Morgan, Monica Bill Barnes and Amy Seiwert). And this week’s shows—categorized into evenings of ballet, world dance, modern and dance theater—feature programs entirely of world premieres, surely a surfeit of riches for audiences who crave to see new work.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that this year’s festival has been enjoying sold out houses, for Seiwert’s justifiably anticipated program, as well as for the “Uni-Form: Ballet” program on Thursday. True, all is not perfect. Given the contemporary styles on view in the latter program, it felt as if “ballet” was less a descriptor and more a convenient box to place works by people who have been ballet-trained and common to almost all was moody atmospheric music of the sort that could inspire a half a dozen new onomatopoeic categories: “oopy-bloopy” music, “cricky-cracky” music, “plinky-plonky” music. Still, if most of the works on Thursday night could have done with some judicious pruning, they were on the whole well-produced and offered satisfying moments that made viewing well worth the time.
The program began with Irene Liu in Viktor Kabaniaev’s solo “Fragments of…” set to an oopy-bloopy score, created by Nicolas Van Krijdt. Dancing to sounds that evoked thoughts of undersea bubbles and phantom radio broadcasts traveling through space, Liu, who has apprenticed with Diablo Ballet, made the most of the choreography, creating effects that were both natural and disquieting with softly undulating arms and a twisting, snaking spine suspended in impossibly deep back arches.
In what was perhaps the most entertaining and polished piece of the evening, Christian Burns played out a solo “Beneath Your Sheltering Hand,” against a wall-sized video of tropical and computerized interior scenes. Looking like a man in desperate need of a tropical vacation, Burns moved across the stage in frantic stammers and starts to Anthony Discenza’s sound score of garbled marketing tropes spoken through a voice synthesizer and hawking self improvement products that prey on our modern hypochondrias.
Only one woman showed work on this program although female dancers outnumbered the male two to one —a sobering reminder that even today in the ballet world, there are plenty of women to dance, but very few who choreograph. Unfortunately, Martt Lawrence’s “Rogue,” an excursion for five women and two men was perhaps the weakest entry of the evening. Filled with much rushing about the stage, meaningful slashes at the air, and pregnant looks, it was a bit like watching a telenovela when you don’t speak Spanish. You’re aware that drama is definitely afoot, but you can’t understand a word of it.
In “Digression,” composer Les Stuck -- who according to the program note, seems to think that he is the first musician ever to attempt choreography—offered an arrangement of dance phrases created by Alex Ketley. The six women ably took on the challenge of sometimes literally bone-crunching leaps and falls to the ground set against still moments of proferred limbs and ominous fingers circling overhead, all to Stuck’s own, rather cricky-cracky sounding score, although ultimately it looked less like a structured work, and more like an assemblage of steps.
Live accompaniment from composer Jack Perla and cellist Sam Bass bolstered Mark Foehringer’s “In Fugue,” a faintly menacing and confrontational work for Katherine Wells, Maya Hey, Carlos Venturo, and Joseph Copley, as well as ODC’s Private Freeman, Brian Fisher and Diablo Ballet’s Jekyns Pelaez. Foehringer was fortunate to have such a heavy hitting list of performers, Wells, Freeman and Fisher in particular, who can express more with the spaces in between the movements than most dancers can with a panoply of technical feats.
Still throughout Thursday’s program, one particularly vexing commonality stood out – the peculiar self-absorbed “windmills of your mind” style of dance marked by impressive, yet mechanical technical feats topped with a closed-off, sightless gaze into space --that has become so popular. Nowadays, watching contemporary dance can feel like an act of voyeurism, a discomfiting glimpse into the performer’s private madhouse. Is that really what makes a ‘serious” dance now?
