Watching Parsons Dance for the first time was like meeting someone for the first time and thinking that this person has actually been a friend for years. It is rare, but it happens. The company was so joyous and fun to watch. Now, I’m just kicking myself for missing their performances for so many years.
David Parsons was formerly a dancer with the Paul Taylor Company, and he has toured with MOMIX, so his works often seem like a combination of the Taylor humor with MOMIX lighting and illusion.
The first work on the program was maybe the best. Wolfgang (2005) is set to music by Mozart (including the famous adagio from Piano Concerto No. 21), and is kind of a raunchy baroque romp between three couples. The lighting is dark and smokey, conveying maybe the back room of a 1700’s theater. What I like about Wolfgang is that very often, composers use Mozart music to convey the light and lyrical (e.g. Balanchine’s Divertimento No.15). Parsons hears something sensual about Mozart’s music. The three couples skip, hop and run like Paul Taylor’s Esplanade but there is also more sexual tension. Zoey Anderson drew applause for her repeated manèges of chaîné turns. One sour point: I did not like that the men dragged the women onstage by their arms.
Her Gifts, also by Parsons, was one of the two premieres of the evening. It was a lovely solo set to Roberta Flack’s “First Time I Ever Saw Your Face”. Zoey Anderson was back, this time doing some fouettés. I’m not sure if the solo would have worked as well with a less appealing piece of music, as the choreography was rather generic modern dance adagio moves (leg up, shoulders back, arms stretched upwards), but it was enjoyable.
Robert Battle’s The Hunt (2001) is an intense work set to pulsating, percussive electronica. Six women seem to be performing some sort of initiation ritual. They stomp and jump with so much force that one wonders how they muster the energy. I know that in some performances, the cast is six men. I’d be interested to see how the piece reads with six men, but with the women it was empowering. Six Amazons.
Rena Butler’s Sheep’s Gothic was the other world premiere. It was the only miss of the program. The concept seems to be that a flock of sheep are looking for the wolf. Good concept, but rather muddled in execution. The work was long, and the theme didn’t become apparent.
Caught (1982) was a crowd favorite. It’s a solo where strobe lights give the illusion that the dancer jumps in a series of freeze frames, and thus is flying through the air. The solo is short, but the freeze frame jumping hides the fact that the jumper has to jump almost continuously for those five minutes. Apparently the strobe light is controlled via remote control by the dancer, so the audience only sees the dancer in the air and never on the ground. However they do it, it’s a magical combination of dance and illusion.
In the End (2005) was an exercise in nostalgia. Dave Matthews Band was a mainstay of college frat parties and bars in the 1990s, when I was going to college, the same way Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” rules the airwaves today. A mix of DMB songs brought back memories. The piece itself is like Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe in that it mixes social dance with modern dance. Dancers shake their hips and groove to the music, and that is part of the charm. This company knows how to make audiences happy.
