For Red Révérence, she had begun by improvising to rock and roll, but for the performance she switched to Baroque music, a slow, stately duet for low strings — two viols, one would think — by Marin Marais. She invoked a procession of dignified, courtly personages derailed at times by the tiny twistings and big wrenchings of an incipient boogie.
I thought the gestural specificity of Soll’s movement made both her dances seem inhabited by distinct characters — or at least dramas. In the quartet, to George Crumb’s vibrant atonalities, the dancers (Erin Ghislin, Lindsey Hedrick, Pearl Marasigan, and Mariah Steele) alternately bonded in formalized companionship and retreated into alienated shapes that suggested hiding, avoidance, suspicion. Sometimes they seemed to be pursuing one another or ganging up to manipulate one woman — or protect her. Often they’d lie down together in a repose that couldn’t last. Soll returned at the end, dancing apart from them but seemingly gripped by fear, tension, relief, sorrow, resignation, and religious visions.
Introducing this dance, Soll had identified several sources of inspiration, and in the Q&A that followed, she insisted it had no narrative content. I hadn’t seen any literal references, but then, in illustration, she asked the dancers to show the “Subway Scene.” She went on to slough off the storytelling tradition in dance culture but to assert, “We can’t escape the stories in our brain.” One of the dancers said she thought of the piece as dancing from scene to scene in a dream.
Connections, detachment, public-service announcement, insider chat, evasion, revelation. There may be little communication in these kinds of interchanges, but for me, the dance is always the rock-bottom information, and I think I got Soll on some level.
