Dusan Tynek, now celebrating his tenth season in New York, is a choreographer gifted with an excellent sense of phrasing and rarely paralleled innovation of spatial design. His program at BAM Fisher offered one revival and two world premières; the revival, Base Pairs, and the first world première, Romanesco Suite, fared quite well. The last piece, Stereopsis, was a confusing mix of chanting, voice manipulation and questionable costuming.
Mr Tynek’s 2010 Base Pairs uses only an onstage metronome and the pleasantly deep voice of Lucinda Childs, reading Cynthia Polutanovich’s text, as its accompaniment. On Saturday night, the seven dancers looked poised for attack but largely unrehearsed – moments of near-synchronicity, straddling that uncomfortable line of what is canon and what is not, marred Mr Tynek’s careful deconstruction of quotidian ballet moves. (I could do without the breath cues, too, that heavily pervaded his first two pieces.) Karen Young’s costume designs, with anatomy textbook-like images of organs and innards printed on white short unitards, were perfect. The dancers both began and ended the piece with port de bras that resembled a child’s idea of what clock arms function like – simple, and appropriately evocative, but a lack of crispness in changing position from a third of the performers needled me. Elisa Osborne’s unrelenting pursuit of locomotive perfection, evident even in her eyes, was invigorating. Ann Chiaverini was a calming presence amidst intermittent chaos and shaky extensions.
The second piece of the evening, Romanesco Suite, was a summer camp dream ballet. The dancers, clad in brightly colored shorts and T-shirts, languidly cycled from tableau to tableau. Ms Osborne began the piece running the perimeter of the in-the-round space with one young man and finished the piece doing the same with another. Relationships blossomed and faded; alliances were forged and abandoned; bodies catapulted over each other, all to the sound of twigs snapping and pine needles yielding beneath feet. Mr Tynek seems to have an innate ability to know when a phrase has run its course – and then, with a gentle shake, he changes the space and the atmosphere and introduces a new cohesion. I wonder if this piece would fare better on a proscenium stage, however; several moments of impressive partnering were lost to a third of the audience. At one point, a male dancer raised a female dancer so that she sat on his shoulders, facing him. In one fell swoop, he crashed backward to the ground, adopting a crabwalk stance, though without arm support – she grasped his neck and planted her feet.
The final piece, unfortunately, was a mystery I had no desire to solve. With the men dressed in He-Man outfits (complete with chokers) and the women flouncing around in bat-like purple tops, and with Mr Tynek virtually alone on stage, crooning the inaudible words of Ms Polutanovich as his voice echoed and twisted, the dance began. The dancers recited more of the text once Mr Tynek left the stage – I caught phrases like “lacquer of blood” and “bitter smell of your brains” – with their own voices manipulated, often to sound as if they had just inhaled helium. Dancers took turns marching rhythmically onstage, forcefully drawing their elbows to their sides at 90-degree angles and grunting loudly. Kissing noises and pleasurable sighs also punctuated the movement, which was rudimentary but not uninteresting. Mr Tynek, despite his penchant for mythical séances, boasts an impressive knowledge of spatial design. Concentric circles, changing patterns and carefully timed canons molded the space into something electric and tinged with purpose. Unfortunately, this shot at redemption was far too obscured by a ridiculously primordial setup.
