Approximately five years ago, Alison Chase, the co-founder of Pilobolus and Momix, stepped into a new direction with a core group of dancers to explore dance as an collaborative and interdisciplinary art form rife with possibility. Chase's new artistic vision comes to fruition in her newest work, Drowned, a world premiere which opened the evening at Miller Theater last weekend. She and collaborators Sean Kernan (photographer) and Derek Dudek (videographer) create a vivid world on stage where projected imagery meshes beautifully with Chase's iconic choreographic style. The piece is a story about a body that washes up to shore, is taken in to the local village and becomes the subject of much curiosity, fantasy, and anger, testing the community's strength and challenging its structure. A gorgeous and somewhat puppeteer-ed use of large fabric portrays water and waves and hints at wan burial shrouds; it is also highly symbolic of not only the connective tissue of the community body, but also the divider that separates and impedes upon the group's unity.
Chase continues to explore group dynamics and the rifts therein in the New York premiere of her 2013 work Red Weather. Unique in this piece is live instrumentation by acclaimed violinist, Rob Flax, whose musical vivacity seems to, at times, control and propel dancers as their bodies toss, writhe, and linger over the stage. We see a group at once together, but continually dividing and shifting groups and pairs in mottled patterns. Circling perspectives on both abiding and limited interpersonal relationships climb in anxiety and concentration until, at last, an abrupt ending leaves you wondering what will become of this enduring struggle to remain unified.
Devil Got My Woman (New York Premiere), choreographed in 2010, features an orange house frame large enough to dance in and not too big to tilt, spin, and carry on one's back. Shane Rutkowski plays an adorable, but clumsy and naive man who is overcome by a sexy female seductress (Jessica Bendig). The two flirtatiously snake, swoop, and slide through, around, over and under this jungle gym of a house frame until Rutkowski humorously embarrasses himself by getting hit in the nose or finding himself stuck after his butt falls in between bars. Although we see him as lovable, she sees him for nothing more than his symbolic orange house that she carries away with in the end, leaving our hopeless romantic heartbroken and, I guess, homeless.
Tsu-Ku-Tsu is Chase's oldest work to be included in last weekend's performance. Choreographed in 2000, this piece has become considered an Alison Chase classic with strikingly strenuous feats and all the beauty in the images created as the dancers stack upon each other in seemingly impossible contortions. The ability of these dancers to find so quickly and innately counterbalance and extend so fully thereafter is ever impressive, but the ease with which they execute is astonishing. Beginning quite serene, in slow and imperially poised locomotion, the piece builds and intensifies becoming more physically charged than in the moments before. Just when you think these dancers cannot possibly do any more daring, dynamic stunts, they surprise you with another blast of dynamite!
