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TIMELESS: Pandora Restaurant. |
At the end of a jam-packed 20th anniversary year, Everett Dance Theatre is (November 3 and 4) at the Carriage House Stage — and it should not be missed. This program is a rich and resonant reminder of how original, creative and cutting-edge the Everett troupe has always been — from 349, its first New York audition piece from 1988, to Home Movies, its 2004 collage of video, story, and dance.Founder and co-artistic director Dorothy Jungels brought her own lifelong love of dance and visual art to the formation of this company with her two youngest children, Aaron and Rachael. She also brought an innate sense of inclusiveness, not only in the collaborative process of creating the dances but, once Carriage House School got underway in the ’90s, of reaching into the surrounding community for new performers, new ways of dancing, and new ways of telling stories.
Everett’s dances have always had an element of play in them, as if a bunch of kids were experimenting with acrobatic tricks in the backyard, inventing variations on playground games or making up sophisticated versions of “Dare and Double-Dare.” But a clear vision of what works and what doesn’t — Jungels’s artistic eye — has always reined in what might have become random improvisation. The lines in Everett’s final pieces are as precise as an arabesque, the movement as polished as a ballroom waltz, the timing as hair-trigger as a mid-air catch by a circus aerialist.
Those characteristics are evident in 349 (named after the address of the Jungels’s home on Hope Street). Set to Stan Getz’s “The Girl from Ipanema” and the Portuguese songs of Astrud Gilberto, this trio of Aaron and Rachael Jungels and Marvin Novogrodski is a non-traditional story of two men and one woman. The men are not competing for the woman’s affections; instead, she is trying to capture the attention of the one she used to be with and the one she’s interested in now, but the two men mainly have eyes for each other. 349 taps into Aaron and Marvin’s deadpan humor, Rachael’s glorious dancing, and the constantly clever partnering among all three of them.
The same three dancers give us the Amelia segment of ’88’s Flight, about America’s first aviators. With a series of poles and planks, the two men hold the “flying” Rachael between them. There’s one transforming moment when the three of them hold five wooden slats parallel above their heads, with the head of “Amelia” in the middle of them, and the lighting makes it seem like an early biplane photo. John Belcher’s sound collage, which includes excerpts from Earhart’s letters to her mother, enhances the poignancy of this piece.
Suite for Balls is from Everett’s “greatest hit,” The Science Project (1992), in which basic science experiments with light, motion, space, and time are turned into performance. The segment with the balls, set to Beethoven and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” has the dancers manipulating flexible two-pipe tracks with white balls rolling down them and onto dancers’ backs, shoulders, heads, arms, and legs, all with a mesmerizing fluidity. When the tracks are laid aside, the dancers do a fast-moving crack-the-whip sequence, in which their own bodies whirl and glide and bounce off each other.
