REVIEW: MMC’s Fall Repertoire 2024 features work by Jazelynn Goudy

Dance artist Jazelynn Goudy (photo: Kenzo Matese)

 

This black-and-white photo portrait shows dance artist Jazelynn Goudy, a Black woman wearing a light-colored jacket over a light-colored top. She has a spill of dark locks down the right side of her face. She looks directly into the camera while framing her face with her hands—capping her forehead with her left hand and holding her chin between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

 

Fall Repertoire 2024

Dance Department

Marymount Manhattan College

Theresa Lang Theater

December 5-7, 2024

This past week, the Dance Department of Marymount Manhattan College (MMC) presented its Fall Repertoire 2024. I caught Program A–choreography by Aaron Loux, Molissa Fenley, Tamisha A. Guy, and Jazelynn Goudy, an MMC assistant professor. Each work deployed large ensembles of student dancers streaming across MMC’s Theresa Lang Theatre, and each found ingenious ways to carve that modest space into complex, shifting layers and levels of abstract activity.

Loux’s San Quentin draws inspiration from the unorthodox work of Henry Cowell, an American composer arrested in 1936 under California’s anti-sodomy laws and incarcerated at one of the nation’s most notorious prisons. For the MMC performance, pianist George Lykogiannis played Set of Two Movements, one of the pieces Cowell created during his years at San Quentin, time during which he continued to compose work, teach music students, and even conduct the prison orchestra. This backstory, though, does not prepare you for Loux’s sunburst of choral movement, a perfect partner to music expressive of audacious tenacity and transcendence. 

For Going to the Sun, set to music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Fenley has crafted both an exaltation of nature and a lament for the natural treasures we’ve lost and continue to lose. The work was inspired by Montana’s Glacier National Park and the ice and waterways of Greenland, all threatened by climate change. Where Loux’s ensemble visualizes the exuberance of Cowell’s unusual music, Fenley’s orderly precision of placement and movement paints a detailed, awe-inspiring landscape–one of cold, pristine beauty and fragility. In Breaking the Mold, Guy similarly floods the stage with dancers, often bunched and moving in unison abstract patterns. Yet, Guy’s vision requires more fluidity and taffy-stretchiness within and among bodies in various configurations–-a quartet, a quintet, a solo, duet, and so forth.

All three works posed respectable challenges of technique, coordination, and expressivity for their performers. By and large, those tests were met. But then came Goudy’s Divine Flight–or, as she prefers to render the title, D vIne fl~ight. Please imagine what my keyboard can’t recreate: a lowercase d nestled within the lower-left corner of that uppercase initial D.

Scene from Divine Flight (photo: Molly Ouret)

Performers: Foreground: Charlene Longchamp, Alyssa Marten, Ariadne Viloria, Kelly Dresner, hidden: Isabelle Julien, Background: Elias Colado

Charlene Longchamp (darker skin dancer) dressed in white pleated sheer linen pants, and an orange shear top, falling backward with arms in the air into the arms of Isabelle Julien (hidden) Alyssa Marten, wearing an orange sheer top, white athletic pants, a glittering net covers half their head: Ariadne Viloria (upstage) Orange top and White bottoms, Kelly Dresner in a white top with a thin strap and pinkish red button. All are in a deep shallow lunge with arms extended toward Charlene, who is falling. 

Elias Colado, Purple sleeveless top, and white bottoms in mid-spin bent position, arms crossed.  

It immediately became clear that Goudy’s piece had taken pride of place, and rightly so, as the program’s closer.

This ensemble piece is grounded in real-life intimacy, in the love and intense complexities between Goudy and her older sister who, just over a year ago, died of lymphoma. If, unaware of this history, you happened to watch D vIne fl~ight, you might question the sequence in which dancers lift and port a wooden bier over which an immobile body is stretched. Nothing else in the look of the work hints at death or provides death any platform. This work celebrates the rigor and exhilaration of Black dancing, evoking the rhythmic, percussive stylings of West Africa and the Black Midwest. By doing so, Goudy, unexpectedly and magically, unified the intent and spirit of the program’s previous dances, boosting their relevance.

In the world Goudy envisions, the colors of vitality fill the stage, a backdrop projection suggests hazy memories of urban neighborhoods, and the bustling choreography declares ”Life is here. Life is abundant. We are an abundant and generous people.”

Danced with powerful release and rippling joy by the students, D vIne fl~ight is, at once, a tribute to a loved one, a fever dream, and a statement of victory. For us, the living, it is the continued flow of life into a future we make because we can.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa

InfiniteBody, December 8, 2024