Franceoff! Danceoff!

Only a smidgen of my memory of Franceoff!Danceoff!--presented last night at PS 122 in conjunction with Crossing the Line: FIAF Fall Festival--survived a good night's sleep. I'm a fan of curators Terry Dean Bartlett and Katie Workum, but this was not their finest hour-and-a-half.

I did enjoy filmmaker John Bush's opener--Zephyr--with its altered-state clarity of color and depth and its breathless, innocent whimsy. Choreography by French-born Nadine Helstroffer--danced by Helstroffer, Patti Bradshaw and Celeste Hastings--featured a trio of sleepy, wind-ruffled blossoms in the green soul of the city.

Franceoff!Danceoff then veered off into the hyper, the slight and the murky--except for Laura Peterson's Security, a piece I almost dismissed on first sight as a trifle. Katie Harris, Christopher Hutchins, Kate Martel and Peterson--all clad in black-and-pink striped costumes, pale panties with rows of ruffles across the butt, and serious kneepads--entered the space on all fours and began to crisply pad to and fro across the floor to the sound of an Eartha Kitt tune, moving their limbs and heads as if they were little mechanical dogs. I was prepared to file this under Cutesy, and it was cute but not without actual humor--a big distinction these days. In a little doggy interaction--sometimes flirtatious, sometimes standoffish--between Peterson's and Christopher Hutchings's mercurial facial expressions have genuine sly humor. Guess that title refers to the most recent airport security concerns, huh? Timely!

DANCEOFF!

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

DANCEOFF!--the cheeky omnibus series curated by Terry Dean Bartlett and Katie Workum--concluded another season last week at P.S. 122 with work by choreographers Heather McCardle, Nicole Wolcott, Andrew Dinwiddie, Dana Michel and Brian Brooks as well as comic interludes by Nathan Phillips. For the first time, Workum said, neither she nor Bartlett would perform in the show. Why not? Well, besides Bartlett's engagement with his home company--fantabulous STREB, kicking it in SLAMSHOW 9 over in beautiful Williamsburg--the two dancers were simply "too old," Workum joked, for DANCEOFF!

A statement like that is enough to spur the New York Times to publish a piece about ageism in dance (and kudos to the Times for recently taking a couple of whacks at racism and size-ism in dance). DANCEOFF! indeed has a youthful slant towards informality, high energy, sexiness and humor. I don't think you have to be a young hipster to have goofy fun at DANCEOFF! or find something that will continue to intrigue you beyond its moment, but it does help to not take yourself or postmodern dance all that seriously.

DANCEOFF! always introduces me to someone or something of interest, and this time those someones are Dana Michel, a black dancer-choreographer from Montreal with a background in track and touch football, and New York's Andrew Dinwiddie (co-curator of the highly-regarded Catch series, a spinoff of DANCEOFF!, at Galapagos).

Michel, who performed an excerpt from the greater the weight, is a killer soloist who tackles the warped, frenetic and fierce rhythms of her piece with precision and fiery authority. Check her out next time.

Dinwiddie's understated movement in Get Radical! seemed to provide a soft background for the bravura performance of a radio talk show financial advisor holding forth in its accompanying recording. Seems like it should be the other way around, right? Dance backed up or at least embraced by its sound? But even Dinwiddie's choice of this guy's concocted spiel--as theatrical as a preacher's--made me curious to find out whatever else Dinwiddie might have up his sleeve. I like him more for his sensibilities than for his choreography--at least what I can tell from Get Radical!--but I'll be happy to see more.

(c) 2007 Eva Yaa Asantewaa