Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York are bringing something that feels like high glamour to Dance Theater Workshop this week. With their juxtaposed world premieres, these two confident artists and their creative teams take dance theater and punch up the theatricality to an aggressive level.
Miller's half-hour For Glenn Gould--inspired by a kind of before/after consideration of the pianist's two contrasting approaches to Bach's Goldberg Variations--evokes Gould's eccentricity. Metal folding chairs suggest the specially-designed piano chair that Gould insisted on using; stacks of books and other items prop up dancers' prone bodies just as Gould used blocks to raise his piano to an unusual, preferred height. The stage is littered--colorfully, artistically--with found objects, the detritus of internal disorder spilling outward from a brilliant artist to his environment. Safe to say, dances containing metal folding chairs are going to be irritating--sonically and, perhaps, otherwise. On that score, For Glenn Gould does not disappoint. But Gould seems to exist here as a screen upon which to project and pick through issues around irrationality and creativity in a way that proves more sensational than satisfying. The oddball Gould proves to be a very specific and specifically distracting screen. On the other hand, the Gallim ensemble--Caroline Fermin, Troy Ogilvie, Francesca Romo, Dan Walczak, Jonathan Royse Windham and Arika Yamada--drive the choreography and their bodies at a serious pitch that always amazes.
Bell's Pool ups the theatrical ante with disco-like decadence and sensational performance by Jonathan Campbell, Austin Diaz, Alexandra Johnson, Caroline Kirkpatrick, Zach McNally, Maud de la Purification and Kendra Samson. Miller and Bell share the same lighting designer, but, here, Vincent Vigilante has stepped up his own theatrical attack with stark lighting that carves out sharply-delineated zones and ovular pockets of space with radically different temperatures. Oh, baby, you feel the lighting--a truly impressive thing--while you wonder if you shouldn't be feeling the choreography, too, and getting a better grasp on meaning. Pool keeps spooling out more and more wild cleverness, seeming about to end and always finding more play (if not more sense) in that spool--a stretch of 41 minutes that seems to go on forever.
Gallim Dance and Sidra Bell Dance New York continue at Dance Theater Workshop through this Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For more information, click here.
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