Berry's movers and shakers

The Irondale Center’s feels like a mini-BAM Harvey Theater, what with its air of history, charming intimacy and dark, peeling walls. I visited for the first time last night, to attend a FLICfest performance. A good place, I think, to see a good, old-school piece of humanism like Confined, a work from the repertory of dancer-choreographer Emily Berry. The hour-long work was performed by Berry and her collaborative B3W company--Nicole McClam, Milvia Pacheco, Sara Roer and Akiko Tomikawa, with actress Sarita Covington and violinist Regina Sadowski. Music was composed by Daniel Bernard Roumain.

Confined’s text, scripted by Todd Craig, is a torrent of words tumbling from Covington throughout the dance. As far as I could follow, it treats of a multiplicity of identities and the experience of feeling constricted within roles imposed by self or others but it also has something to do with family heritage. I say, “as far as I could follow,” because the words are jammed so tightly against one another and fly so quickly from Covington--who must have one hell of a memory--that I could barely keep up. Because she sometimes moved around the dancers, she occasionally placed herself just far enough away that her delicate voice was not clear enough for me to understand. In fact, I experienced the overwhelming and, yes, confining presence of Craig’s text as a competition with imagery--Berry’s dancers and Gail Scott White’s fresh and engaging video. There were times when I had to block out one thing in order to try to grasp and honor the integrity of the other.

Berry works well with props--little wooden tables that turn into cleverly used projection screens; paperback books gently applied to a fallen dancer’s body like bandages; clothing knotted together into long strings that confine and burden. She can create quite touching moments with these imaginative uses of simple things. She has a wonderful eye for visual elements, a capable, well-grounded corps of dancers and a excellent collaborator in her videographer. The missing piece might be an awareness of what could be usefully pared away, a sense of when less could have a chance to mean more.

FLICfest--a Fort Greene, Brooklyn festival devoted to feature-length independent choreography--will run through January 29 with a diverse lineup and an after-hours cabaret. Some of the upcoming performers include Artichoke Dance Company, CatScratch Theatre (the company of FLICfest founder Jeramy Zimmerman) and Layard Thompson. Find out more and get tickets here.

The Irondale Center
Lafayette Avenue Church
85 South Oxford Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
(directions)