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Luke Manley and Megumi Eda (pictured in New York in March) teamed for “The Watteau Duets’’ in Concord. (Erin Baiano for The New York Times) |
Dance Review
It’s tone is a bit softer, but troupe’s still sharp
CONCORD - Choreographer Karole Armitage straddles dance idioms as ferociously as the lusty women in her company straddle the hunky men. Armitage has been doing this since the early 1980s, when she shattered the downtown New York dance scene - and audience members’ eardrums - with her brand of “Drastic-Classicism,’’ the title of one concert. Her mission was to grab ballet by the throat, then rip and warp and push it into the aesthetics of now. It’s given her a unique place in dance time: when punk met port de bras.
These days, Armitage’s tone is softer, more mature and reflective, as Thursday night’s performance by her troupe Armitage Gone! Dance showed. The downside is that it has less bite. Presented by Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy, the program comprised three pieces, taking us from 1985 (albeit “revised’’) to 2009.
“Ligeti Essays’’ (2007) is an architecturally austere piece for seven, lit by gestures of surprising tenderness: a touch to a face here, a nonchalant arm-in-arm walk there. The music by Gyorgy Ligeti - knots of sound pierced by silences and arch voices - drives the choreography’s angular dynamics.
The piece reverberates like a series of flash pictures: duets, trios, quartets. Snap: A woman sinks into a deep side lunge, her straight leg stretching to forever. Snap: A woman arcs back, and a man rests his head on her chest, as if listening to her heart. A Balanchine influence whispers through the work, right down to Peter Speliopoulos’s elegant black leotards. It’s a joy to watch. Would that it stuck with you afterward.
“The Watteau Duets’’ (1985/2009), on the other hand, sears itself into your brain. Originally a full-evening work cracked into six movements, the piece here keeps that format but reduces each section to its essence. Matt Mottel and Kevin Shea of TALIBAM! do a bang-up (and crack-up) job as the onstage musicians, attacking keyboard and drums in David Linton’s witty “The Simpleton’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Music.’’
Megumi Eda is lascivious and bold as the woman of the dance pair in this battle of the sexes. Stunning costumes by Charles Atlas and Speliopoulos describe each phase of the pair’s relationship, from the dangerous (black pointe shoes disguised as boots) to the sensually innocent (loose slip dress). The black stilettos Eda later dons are as lethal to her prey (Luke Manley) as an ice pick. He doesn’t stand a chance.
Here Armitage splinters the ballet vocabulary into shards: Eda climbs on Manley’s knee in her spike heels, she straddles him and rocks her hips, she clambers up his back.
An excerpt from “Mashup’’ (2009) can’t hold a candle to these duets in light or heat. It’s a rollicking good time for 10 dancers set to music by Daniel Iglesia, who crashes Mozart into the punk band X-Ray Spex. Hands get very busy over heads, and people run and spiral and fly. Armitage Gone!, it appears, has gone communal.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
