See all in Dance

Tudor, Millepied, Ratmansky, and Wheeldon at ABT

Dance

The curatorial eye

Boston’s dance showcases have often been motley affairs — mature work rubbing shoulders with not-ready-for-prime-time explorations, dances made to the stopwatch and according to a deadline. Bring in a curator as seasoned as Daniel McCusker, however, and motley changes to melody. McCusker had been wondering how to shine a light on his own creative preoccupations as a dancemaker, concerns that include non-narrative dances that “require a mentally and emotionally active audience to imaginatively complete them. These are pieces that use form and structure to convey content.” (Think Paul Klee rather than Pablo Picasso.) So last weekend he gathered some friends and associates and came up with a coherently beautiful “salon” of dance and video works he called “tHisTHat Show No. 1” at Green Street Studios in Cambridge. May there be No. 2, and No. 3, and up into double digits.

I first noticed Ana Isabel Keilson more than a decade ago in McCusker’s work. She was 14. I wrote then that “she looks like Pippi Longstocking and dances like a diva.” The Barnard grad is now a freelance dancer in New York and, lucky girl, working as the film and video archivist for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Her own video “Monitor 2” is a standard newbie juxtaposition of split-screen details: smooth clavicle and inner elbow, the surface of a jersey T-shirt and damp curls, shot not quite close enough to dissolve into abstract shapes and textures.

The details of Keilson’s solo Tidal/Perch, however, read like Firebird played au naturel. To the sounds of surf and a meditative accordion she evoked a naiad or a seabird. She danced with the carefree autonomy of a wild creature, balancing on deeply arched feet, bobbling from a spring deep inside her torso, and finally rolling across the floor holding her feet in her hands in a series of hyper-charged oscillating triangles. Keilson’s still a diva all right, grown into a smashing performer.

Hints of narrative felt their way into the snippet of Caitlin Corbett’s work-in-progress Tom’s Wealth, which so far takes off on Tom Sawyer primarily through Chris Eastburn’s delicious twisting of such Americana favorites as “Oh! Susannah” A crowd of 30 dancers — her trained company supplemented by folk ranging from young teens to seniors — gestured in simple choric ensembles. When they lay down and rose, it was like watching the cresting of a series of waves. Erin Koh’s dance slurped along the floor; the lyrical duet of Marjorie Morgan and Leah Bergmann sent the women traveling over and under each other’s paths like a churning riverboat paddlewheel.

There was a bayou sensibility in the children’s-book-like images of Rick Fox’s video “Beautylife . . . and other stories” as well. Monotone dragonflies hauled snapping turtles into the night sky, and insects turned into airplanes under the calendrical moon.