At one point, Hilberman explained that the show hadn’t turned out according to plan, because his life had been interrupted by a disastrous flood in his house. Even that gave him fodder for a dance. Setting up a fixed camera, he filmed himself dancing in empty, wrecked rooms, then edited the footage in a computer. The result, FloodHouseDances, constituted a five-minute triumph over loss.
Jody Weber tried something new for her concerts at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center. With the audience at little tables and treated to wine and cheese, Weber came out before each of the five dances to give an informal introduction, explaining a little about how she made the piece. The cabaret format isn’t new — José Mateo has been presenting his ballets that way in Harvard Square’s Sanctuary Theatre for years — but the talk part was a friendly attempt to educate the audience. Weber’s laid-back modern dances didn’t really need a lot of exposition, but what she chose to tell about them seemed either to focus on the obvious or to bring up questions I wouldn’t have thought to ask. The solos were fairly straightforward. For her own 49 Things, she said she’d made seven groups of seven unrelated movements, and as she practiced them, she learned how to connect them. She made Devotion’s Tale for Ann Fonte Abbott’s 50th birthday, a dance of gestures evoking remembered events in Abbott’s life.
Dancers hardly ever tell us the real information about composition. As Margie Pierce and Sarah Style performed Steadfast Season, you could easily see there was a fluctuating relationship between the two of them. But Weber’s remarks about how they were exchanging movement material made me look for this structural element. Exactly what moves were Pierce and Style exchanging, and how did this exchange take place? Did it matter to my enjoyment of the piece?
Dancemaking is a process that goes from idea to action on a level that bypasses reason. Accounting for what they did, dancers may take certain things for granted, but the audience doesn’t necessarily make that leap of mind. When Weber extrapolated from action to philosophical issues — the “separation between natural space and human space” in her new group dance, Of Bones and Marrow — the audience was led into even murkier terrain. The dance itself was possibly superficial, but stronger, as it flowed from calm, harmonious trios to yelling, clashing crowds to a restful chorus accompanied by poetry and katydids.
BETH SOLL: You can explain all you want, but the rock bottom of Black Flower — or any dance
piece — is dance. |
Long-time Boston dancer Beth Soll, now based in New York, returned for a Sunday-afternoon concert at the Dance Complex. In a talk that was partly about being away and coming back, Soll introduced her solo, Red Révérence, and Black Flower, for four young New York dancers. She gave us more background than Weber had, but she mystified me in a different way.Like Weber, Soll choreographs by building up structures with gestures drawn from everyday life, art, and fantasy, on a modern-dance base. Her work looked much more rigorous and highly charged, however. Maybe it’s that ineffable New York energy that gets into people.
