Lyrically charting a life of 'Abandon'
In 50 spare minutes, Callie Chapman Korn's ambitious new ``Abandon" beautifully charts the human transformation from guileless child to wary adult. The dance piece employs no narrative and few props to tell this most elemental of tales, but slowly and irrevocably, the five talented dancers of Chapman Korn's Zoe Dance trace a journey of lost youth.
The work, staged at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center last weekend , opens with dancers tucked in doorways, nooks, and stairwells as a video of a little girl cavorting in a meadow plays over the back wall. Once into the performing space, the dancers' games of piggyback and tightrope reflect a childlike preoccupation and innocence. Interspersed are movements of lush lyricism that often lead the dancers to the floor in luxurious stretches, like children lolling in the grass.
Then Chapman Korn turns face front one of the five tall mirrors lined across the back of the stage, and we get our first glimpse of how self-consciousness creeps in. One by one, the dancers don more sophisticated clothing, and their partnering becomes more calculated, more manipulative. Duets, fueled by the push/pull and weight exchange of contact improvisation, imply conflicting emotions.
With each turn of another mirror, we sense the passage of time, the developmental changes of the psyche. A waltz by Los Tigres del Norte draws the dancers into what looks like a barroom romp, as women sashay suggestively and men bump aggressively into one another. At one point, Ivan Korn throws Sarah Ackley over his shoulder before all the dancers end sprawled on the floor, as if in drunken abandon. (The work's title suggests so many levels of meaning.) Chapman Korn's vigorous solo suggests the ``What have I done?" morning after.
As Tamara Butts-Sullivan teeters on a swing between Korn and John Peck, she is part child, part vixen. The most provocative section pins the dancers in a corridor of light. As they slowly advance, seemingly drawn by its dangerous brightness, they take turns protectively pulling back whoever is at the front of the line.
The striking visuals of ``Abandon" are aided immeasurably by John Tibbi tts's lighting design and Chapman Korn's imaginative use of space. Her score, though an eclectic mix of styles from Erik Satie to Stellamara , hangs together surprisingly well.
The feel-good ending is a little too pat and tidy for this reviewer's taste, but it's well done: A coda returns us to the imagery of the beginning. The dancers briefly reprise their games before resuming their original postures, and the video once again shows children at play. But poignantly, the last shot is of an empty swing, jerkily swaying forward and back.
