"Tomorrow's Legs" last night

There's a lot to admire in Tomorrow's Legs--a new ensemble piece presented by well-regarded choreographer Tiffany Mills this week at Danspace Project. Foremost, it's blessed with performances with courage, resonance, and an air of mystery. Jeffrey Duval, Luke Gutgsell, Whitney Tucker and Petra van Noort are versatile, appealing dancers who deepen and mature into the piece as we watch. Naoko Nagata has contributed some of her most flattering--while still quite quirky--costumes for the two women. And Mills's flashy visual style and rough-hewn movement attack make an irresistible mix. This woman doesn't just use space. She takes charge of it.

I was less convinced by Tomorrow's Legs as an intention and a whole package--an enigmatic collage pieced together from the fragmented fabric of memories associated with various cities--than I was by substantial swatches that felt like they could come from nobody else but Mills. Watch what unfolds when Duval begins to tug Gutgsell's arm; the entire process of getting to the resulting gutsy, risky sequence bursts and reveals itself in your mind. That sequence simultaneously drew me in and distressed me. Likewise, a charged duet involving Duval (obsessed with a science article) and van Noort (glamourously engrossed in dancing the memory of lost teenage love) lucidly articulates their differences and difficulties.

The work, running 60 minutes without intermission, can be seen again tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, at 8:30pm. Click here for ticketing and further information on Mills's Danspace Project season, and here for her company's 2009 calendar.

Gina Gibney Dance: The Distance Between Us

The Distance Between Us--the new piece by Gina Gibney, closing tonight at the Ailey Citigroup Theater--looks very much like a short story filled with characters engaged in shifting relationships. I can't tell you exactly what those relationships are, but this is the sort of work that asks a watcher to tilt forward and read into it whatever is in the watcher's experience and soul. It's a sophisticated, if abstract and tantalizingly enigmatic, tale. It unfolds within an extraordinary environment--one that seems to breathe, pulsate, flush with emotion, harbor haunting memories and even speak like a living being--created by Kathy Kaufmann (lighting), Lex Liang (set) and Ryan Lott (music).

Among Gibney's six women dancers--always a strong, vivid bunch--Courtney Drasner, Janessa Clark and Kristy Kuhn give especially focused, super-energized performances that make them seem larger than life. Naoko Nagata's dizzily constructed black-and-white costumes are the only feature that seems a little off, a little too kicky for the low-key tone of this piece; otherwise, they have and contribute their offbeat appeal to this rich production.

Gibney's initial solo segment for the tall, gorgeous Drasner introduces the tidal flow of so much of the movement: the lush, lashing, twirling and spongey moves, performed with ease and confidence, that appear throughout much of Distance, running through solos, duets and ensemble gatherings in which stuff, whatever it is, happens in privacy or with others. Gibney has given herself a lot of time and space in which to have stuff happen, and sometimes this generosity seems to have worked against the kind of scrupulous decision-making that chooses what's most crucial for us to see and that guarantees variety of texture. There are any number of places at which the dance seems to have reached an end but continues. Still I would much rather sit out a lengthy Gibney dance than many another choreographer's because she has an eye for sensuous beauty and an appetite for feeling.

(c) Eva Yaa Asantewaa, 2007