Restless dance …
This past October principal dancer Wendy Whelan, at the age of 47, retired from New York City Ballet. She hasn’t retired from dance though. SF Performances brought the acclaimed dancer to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the beginning of the tour of her project Restless Creature, which premiered at Jacob’s Pillow in August 2013.
The project has four young dance innovators creating for and dancing with Whelan in an evening’s worth of duets. Choreographers Kyle Abraham, Joshua Beamish, Brian Brooks and Alejandro Cerrudo each have a style very far from the usual fare of classical and neo-classical dance. Their choreography – and this was characteristic of all four – combines technical speed and resilience, features of Balanchine’s ballet choreography, with modern dance’s adherence to natural movement and an enhanced awareness of the pull of gravity.
The evening’s works showcased Whelan but without the usual pyrotechnics of ballet: the mind-boggling extensions, flying splits and finely placed turns that are presented – displayed, really – in ballet’s self-conscious awareness of physical prowess. Only an occasional extension unfolded, and the turns were companionable windings between the partners.
The dancers were barefoot, attached to the ground. And for the most part it was the upper body – arms, head and torso – that formed the dancers’ expressive drive. Their feet moved their bodies through space and action. In this way the choreographers were similar, showing perhaps a choreographic preference on Whelan’s part. The differences between the pieces were subtle and tonal.
Beautiful creatures …
Duets in ballet are almost always romantic: that’s built into the exchange between one male and one female dancer – especially given the physical intimacy of a duet. I don’t think that can be stated too many times. But when performance is carved back to its sparest setting intimacy loses emotional glamour, and musculature and the shifting of tendons and gristle gain definition. Take away the tiaras and tutus and the body is more revealed, less hampered by the constraints of decoration. The minimalist and rather bleak stage lighting of Restless Creature made the dancers’ potentially romantic interactions becomes less predictable. What emerged was a form of intimacy that was complex, textured, indefinable and somehow realistic. Surprisingly, it was no less mythic. No less likely to make the heart flutter.
The evening began with Cerrudo’s Ego et tu. The piece began with a solo by the choreographer, which was followed by a solo by Whelan. Of all the male dancers Cerrudo was the most guy-like – highlighting Whelan’s physical delicacy and balletic precision of movement through contrast. Theirs was a dance that offered questions of touch, their arms threaded into each other and sketched interlocking geometric shapes
Beamish’s Conditional Sentences, set to a Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor, was full of exact, contracted movements, almost mechanical in tone, and the two dancers’ close placement to each other and synchronous gestures suggested repetitions of thought and feeling. Eccentric circles of the dancer’s arms and torsos matched Gould’s definitive playing.
Abraham’s The Serpent and the Smoke was based on a folk tale in which a snake is fascinated by the movement of smoke, Dimly lit with spotlights placed on the floor at the sides of the dance area, the piece offered an erotic duet with a subterranean darkness. Abraham used undulations of the torso and arm movements reminiscent of B-boying, or break dancing. In an interview Whelan remarked that Abraham’s dancing is “far off” from her own style of dancing – something she considers a plus.
Brian Brooks’ piece was full of what he calls his “tangled” choreography. A good word for the “pull me–push you” steps of his dance. In between the intricate tangling of arms were the slow-motion walks across the stage, where Whelan falls against Brooks, pushing him forward and downward. A movement repeated enough to become a central motif of First Fall.
An interesting and provocative program, Restless Creature adds to our sense of what the body means and who we are as men and women.
— Jaime Robles
Photo: Wendy Whelan and Brian Brooks in Brooks’ First Fall. Copyright by Christopher Duggan.