Leine & Roebana company style owes a lot to the drastic physicality and faux theatrics of William Forsythe, who’s been retooling postmodernist ideas for today’s audience. In place of feelings, eroticism, the development of relationships among the movers, we get extreme action but no affect, groups moving together without making emotional connections, endless invention and little compositional shaping. Everyone danced as if it were awfully hard work.
When postmodern dance began, it was refreshing to see dancing from the ground up, without the emotive trappings and movement elaboration of modern dance. Expressive and narrative ways of structuring a dance were supplanted by “process” work. The audience would see a game being played out in movement, or a task set forth and accomplished.
The revolution has pressed on for decades, and now movement can stand alone. Choreographers/artistic directors Andrea Leine and Harijono Roebana lay claim to the postmodern reliance on movement, with its “ambiguous simplicity,” its autonomy in a “technologically mediated society.” But without the flash of Euroballetics, how do you hold the audience’s interest? Production pyrotechnics and philosophical verbiage is one answer. According to a Dutch critic, when you undergo John Zorn’s tuneless detonations, which punctuated Sporen, “your ears are washed clean.” Mine went numb for a minute.
An even tougher question is how to retrieve the classic works of modern dance with bodies that are committed to an objective performing style. What the postmodern dancers ruled out was using movement to coerce, beguile, dazzle, or wound the audience. Begone the effusions of Isadora Duncan, the high-drama theatrics of Martha Graham. But if we’re not to discard the work of these pioneers altogether, they have to be reanimated somehow by living dancers.
Anna Sokolow ripped the stories and the stagings off Graham’s style as if they were tinfoil, to expose raw movement drama. The project of reviving dances by Sokolow, who died in 2000, was one of several auspicious ideas for the new company Contrapose, which had its debut at Green Street Studios.
Starting a dance company in these economically stringent days is a bold step. Cambridge-based artistic director Courtney Peix assembled a repertory by varied choreographers in both ballet and modern-dance styles. Music served as a motivating element for all of them.
Twelve dancers contributed to the program, working most successfully, I thought, in the simplest of the works: a Mozart rondo for five women on pointe, choreographed by Peix and Lucy Warren-Whitman; a solo by Peix (Slightly Broken) for Lindsey Ridgeway to short Bach selections; and a charming duet by Marcus Schulkind (Tidbit, Too) for Ridgeway and Jennifer Lustig.
Gianni Di Marco’s Gitanas, for Warren-Whitman and Ruth Bronwen, suggested a romantic attraction between two Gypsy dancers, their dancing growing more passionate with each face-to-face encounter. Bronwen choreographed herself as the three heroines of Tales of Hoffmann (Trois Femmes), with music by Schubert and a wonderfully noble but unaffected Rick Vigo as the Poet.
I was eager to see the three early Sokolow dances — Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter (1941); Ballad in a Popular Style (1936); Kaddish (1945) — plus four sections from the choreographer’s psychologically scorching masterwork Rooms (1955). Reconstructed by one of Sokolow’s heirs, Lorry May, these dances exemplify a generation of humanistic concerns in dance.
