Leichter dance: all the way live and outspoken

Shay Wafer, 651 Arts's new Executive Director, and Anna Glass, Managing Director, were on hand last evening to usher in a new season of Live & Outspoken. This popular series, presented at the Mark Morris Dance Center, features conversations between stars and innovators of the performing arts and samples of the artists' work. A magical interview between Ntozake Shange and Marc Bamuthi Joseph was one of my highlights of 2011.

Last night's session paired the richly talented Eisa Davis (playwright, singer-songwriter, actress, dancer) with dancer-choreographer Nicholas Leichter. Davis and Leichter go back a long way. When she first moved to New York, she took up residence in his basement, and they have collaborated. So it was no surprise that this conversation would be a breeze. Davis brought to it not only personal insight but fresh imagination, a real interest in discovery.

Eisa Davis (Photo by Colman Domingo)

Nicholas Leichter

Reflecting on his club-kid period, Leichter reached back to one source of the intensity in his dancing and dance-making.

"I did it so young and so early when it was still in this dark period," he said. "I saw a lot of crazy shit, though I never did any of that. There was hysteria, but there was also a crazy amount of passion on the dance floor. Such energy. It just ignited me.

"It wasn't as segregated as it is now. It was kind of pre-hip hop and felt like what modern dance should be--a mix of a lot of things."

Leichter developed an attitude towards concert dance that was a mix of a lot of things, too--the fire and fluidity of club dancing, yes, but also the discipline of the ballet studio. A technical wiz kid himself, he says that the rigor of his training still underlies all of his work, although it might not be as overt as it used to be.

The evening's talk was interspersed with excerpts from a smokin' duet (from Twenty, Leichter's evening-length work-in-progress) that features the choreographer and a younger dancer, Bryan Strimpel. Here's a bit of Strimpel.


French Kiss (excerpt from Black Barbra) from Nicholas Leichter Dance on Vimeo.

That's all fine, but you really must see Strimpel and Leichter dance together, a collaboration that, the choreographer says, revitalized his own dancing.

Different in age (by almost twenty years), race, body type and sexual orientation, Strimpel seems to have absorbed and enhanced the qualities that have always been wildly magnetic about Leichter--an elastic body nevertheless given to delivering rapid, sharp, percussive language, the entire body as speech and gesture. Leichter mentioned that critics, admiring of his dancing, sometimes chide him for not having dancers who can replicate his abilities. I suspect that there's a subtle distinction here: It's not about having dancers who look like you and dance like you but focusing on dancers who can stand up to you. Lanky, blond Strimpel does just that, approaching his work in a dramatically sexy deadpan way, matching Leichter at every turn and then some. The results are electrifying.

Catch up with everything from Nicholas Leichter Dance here, and with 651 Arts' new season here.

Leichter rocks his Joyce debut

I know a thing or two or two thousand about "As" and "Another Star"--a couple of back-to-back numbers from Stevie Wonder's 1976 album, Songs in the Key of Life. Mainly, I know what it's like to slap that vinyl down, play these two songs to smithereens and, further risking delirium, try to make a dance to them, too.

"As" starts off as typically smooth, bubbly Stevie before the man shifts into his hard-pumping roaring, and moralizing, mode. In Free the Angels (2001), choreographer Nicholas Leichter and his company members and guests get the initial melodic sinuosity right, and the dancers' flowing entanglements are enjoyable. But there's something obsessive about "As"--and the people who love it--and that obsessive insistence, if you're going to follow it closely, doesn't allow a lot of room. So, after a while, the dance becomes an exercise in finding ways to throw dancers together just to visualize the rhythm. The inventive Leichter manages to make it through "As," starting fine but with diminishing effectiveness. We soon see that there's little new to learn about Wonder's music here as it stretches on and, since the dancers are completely at its mercy, all we learn about them is that they sweat really hard for Leichter.

I used to love how "Another Star" starts up with absolutely no break after "As." Breathless! But it's impossible--just impossible--with a manic, even angry rhythm even more driven than "As." Watching Leichter's troupe work through this number, I began to hear something that bothered me. Wonder's music, although upbeat, sounded flat, compressed, tight, airless. The choreographer seemed to lose control of making movement and the overall stage picture creatively interesting, instead bowing even more to the music's dictates and to an audience's desire for more and more spectacle.

And, believe me, last night's Joyce audience desired and ultimately rewarded the spectacle. These dancers--of which, tall, watery, gorgeously guesting Will Rawls was the most unforgettable--danced the hell out of the song. Can't argue with that.

Let me say it another way: Leichter is blessed in dancers. He is, himself, a brilliant one. And now he has a crew that matches his own ability to make us sit up and take notice. His choreography, though, which often draws heavily from youth culture and has accessible, popular pizzazz, could use some substance, some sense that it is about and drawing on something of consequence. It's time.

So, along comes Killa, Leichter's world premiere, an ensemble working eight segments to music by MIA, Basement Jaxx, Lionrock and Monstah Black. Black--in a singing, dancing Trickster role--appears to preside over the piece. I'm impressed by the look and lyrics of his initial man-hopelessly-caught-in-a-huge-web number. I love his subsequent bust-out flamboyance--particularly how he bravely and quite skillfully prowls and prances atop the hoof-like wedges strapped to his feet. Killa is colorful, tuneful, marvelously danced by the company and guests, and that will be enough for most viewers. But, I have to say, I wish I came away with a stronger sense of Leichter's intention, of some emphasis and coherence. What's going on here, aside from crowd-tickling flash? Does Black's character--and his relationship to the other performers--have meaning? A meaning that we should understand and care about?

See nicholas leichter dance at The Joyce Theater, Friday, June 26 (8pm) and Sunday, June 28 (2pm and 7:30pm).

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