Barton's seekers

For some choreographers, performance space is a laboratory. Or a playpen. Or a classroom. Or a soapbox.

Not so for Canada's Aszure Barton. For her, space is theater. And I mean real, old-school theater. The kind where a performer comes out and practically opens up a vein to reach you. Because that's who he or she is. And where it's okay to lower a disco ball and send flecks of starlight spinning through the darkness of the world.

I first saw Barton's Busk in Sarasota, Florida, where it had its world premiere at the Ringling International Arts Festival (2009). Here's some of what I wrote about it for Dance Magazine:

...costumes merely offer hints of narrative possibilities. Huddling dancers in dark hoodies, in one section, could signal everything from homeless street kids to a death-spooky group of monks, but no matter. We’re not meant to hold onto any identification long enough to pin it down.

Dancers’ bodies move like bold splashes of paint, match the slippery suppleness of clay, shimmer and resonate like stringed instruments, sing in overtones, and emote in a multitude of tongues. Today, many dance artists collaborate widely and consider their productions to be multidisciplinary. Barton—with an assist from her dancers, among the most magnetic and psychologically expressive performers onstage today—delivers the multidisciplinary, and multivalent, body.

A dancer’s long frame undulating, while one hand—adjoined to and splaying out from a hip—wriggles like a sea anemone, is at once human, not quite human, and a collective of humans, or perhaps a collage of human experience. Barton, who famously builds on each of her dancers' individual strengths, also seems quite confident and happy deploying a large group across sizable space. It’s amusing to realize that she can sneakily multiply a group even further by turning each one into many. 

Barton, I now see, can also turn this hour-long, episodic dance into many--revisiting, reworking and recasting it, remolding it to its specific venue and even rethinking its focus. The renewed Busk--running now through Sunday evening at Baryshnikov Arts Center's Jerome Robbins Theater--feels more powerful than the version that intrigued me in Sarasota. Its dancers--some original and some different--are still an astonishingly forceful, magnetic ensemble, agile and hellbent, sly and masterful, as capable of sophisticated musicality and breathtaking beauty as of cartoonish distortion. (I thought, at times, of the mercurial, sublime James Thiérrée, especially when watching Stephan Laks's solo dancing. Eric Beauchesne and Jonathan Emanuell Alsberry are also great standouts in this overall handsome troupe that includes Jenna Fakhoury, Charlaine Katsuyoshi, Andrew Murdock, Emily Oldak, Cynthia Salgado and Evan Teitelbaum.) Barton's vision seems big and bouyant in a way that forces us to ask ourselves, as people, as artists, "Why do you accept limits?"

With a large and grand creative team, most notably including Lev Zhurbin's Ljova + The Kontraband (primary music); Michelle Jank (costumes); Nicole Pearce (lighting); Keith Caggiano (sound design)

See Aszure Barton & Artists in Busk--today at 3pm and 8pm; Sunday at 7pm. For information and ticketing, click here.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

450 West 37th Street, Manhattan

(between 9th and 10th Avenues; map)