Christopher Williams descends the roots

The prospect of seeing a new Christopher Williams piece fills me with childlike eagerness. I’m jazzed by his imagination, which seems to belong to not just one wildly intelligent man but to a multitude. I’m dazzled by his productions which always seem much larger than the space they inhabit and definitely not of this era. Watching his work feels like falling into a big storybook with gilt-edged pages, embroidered satin bookmarks, fanciful characters whose heightened strangeness only partly masks their more elusive familiarity.

Like a Joseph Campbell with all of theater’s tools and magical possibilities at his command, Williams divines and opens portals between cultures, bidding us follow wherever curiosity has led him. In Hen’s Teeth—given its world premiere last night at Dance New Amsterdam--that curious terrain is the intersection of old Brittany, ancient Greece and the medieval Roman Catholic church. Heads should swim but, oddly, I managed to keep mine firmly in balance. I wondered what was preventing me from being swept away this time.

This work has Williams’s signature richness of imagination and his polish, complete with lighting by Amanda K. Ringger, costumes by Andy Jordan and Gregory Spears’s appealing original score, a requiem played and sung live in Breton, Middle French and Latin. For the Breton tale’s ensemble of mysterious bird-women—Storme Sundberg, Jennifer Lafferty, Kira Blazek, Hope Davis, Emily Stone, Ursula Eagly—Williams has provided old-fashioned dancey-dance architecture. That’s rare as hen’s teeth in New York’s “downtown dance” venues but fits this choreographer's mythic, ritualistic purposes just fine. The bird-womens's opening number is performed with enchanting physical presence and convincing vocal skill. Their delicate costumes—filmy, feathery skins that eventually “molt” from bare shoulders and bosoms—are totally lovely.

The actual Breton narrative remains vague—on purpose, most likely—but there is a lone male character (Adam H. Weinert) who woos one of the bird-women. The avian ladies lift him and his love high, swirling them around in the air so they appear to be flying. These swoony passages resemble a romantic ballet rendered in animation—artificial with a sincere underpinning, sincere with an overlay of the artificial. I think, for Williams, this is the very essence of doing ritual, of doing theater.

At some point, though, you might begin to wonder what all of this has to do with the Holy Roman lux aeterna and Agnus Dei. I believe that Williams must know but, as a watcher, not having some clue can be a barrier. The entrance of three bulbous, grotesquely-costumed characters--played by Alison Granucci, Joan Arnold and Grazia Dell-Terza—compound the confusion. It’s possible that these beings are introducing an apocalyptic note, but neither their existence nor their movement effectively connects to what came before or advances the narrative.

So, we have a dreamy opening ensemble that enjoys the work’s only distinctive movement; a soaring love fantasia; and finally, the arrival of a depressed and depressing trio of ugly trolls. Rather than a coherent accomplishment, Hen’s Teeth feels like patches out of a much larger ballet where potent ancestral motifs might speak to us of the perennial challenges of the human journey.

Christopher Williams’s Hen’s Teeth and Gobbledygook (a work in progress featuring Weinert and Eikazu Nakamura) continue tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm.

Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway (entrance on Chambers Street). Information and tickets