For choreographer, loneliness comes in many shapes
BECKET -- A little while into Henri Oguike's "Tiger Dancing," something happened: A man settled on the back of one of the women for a union as brief and fluttery as if they were two giant dragonflies. It was one of the rare moments when someone touched someone else in the dark evening that was Henri Oguike Dance Company's first American performance, at Jacob's Pillow on Wednesday.
Those who have likened the emerging British choreographer to America's Mark Morris may be thinking of his fondness for good music, ballet-like formality, and occasional bit of mockery. There is something else: the absence of connection. You're not supposed to criticize art for what it doesn't do, but after a while this became all I could think of, the activity around this missing element was so relentless, so athletic, and, finally, so hopeless.
Oguike's dances, at least those he brought with him, are lonely places. In the opening "White Space," set to the harpsichord music of Domenico Scarlatti, the dancers try some baroque steps, then flail and contort themselves in serial patterns that never settle or join. They flutter across the stage like scared flamingos, walk like chickens with bobbing necks, or bend like cripples. A male does a turn of spastic self-abuse. Another does campy vamp.
The symmetry, lively music, and Mondrian-like projections on the back wall make this freak parade bearable or perhaps inescapable. Perhaps "White Space" has a particular meaning to Oguike, who was born in Wales, to a Welsh mother and a Nigerian father he hasn't seen in many years. It's nowhere I'd want to live.
Dissatisfied with old vocabularies and willing to do ugly, Oguike is, you realize, not at all like Morris, whose recent work has been consistently, almost tiresomely, lovely. Oguike doesn't do lovely.
A tigerish figure strikes voluptuous poses as we enter the green-lit animal kingdom of "Tiger Dancing," but this is only a point of departure. Oguike's dancers are soon slinking along the floor like crabs, sticking up odd appendages. Then they turn on all fours and shake their booties at us. This jungle has a sense of humor. Steve Martland's bluegrass-tinged music surrounds it with the mood of a country picnic.
"Expression Lines," a solo danced by Oguike himself, begins, like the others, with a pose, as the dancer contemplates an extended arm in the lamplight. Over the next 10 minutes, accompanied by the sultry blues of the African guitarist-singer Ali Farka Toure, he tries to find a way to lift himself up and out, but is pulled to earth. He tries a bit of breakdance, and that fails. It ends in a mute howl. Then it came to me: Henri Oguike started choreographing only after he snapped his Achilles tendon and had to stop dancing. The wellspring of writhing pain he experienced then is where his dances begin.
The final piece, "Second Signal," was the most exciting. With a band of Japanese Taiko drummers playing in the background, it brought out the company in a series of furious martial steps and joyously aggressive poses. It showed, as had the others, their amazing athleticism, and the cheering was long and loud. In the end, however, this seemed a lonely world, too.
