Both Robbins and Bernstein authored theater works with other partners, and they embarked on things together that didn’t jell, but their collaborations on Fancy Free and West Side Story became legendary. I’d love to know more about Bernstein’s television opera, Trouble in Tahiti (1955), for instance, or his Mass (1971), which was choreographed by Alvin Ailey when Robbins withdrew. The other Robbins/Bernstein ballets, Facsimile, Age of Anxiety, and Dybbuk, were passed over lightly, and we didn’t hear much about Candide, either, or Bernstein’s movie scores, which included On the Waterfront. It was great to deepen my understanding of two mega-works, and I loved seeing the stars do their anecdotal numbers, but the symposium leaned heavily on celebrities and myths. Much more to come . . . somewhere.
In the Central Square studios over the weekend, two local choreographers showed the minimal side of things. Both sets of performances crammed a lot of material into the space of an hour. Nicole Pierce, director of EgoArt, called her concerts at Green Street “Dances Only,” explaining in pre-curtain remarks that this was the first all-dance program she’d ever tried. Having discovered quite a lot of dance material woven among previous attractions known for their use of gorilla suits, she decided to give her dance its own platform. The seven morsels suggested a choreographer capable of making some interesting musical choices (Pierce teaches piano as well as dance classes) and using them resourcefully. The dances — more like studies — used scraps of Schumann, Bach, Prokofiev, Gavin Bryars, and Elvis Costello, but Pierce was able to bring out some danceable possibility in each one.
Her movement has a rhythmic assertiveness and a peasant-like, flexed-footed clumpiness that showed up even when she didn’t actually use folk music (Balkan Dance). The small all-female groups often worked in counterpoint — sometimes one dancer against three, sometimes two oppositional couples. In one piece the couples kept changing partners, so that the linkages you were following undid themselves and reattached in new ways.
Pierce’s quirky theatricality concocted Stage Head Abe, in which Victor Tiernan entered with a toy theater on his head. When the toy curtains parted, Tiernan, in whiteface, enacted a little drama with his face and walked off. Even more interesting was Pierce’s film 3 or 6. Three possibly deranged women are all by themselves in a brightly lit movie theater. Instead of watching a movie, they’re haunted by flickering figures that crawl out from behind the curtain, climb over the seats, and poke up their disembodied legs and heads between the empty seats.
There’s the opening of a thriller here; Pierce leaves the audience to write the story. The same can be said about the whole evening.
In a benefit for the Dance Complex, which is having its 15th anniversary this year, Daniel McCusker used four studios in the Complex’s 536 Mass Ave building and broke up the dancing into even smaller segments. Twenty-three dancers were roving among the spaces, doing parts of the two and a half hours of material they’d made together with McCusker. The audience was invited to move around too, at set intervals. Only a fraction of the material could be seen by anyone since the dance kept on going, without repeats. From the complicated program/instruction chart that was provided, I figured there were about 45 separate dance bits taking place in less than an hour. Chris Eastburn’s nuevo-country music was played and sung live, too, by a crew of fine musicians.
