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Suchu Dance Photographer: Loue Saletan
SUCHU DANCE Sometimes She Forget to Dance By D.L. Groover Many years ago there was a lovely principal dancer at New York City Ballet. I shall call her Fay. She wasn’t a diva, or one of its international shining stars, but was nevertheless a stalwart company member with sterling stage presence and a piquant beauty. She was always a pleasure to watch, especially in the more modern works, but every so often she’d hold something back. Those in the know, the backstage gossips, called her the Queen of Marking -- a ballet term for not going all out when dancing, leaving out steps, mainly used in rehearsals when a dancer doesn’t want to wear out physically before performing that evening. Once Ballanchine was complimented on Fay’s dancing one night. “Yes, dear,” the great ballet master snorted characteristically, “Fay is lovely. But sometimes she forget to dance.” Not surprisingly, the wistful apparition of Fay popped into my mind while I watched Suchu Dance’s world premiere performance of Jennifer Wood’s The Formers. The company moves all over the stage, to be sure, and the physicalness of it all shows prominently in the sweat stains on the utilitarian costumes of sweatpants and athletic shirts. But there’s a lot left unsaid, or undanced, as it were. Dancers fall to the stage in wondrous swirling corkscrews, roll over, and immediately bounce up and continue swirling off stage, but none of the movements continue in one piece. A leg scissors over the other, but stops short of finishing. An arm swings around and up, but the movement ends halfway. From a couched position, someone kicks like a donkey, but the legs don’t straighten. It all needs to be finished, needs rounding out, snappiness. Don’t stick out your hand like a stop signal if you don’t want people to stop. Maybe it’s the teaching. Maybe it’s the lack of rehearsal. Maybe it’s the dancers abilities. The choppiness certainly isn’t built into Woods’ multi-patterned choreography which cries out both for sweep and quicksilver movement. Except for the sharp attack from Kristen Frankiewicz, the dancers performed the gymnastic fast-footed work, but never really danced it. The Formers is a communal work, with the community jerking onto the stage at the beginning, bumping about like corpuscles or molecules, then splitting off into groups or individuals for each musical segment. I’m guessing, but the title seems to refer to how they all interact as the group forms and re-forms. Nothing else of note happens, except for the continual change of light design, so that‘s about all one can glean from the program. It’s much too long by half, and its charm wears thin. But when the dancers are individualized, the work breathes with easy likeability. Especially appealing is the atypical distaff trio (Muses? Graces? Sorority sisters?) who meet up, chase each other around, banter, elbow one another out of place, and then scamper together offstage. They make a welcome comedy return in the extraneous second act. Woods has a great ear, and her soundtrack is thrillingly dramatic and universal in its sampling, with the vegetal sound effects by earthworks artist Bob Verschueren an aural highlight. We’ve got our future play list cut out for us, as Woods introduces us to a whole new sound world: the African drums of Guem, the percussive tracks of Joel Grare, the rich romantic sound of Erich Kory, the techno gamelan of David Demnitz. It works completely, though, as an aptly sonic accompaniment to her spiky movement and fragmented, jazzy structure. Jeremy Choate’s lighting design, while striking in drama, lacks cohesion and reads as arbitrary. Why certain segments are lit certain ways is never apparent, although the beam that splits the floor from downstage to upstage is a mysteriously haunting image. Otherwise, the light’s literally all over the place, changing at random, with the front wash especially ugly, even though the shadows it cast on the cyclorama for some reason reminded me of Astaire’s “Bojangles of Harlem” number in Swing Time. I don’t think it was supposed to. The Formers. Through December 13. Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex, 2201
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