New York Theatre Ballet’s latest edition of Legends and Visionaries, staged at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, came and went before the ink was dry on the programs. This revival of work rarely seen today, by four important figures of postmodern dance, packed a mighty punch – particularly at Judson, where the radical postmodern dance movement was born in the 1960’s. Its influence continues to be felt, though not always acknowledged, on dance stages globally.
With nine top-flight classically trained dancers, New York Theatre Ballet does some heavy artistic lifting. Their versatility has been tested since the company’s founding in 1978 by the visionary Diana Byer, in a broad rep that stretches from elegant ‘miniatures’ of classic story ballets to Tudor, Robbins, Cunningham, Alston, Tanowitz and others.
This pivot to the postmoderns, engineered by artistic director Steven Melendez, kicked off with choreographer David Gordon’s Beethoven/1999. Riding the somber waves of a Beethoven string quartet, a tight-knit foursome, possibly a family, ventured cautiously into unfamiliar territory. They could have been asylum-seekers crossing a border defined by four steel pipe ballet barres demarcating the danceable space. They raised cupped hands as if to block a bright light, skittered backward then pressed forward. In a revelatory moment, they flung their arms up and open, lifting chest to sky in a deep lunge, before slipping through a gap in the barres.
To Bob Dylan and his melancholy harmonica, Trisha Brown lined up five women and marched them deliberately into an immovable object, making a thing of absurd joy and beauty. In Spanish Dance, the dancers scooped their arms dramatically into an implication of flamenco, hips gently swaying, bare feet chugging forward in tiny steps, each dancer colliding in turn with the dancer in front of her, to set her in motion. Radiant in white loungewear, with an ironic smile on their lips and a faraway look in their eyes, they inched along, bodies squished together, arms in haloes, until the woman leading the charge smashed into a massive stone column. The sensual collapsing of space between the women’s softly swaying yet regimented bodies provided hilarious counterpoint to the morose lyrics penned by Gordon Lightfoot: “I'm stuck here on the ground/As cold and drunk as I can be/You can't jump a jet plane/Like you can a freight train/So I'd best be on my way/In the early morning rain.”
James Waring’s Eccentric Beauty, Revisited spotlighted a stunning Orientalist costume by Sylvia Taalsohn Nolan after Ballets Russes designer Leon Bakst for the 1912 Fokine ballet Le Dieu Bleu. Dancer Giulia Faria wore the jeweled dress, mask and crown like a peacock struts its plumage. Brittle movements not unlike a bird’s contrasted with gestures of vanity and self-absorption that invited us to admire the trappings of wealth and power.
David Gordon’s comedic genius laid bare a choreographer’s process in the side-splitting A Plain Romance Explained/Keith’s Solo, performed with great flair by Abigail-Rose Crowell. She dashed to and fro, hurling herself to the ground, condensing complex maneuvers into a hilarious shorthand while breathlessly vocalising, “I’m her,” “Now I’m me”, “Pose … pose … pose,” and, hilariously, “Where is she? [pause] She’s on my back.”
Douglas Dunn’s duet Roses was sleek and ebullient in performance by Kieran McBride and Jonathan Leonard. The duo established their individual flight patterns and contrasting movement qualities before hooking up for a few heroic lifts that slyly mocked ballet convention; my favorite were a series in which he tipped her rigid body horizontally then vertically.
The bracingly eclectic program closed with the modern-day Sideslip, a coolly beautiful and deeply satisfying piece by former company member Amanda Treiber. Curvy sculptural flats, painted by Marcy Rosenblat and wheeled around by the industrious dancers, created an eye-catching landscape that appeared to change seasons when flipped to reveal new colors and patterns. The flats sheltered the dancers, who peered out from behind them as if surveying hostile terrain. When one dancer emerged at a steep angle – lifted by a hidden partner – they looked like the figurehead on a ship, an extension of the artwork itself. A piano played lonely chords as the dancers made like signposts, pointing with an arm, leg or head. Giulia Faria was lifted into a high arabesque with her hands flickering like a blinking light, as if she were an aircraft in the night sky. On pointe, she made a sublime, otherworldly, swiveling, cambering trio with Ethan Huffman and Jonathan Leonard, reminiscent of stretches of Trisha Brown’s O złożony, O composite and Frederick Ashton’s Monotones. Left out, Mitchell Welsh partnered the air.
Sideslip’s title points to a technique for landing aircraft safely in a crosswind. If small dance companies band together as the postmodern revolutionaries did, will they be able to navigate the political crosswinds that presently threaten their existence?
