Works by Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e, Caleb Teicher and Company at Gibney

Last night, at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, curator David Parker introduced his Double Plus evening as "a utopian event" and "not an ordinary combination of artists." Here we have Dylan Crossman (Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e), with his elite Cunningham/post-Cunningham pedigree. And then there's Caleb Teicher (Caleb Teicher and Company), a young Bessie-winning prince of tap collaborating with swing dance champion Nathan Bugh. Combining these disparate sensibilities and styles into one show is far from your everday New York programming. But what makes sense to Parker is that these artists take what we've come to expect from their respective art forms and ask more of them.

But first, Crossman asks something of us. The opening of [Insert Title] makes us crane our necks to see him and three fellow dancers--Sumi Clements, Jason Collins and Sarah Harrmann--lined up off to the far right of Gibney's theater space in light that both catches their flesh and surrounds it in murk. It's a theatrical attention-getter, though beyond that effect, its purpose remains unclear. When the dancers soon swarm into the central space directly in front of us, there's nothing reserved or shadowy about them. Squatting, lunging, cantilevering, they readily take the measure of a space now theirs to inhabit.

I'd been contemplating Lois Weaver's Long Table discussion format and had just watched Antonia's Line, the 1995 Dutch film where scenes of a dinner table teeming with various and sundry characters served as Weaver's inspiration. So I was amused to see a long table set up behind Crossman and his dancers. Dark, plain, bare and sturdy, it seemed to represent home or, at least, a base to touch, slouch upon, back up against, even mount and dance across in the encounters and confrontations that would ensue as a muddy audio recording--a speaking voice run backwards?--rambled on unhelpfully.

Left-right: Sumi Clements, Sarah Harrmann and Jason Collins
in Dylan Crossman's [Insert Title]
(photo: Scott Shaw)

This long table is the one constant in a variation of interpersonal arrangements. Encircling it, dancers move right up into or back away from one another's personal space. They gaze into one another's eyes as we both project what we think is happening and shy away from those projections. In fact, our own back-and-forth can render us watchers transparent to ourselves. We see ourselves seeing something that might or might not be there. And doesn't that feel odd? Shouldn't we mind our business? Well, if we should mind our business, what are we doing at a dance concert watching bodies in motion?

Well, Crossman and crew, especially feline Clements, are adroit postmodern movers. They master clean form while suggesting human narrative when bodies are in proximity to other bodies.

Meet Ella, then, makes the perfect follow-up--all about two male bodies in near-constant and joyous proximity, along for the swooping, sliding fun ride of recordings of Ella Fitzgerald singing live. And, yes, as a friend noted, the late great jazz vocalist gets a bio in the program notes. Rightly so. Her agile voice--with all its daredevil technique, its silky warmth and delectable playfulness--is an essential and equal partner here, in high form, as are Teicher and Bugh.

I had only ever seen the mercurial Teicher tap dance, a wonderful thing in itself. I had never seen Bugh; Meet Ella was my introduction to this lighthearted charmer. The two men, wearing regular two-toned oxford shoes, not tap shoes, make nonstop rhythmic "music" throughout their bodies. Swing dance, jitterbug, ballroom, even dashes of Nicholas Brothers virtuosity flow though the duet, powered by standards like "Our Love is Here to Stay," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" and--so lusciously--the Lionel Hampton/Sonny Burke/Johnny Mercer "Midnight Sun."

Was there such a night?

It's still a thrill I don't quite believe;

But after you were gone

There was still some stardust on my sleeve!

Nobody sings it like Ella....

Saucy, sexy Meet Ella leaves us with stardust--a great performance and an instant classic.

Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e and Caleb Teicher and Company continue through Saturday with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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New dances by Bartosik and Crossman at Abrons Arts Center

Above and below:
Scenes from Kimberly Bartosik's Ecsteriority4 (Part 2)
(photos: Ryutaro Mishima)

In a human environment, propulsion--willed by the self or coerced by outside forces--means you're bound to stray through someone's airspace, run up against another body and do damage. Kimberly Bartosik creates that supercharged, contested, treacherous space in her world premiere ensemble, Ecsteriority4 (Part 2), a trio for Dylan Crossman, Melissa Toogood and Marc Mann.

Crossman and Toogood, like Bartosik, had distinguished careers with Merce Cunningham. Guyana-born Mann has his own illustrious history, including Principal and Soloist roles in the Martha Graham Dance Company and work with Bill T. Jones and Susan Marshall. While handsomely sleek, nimble in force and timing, these three performers share a reckless drive in Ecsteriority4 (Part 2). They are up for anything.

Roughly a half-hour in length, the piece takes full advantage of the dramatic confines of a small, spare chamber, Abrons Arts Center's Black Box Experimental Theater. Bartosik's audience should sense the desperate impact of bodies against walls and the risk of those bodies colliding with the Fourth Wall, too. Believe me, we do.

It opens with a slice of chaos. At first, houselights dim only slightly, leaving watchers exposed. Bartosik's torrential soundscape, much of it, could be songbird tweets on Fast Forward. Don't imagine that would sound pretty at all. To the keening sound, dancers thrash against the black backdrop, careen wild splashes of movement around the floor.

This action had already begun when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a person quietly close the door to the space, closing us in. The timing seemed oddly late but perhaps deliberate and had real psychological power.

Gaze at Toogood's face. Her eyes reflect vulnerability, apprehension, perhaps shock, even while she stays in motion. But she not only stays in motion, she survives and with unexpected aggression, red in tooth and claw. At one point, the dancers engage in staged combat without real contact; the air takes the kicks and blows. Crossman ends up on the ground with what appears to be two victors astride him, closely eyeing each other. Who will haul away the spoils?

In a scene near the end, Toogood's eyes lock onto Mann's, staring him down, literally; he backbends away from his overpowering competitor. Toogood then looms over Crossman and deftly strips the shirt from his torso. As Crossman, in particular, repeatedly discovers, there's no easy way to break or scale the wall that contains this dance's violence and furtive sexuality. Yet everything ends with a decisive choice made by each combatant.

Above and below:
Scenes from Dylan Crossman's BOUND
(photos: Ryutaro Mishima)

Crossman's own world premiere, BOUND, opened the evening. (Both works are part of Abrons's new TRAVELOGUES dance series curated by Laurie Uprichard, former director of Danspace Project and of Ireland's Dublin Dance Festival). Of BOUND, a solo, Crossman writes that it "questions emotional (in)dependence--how real freedom may lie in recognizing what binds us, what we have already freed ourselves from, and what ties will always be with us."

To convey this might not absolutely require white cords anchored to the walls and attached to Crossman's ankle, elbow and back, but this design element works well, both visually--subdividing and moving against the murky space--and as a suggestion of living as someone or something else's marionette.

Interestingly, Crossman, like all three dancers in Bartosik's work, commands more agency than you might first realize. The first sign, for me, was in the care with which he positions his bound body--particularly, the firmly pointed feet--which seems a choice, though straight out of classical ballet. At times, he clearly aims to float and to fly, and he can and does release or re-position his attachments at will. He can lash his arms as if wielding weaponry, and he can push into the space and noisily claim it. Only the abruptness of this solo's end suggests one controlling tie that none will ever remove.

Bartosik and Crossman's shared program continues nightly through Saturday with performances at 8pm. There will be a post-performance talk with the artists, moderated by Uprichard, on Saturday, May 23.

For more information and tickets, click here. The box office opens a half-hour prior to the performance. All seating is general admission.

Black Box Experimental Theater
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (between Pitt and Willett Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

The cinematic Sally Silvers: "Actual Size" opens at Roulette

Dylan Crossman and Melissa Toogood
in Sally Silvers's Actual Size
(photo: Karen Robbins)

Of course, if you want dancing most immaculate, you'll do no wrong by turning to artists like Melissa Toogood, Dylan Crossman, Alicia Ohs, Carolyn Hall and Luke Miller. The internal, shifting, watery evanescence of a piece like Actual Size--an hour-long fantasia on a theme by Alfred Hitchcock--requires something steady to grab hold of, even if only for a moment. These dancers take the best of what choreographer Sally Silvers has on offer here--the clear shapeliness of her Hitchcock-evocative movement and interactions--and makes that even more vivid as bodies drift or struggle in a noirish snow globe of evocative sound snippets, atmospheric lighting, and projected imagery including, at times, photos of their oversized, incongrously grinning faces. To borrow words from Bruce Andrews's puckish and self-conscious voiceover text, Actual Size exists as "a closeup of confetti" and a blurring of motives."

Crossman and Toogood
(photo: Karen Robbins)

I think I'm not supposed to say here which avant-garde luminary will be on hand as guest dancer--a different one each night--but you'll find the complete list of all of them right there in your program. For opening night, Silvers "surprised" us by dancing with Pooh Kaye, which introduced a different way of being with Hitchcock--two little scamps or kittens tussling underfoot in a darkened living room, making their own fun, heedless of everyone else's fascination with North by Northwest.

Video: Ursula Scherrer
Text/sound: Bruce Andrews
Music: Michael Schumacher
Lighting: Joe Levasseur
Costumes: Elisabeth Hope Clancy

Actual Size continues through Friday, November 7 with performances at 8pm.

Roulette
509 Atlantic Avenue (corner of 3rd Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)