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DANCE REVIEW: Kaatsbaan Cultural Park’s ‘New Works Bill’ of dance

All of the pieces on the program were nurtured and developed through residencies at Kaatsbaan. Results from the three residencies in performance this past weekend were extremely impressive.

As noted by this reviewer in The Berkshire Edge, it may take a bit more time to get from the Berkshires to Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, in Tivoli, N.Y., but given the quality of the arts and performance experiences one will find there, it is well worth the trip. Currently, Kaatsbaan is presenting a “Fall Events” series, which featured the “New Works Bill” this past weekend, with dance pieces from three companies: Music From The Sole, Boca Tuya, and The Limón Dance Company. All of the pieces on the program were nurtured and developed through residencies at Kaatsbaan. These residencies, which were supported with funding from various sources—including Kaatsbaan itself—provided the artists and the companies with extensive studio space, as well as housing and food. Thus, during the one or two weeks the artists and companies were in residence at Kaatsbaan, they could focus exclusively on creating work. Results from the three residencies in performance this past weekend were extremely impressive.

The concert opened with a preview of a piece from the company “Music From The Sole,” founded by Brazilian tap dancer Leonardo Sandoval and musician Gregory Richardson. The residency for this piece was funded by Works & Process LaunchPAD at the Guggenheim.

Music From The Sole. Photo by Jack Baran.

The stage was set with some chairs, a small table, a grand piano, trap set drums, an acoustic and an electric guitar, acoustic bass, woodwinds, and other instruments and accoutrements, all seemingly kind of loose and akimbo. Also on the stage were a number of very low wooden platforms, the kind one often sees onstage when tap dancers perform. These platforms are like the skins stretched on drums, designed to add volume, depth, and richness to the sound of the taps. The musicians and dancers then lazily just wandered onto this set, quietly interacting with each other, moving around, relaxing into the chairs, all as if they were family members comfortably drifting into a living room after a considerable dinner.

The performers then casually moved to the instruments and began playing softly, the music slowly developing complexity, depth, and lushness as each new instrument, played by these excellent musicians, was added to the mix. Clearly, this was no ordinary living room, a fact that was made abundantly clear when the tap dancing, which was just stellar, was added to the mix. When everyone was fully cooking on the instruments and the taps, the piece would crescendo, both musically and visually, and then gently fall back, with performers moving around, changing places, instruments, spacing, and even their facing in the theater, all while an underlying musical pulse and rhythm would remain, or another musical form would begin anew, so that everyone could eventually rise to another crescendo. The ebb and flow was electric and mesmerizing. Particularly notable to this viewer was the company’s seeming ease in the performance space. This was perhaps because the residency allowed the company to actually work on the piece all day, every day in the performance space itself, instead of the usual, which is swooping into a performance space in the afternoon, setting everything up, and performing that evening.

I have rarely seen such complete and total integration between musicians and tap dancers as presented in this piece. Yes, I have seen many tap performances where the dancers are fully making music with their taps (and hands and other body parts) along with the performers who are playing more conventional instruments. However, there are always moments where the dancers just want to wow the audience with the speed and virtuosity of their dancing, and the dancing really becomes, for those moments, principally about the technique and brilliance of the performer. Not so in this piece. The dancers, even when they were doing arguably virtuosic tapping, were always entirely musicians, fully integrated into the music. The piece was whole and beautiful throughout.

One very nice touch was that some of the performers drifted between instruments and dancing—a performer would tap dance, then play the trap set drums, for example. Another nice touch was that the dancers would sometimes jump between the low wooden platforms, on rhythm, as they were dancing.

Boca Tuya. Photo by Jack Baran.

The company Boca Tuya presented a duet, choreographed by Oscar Román De Jesús and danced by De Jesús and Ian Spring. According to the program notes, the duet encourages “all to embrace their uniqueness and challenge the boundaries that confine them” and invites each one of us “to traverse the enigmatic landscapes of desire, identity, and aspiration.” The piece had a perfect name: “Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight.” Indeed, I felt like I was watching two adolescents who were beginning to explore their emerging and formidable physical strength through fierce and complex—but somehow still delicate and tender—partnering, and at the same time were confronting their incipient desire and budding sexuality, and doing it all with a kind of innocence and naïveté that forebode danger and perhaps even heartbreak. The piece was very poignant, often during brief moments of stillness. The original score for the piece, by Jesse Scheinin, countered and complemented the piece thoughtfully.

Boca Tuya. Photo by Jack Baran.

The concert closed with The Limón Dance Company. José Limón, the founder of the company, was truly a giant of modern dance as a choreographer, dancer, and teacher. Reflective of Limón’s stature in the dance world, the Limón Dance Company has also historically been one of the preeminent modern dance companies in the world. And unlike a number of dance companies that have not really been able to manage their future after the creator and prime mover dies (Limón passed away in 1972), The Limón Dance Company, currently under the artistic direction of Dante Puleio, appears to have been navigating reasonably well overall these 50-plus years without Limón at the helm. The company, in addition to always performing Limón’s extensive catalog of dances, is commissioning works by new choreographers and expanding the movement vocabulary of the dancers. At the same time, the company is striving to preserve the seminal movement style and dance technique created by Limón.

The Limón Dance Company. Photo by Jack Baran.

At Kaatsbaan, the company previewed an untitled work-in-progress by choreographer Kayla Farrish. Again, this piece benefitted from a residency at Kaatsbaan, funded by Kaatsbaan and by the New York State Council on the Arts, among a number of other arts organizations.

It appears, from the program notes, that Farrish was inspired by two works Limón choregraphed and re-choreographed in the early 1950s: “Redes” (“Nets”), which represented “collective work and unity,” and “El Grito” (“The Scream”), concerning “the awakening of consciousness, creative force, and freedom.”

The Limón Dance Company. Photo by Jack Baran.

Regardless of Limón’s original choreographic approach to the pieces, it certainly might have been easy for Farrish, given the themes—and the linking of the themes in particular—to be making more of a sentimental piece which romanticizes the human qualities being rendered. To her credit, that is not what Farrish is doing. Farrish portrays “the awakening of consciousness, creative force, and freedom” as an often violent, aggressive, and painful act, and the “collective work and unity” as an absolutely necessary antidote, without which survival itself might become questionable. The piece has power, and the dancing was simply superb. It was very impressive to see dancers who have presumably been principally trained to perform the usually lyrical and focused-on-gravity theatrical movement of Limón give all-out commitment to the highly percussive, razor-sharp, and intense movement Farrish demanded of them. One waits with bated breath for the fully finished piece.

The fourth weekend of Kaatsbaan’s “Fall Events” series is this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, October 5 and 6, with outdoor performances of “Autobiography (V110 + V101)” by Company Wayne McGregor. McGregor is a world-renowned and trailblazing choreographer, and the performances promise to be well worth seeing. Tickets and more information are available on Kaatsbaan Cultural Park’s website.

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