DEBRA CASH

States of unrest

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:09:07 GMT

Hofesh Schechter, Natural Dance Theatre, Ko + Edge at the Pillow
“Dance is a tool to look at other things,” choreographer Hofesh Shechter told an interviewer, but during the company’s US debut at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend you’d be forgiven for just looking at the fantastically virile dancing.

ALICE: Shinji Nakamura’s meditation on his Japanese childhood after World War II as seen through
the lens of Lewis Carroll.

“Dance is a tool to look at other things,” London-based Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter told an interviewer, but during the company’s US debut at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend you’d be forgiven for just looking at the fantastically virile dancing. In Uprising (2006), seven men lope along the floor on their knuckles like fluidly moving apes, wrestle, bang foreheads, and use contained fury as a way to shape and disguise their demands for closeness. Movement seems to shake out of them like restless ions scattering out of the ends of their limbs.

Emerging from haze and opaque shafts of light designed by Lee Curran that turn the stage into a smoky barroom or a claustrophobic dungeon, the dancing in both Uprising and 2007’s In Your Rooms is arranged with rare spatial sophistication. The delicate maneuvers of a twitching walk-on-elbows crawl is blocked by a tender lift that hogs the attention. It’s all hide-and-seek: you know you’re missing something, but there’s a thrill that so much is going on simultaneously.

Shechter says that Uprising is inspired less by the intifadah at home than by the youth uprising in the Paris suburbs in 2006. Still, if the piece’s closing moment, with its evocation of a bunch of young revolutionaries carrying a red flag and storming a barricade, has a smart-ass smirk, that’s part of Shechter’s reading of this culture of self-dramatizing hypermasculinity. You can tell he knows these guys. He’s been there.

Neither Uprising nor In Your Rooms speaks directly to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis — it would appear that Shechter left his native Jerusalem in part to avoid making all of his art in a context of permanent conflict. Nonetheless, it can’t help shadowing them. In Your Rooms incorporates a voiceover text about the challenge of creating harmony out of chaos, gibberish polemics studded with nuggets of truth and a stunned man who stands with a sign that reads “Don’t follow leaders” and then on the opposite side “Follow me.”

In Your Rooms, with its cluster of shifting episodes, takes place in a kind of crouch: the six men and five women freeze with their hands above their heads as if warding off a blow, and later they stride forward drumming insistently on their thighs. Argumentative, defiant, they pump their fists at the musicians hovering overhead, at one another, and at an opponent somewhere yonder. The dance is deliberately interrupted, its insistent rhythms pushed by a score that mixes growling electronica and Middle-Eastern-verging-on-Indian modalities performed live by a string quintet. Shechter, who once played drums in a jazz band, wrote the music with violinist Nell Catchpole.

Rite of darkness

DEBRA CASH — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:49:59 GMT

Heddy Maalem’s Sacre
Le Sacre du Printemps , with 14 dancers hailing from Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Nigeria, and Mozambique, takes on black-on-black violence .

BLACK-ON-BLACK VIOLENCE Maalem depicts contemporary African savagery.

Last weekend, as I sat in the audience for Compagnie Heddy Maalem’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at Jacob’s Pillow, Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe had just declared himself the winner of a presidential election for which he was the only candidate on the ballot. His triumph, if you can call it that, appears to have been engineered in part by having thugs go from house to house and beat every man, woman and child who was not supporting him. Opposing candidate Morgan Tsvangirai fled for his life and took shelter in the Dutch embassy in Harare.

Political juxtapositions came to mind because Maalem — a 57-year-old choreographer based in Toulouse, and with a background in both boxing and aikido — identifies himself as a child of war. He’s the son of a French mother and an Algerian father; his family fled North Africa when he was a boy. Yet whereas his familial fury is aimed squarely at the distortions of colonialism, his Le Sacre du Printemps, with 14 dancers hailing from Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Nigeria, and Mozambique, takes on black-on-black violence. Maalem has headed unblinkingly into the dangerous territory of white projection. Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 evocation of a pre-Christian Russian fertility rite shudders alongside Maalem’s 2004 depiction of contemporary African savagery.

While considering a new version of Sacre, Maalem made an emotionally jarring trip to Lagos, Nigeria. As he explained to Jacob’s Pillow scholar Philip Szporer, he eased into the project with a simpler, thematically related exploration that became the 2000 short dance-for-camera work “Black Spring” created with filmmaker Benoit Dervaux. In “Black Spring,” the images race alongside the movement variations like flashes of memory. During Maalem’s Sacre, blurred representations are the backdrop to interludes of mechanical sounds by Benoit De Clerck carved into a recording of Pierre Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in the monumental Stravinsky score. Nature — swaying fronds and open water and blasted baobab trees — gives way to images of urban density in both sets of clips, as Dervaux’s camera sweeps across stacks of cloth, piles of garbage, and the overlapping corrugated roofs of shanties.

Maalem’s Sacre opens with two sculptural figures silhouetted against flashes of lightning. One bends to the floor, the other stands with her neck bent, hands clasping and opening like a spiny star. As the lights come up, the ensemble emerges onto the stage like cautious animals entering a glade.

What's left behind

DEBRA CASH — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:38:59 GMT

Tap Olé at the Regent, Rachid Ouramdane at the ICA, Prometheus at Boston Conservatory
Tap Olé is less a new-fangled bicultural fusion than a return to tap dancing’s foundational swingtime.

TAP OLÉ: Unison hoofing right out of 1940s Hollywood.

A week ago Friday, on the stage of Arlington’s Regent Theatre, dancer/producer Josh Hilberman asked for a moment of silence to mark the passing of legendary tap master Jimmy Slyde. Slyde’s death that morning just as the Boston community was celebrating International Tap Day — Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s birthday, May 25 — was sort of like having Thomas Jefferson and John Adams die on the Fourth of July. Slyde, according to his friends, had always insisted that someone who had passed away hadn’t left but had left behind, so it was fitting that the silence should soon be broken by the clangor of the art form he did so much to preserve and advance. Tap Olé, a quartet of hip thirtysomethings from Barcelona debuting their full-evening show here in the States, made a joyful noise. Jimmy Slyde would have loved it.

Tap Olé is less a new-fangled bicultural fusion than a return to tap dancing’s foundational swingtime. Alejandro Pérez Gracia bent his contemporary flamenco guitar riffs bluesward like a Clapton wanna-be, eliciting a raised eyebrow from straight man Roger Raventós: the two were not beyond lacing their rumba with corny television themes and Beatles hits. Flamenco dancing is barely to be found in Tap Olé’s style, beyond a matador-like hand at the waist or a curling wrist overhead. How could it be? Flamenco is brooding and inward; tap, at least in the style Tap Olé has mastered, ingratiates itself with its audience. What Tap Olé does take from flamenco is fearlessness in the face of changing time signatures and the gift of making surprising decisions to accentuate the off-beat. For both the musicians and the dancers, Tap Olé’s syncopations seemed to derive equally from jazz and compas, a combination that got a special wink in Tap Olé’s performance of Chick Corea’s “Spain.”

Petite Roser Font has a bright sound to her footwork and a talent for spinning smoothly while her feet are playing out intricate musical arrangements. Occasionally she strikes a Shirley Temple “good ship Lollipop” pose that no American tap dancer would dare do, and she gets away with it. Guillem Alonso is more of a poet, whether emptying a bag of sand onto the stage in gorgeous ribbons, jack-in-the-boxing into the air, or increasing the intensity of his phrasing by adding to its density in sheer taps-per-second. Together these dancers can handle unison hoofing as crisp as any you would have heard on a 1940s Hollywood sound stage.

The curatorial eye

DEBRA CASH — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:13:24 GMT

Daniel McCusker’s ‘tHisTHat’
Never merely illustrative, their unity seemed like the very source of Heaven.

TIDAL/PERCH: Ana Isabel Keilson’s solo read like Firebird played au naturel.

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.

Signals from the solar system

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:06:35 GMT

Daniel McCusker at Tufts, Kelley Donovan at the Dance Complex
Pluto may have been downgraded to a dwarf planet, but Jupiter is still respected for its size, its moons, and the regularity of its orbit.

JUPITER: This latest from McCusker is the kind of dance that keeps going on even when you aren’t
looking at it.

Pluto may have been downgraded to a dwarf planet, but Jupiter is still respected for its size, its moons, and the regularity of its orbit. When local dancemaker Daniel McCusker titled his current movement project Jupiter, a piece his Boston-based company performed at the Tufts University Dance Lab at Jackson Gymnasium this past weekend, he says that he meant only that the dance would take the form of five distinct parts augmented by four “satellite dances,” all using and reusing the same movement language.

The title, however, cast an extraterrestrial subtext on the choreography. Like a work by Merce Cunningham, McCusker’s latest seemed to be the kind of dance that keeps going on even when you aren’t looking at it. Jupiter is like a satellite crossing purposefully overhead despite being washed into invisibility by daylight.

Jupiter opens with a solo of gentle containment. McCusker, a thin, grizzled figure in nondescript brown, looked as honed and linear as a whittled whirligig. His solo set up a steady, breathing pace, one that persisted for the hour-long dance whether the sequences were accompanied by Michael McLaughlin’s stripped-down solo accordion playing or performed in a silence broken only by the hum of the gym fan.

Rebecca Lay and Melody Ruffin Ward appeared and performed a brief, intimate duet that they revisited a number of times through the evening. The women tussled, snuggled, and rearranged each other’s shapes with the barest touch of an arm or a thigh. Then they rested, with Ward looking skyward while leaning against Lay’s rounded back as if her partner were a field boulder. When the two women repeated this sequence, they usually presented it exactly the same way, as if they were teaching the audience to pay attention to how it was done. But at least once that I observed they presented it at the end of a new series of movement phrases, so that we learned more about the relationship that created that companionable rest.

Ten other dancers emerged in various combinations through the rest of the work. They moved in a weightless, almost polite way, something I think McCusker has retained from his years dancing in New York with the starker minimalist choreographer Lucinda Childs. The dancing seemed chaste and unruffled, with scooping reaches and freely taken folkloric steps. It was given a lucid reading by the company’s confident, grown-up performers — especially Wanda Strukus, Yenkuei Chuang, and Leah Bergmann.

Finding a voice

DEBRA CASH — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:48:23 GMT

Battleworks at the ICA
Closer inspection, however, shows a choreographer making a series of perplexing musical choices that don’t always serve him well.

BATTLEWORKS: Sometimes it doesn’t all seem to be going in the same direction.

If you got snowed out of World Music/CRASHarts performances of Battleworks at the Institute for Contemporary Arts last weekend, you might still have caught Robert Battle’s languorous Unfold, which Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performed at the Wang Center earlier in the month. Unfold was a duet set to the aria “Depuis le jour,” from Charpentier’s Louise, sung by Leontyne Price. It turns out that Battle’s choreography for his own company embraces a wide range of musical genres — everything from Bach to the contemporary drumming of Les Tambours du Bronx. Closer inspection, however, shows a choreographer making a series of perplexing musical choices that don’t always serve him well.

Take the Bach pastiche in Battle’s Overture. If you’re going to choreograph the “Air on the G String,” you’d better have something new to say, but why does the music accompany someone hurling her lunch? In Overture, the dancers slow down as the harpsichord or piano inventions hurry along. Then, abruptly, they seem to be released into speed. It’s a good effect, but Battle overplays it. Similar musical taffy structures the edgier, more successful Promenade. From bobbling chicken strutting to lust-crazy tackles, there’s a sourness under this fractured square dance for robots — as in Fritz Masten’s white, bustle-augmented muslin costumes, all the seams show.

Battle’s robotic isolations go primitive in The Hunt, which he choreographed for David Parsons’s company in 2001 (the last season Battle was dancing with that company), and which was soon adopted into the Ailey repertory. It’s easy to see why Ailey fans find it such a crowd pleaser: in this work of jungle machismo, a quartet of bare-chested men wearing slashes of face paint and red-lined black skirts chomp their teeth, drag one another along the floor, curl into one another like a nest of snakes, and finally join in rhythmic celebration. Burke Wilmore’s lighting patterns mark the floor with kente cloth geometries. The Hunt is sometimes cast with a quartet of women; it would be fascinating to see how the aggression translates.

Queen bee

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:56:19 GMT

Eva Yerbabuena at the Majestic
Is there such a thing as conceptual flamenco dancing?

CEREBRAL FLAMENCO? Yerbabuena
seemed to have theory on her mind.

Is there such a thing as conceptual flamenco dancing? You’d think that a dance form so reliant on disclosing inner emotional states would be hard pressed to get cerebral, but when Eva Yerbabuena returned to Boston this weekend, after a six-year absence, as part of World Music/CRASHarts’ ninth annual Flamenco Festival, theory seemed to be on her mind. (The festival concludes this coming week with the lovely Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca, also at the Cutler Majestic.)

Yerbabuena, who grew up in Granada, recycled a number of pieces from her touring repertory for the current Santo y seña (“Signs and Wonders”) program. The show starts in inky tones and works its way toward the light. The charcoal light of “De la cava (siguiriya)” washes a solo that evokes remembered sadness and presumed ambivalence. Male singers, miked and seated on the aisles in the house, reach out to her with their voices, breaking through the theater’s fourth wall and coaxing both dancer and audience closer. An augmented flamenco combo — one that embellishes the heartfelt melisma of the singers, with two jazzy guitars led by her husband, Paco Jarana, plus contemporary sax and flute — emerges out of the darkness as Yerbabuena shrugs a dark velvet shoulder and lifts the ruffles of her hem to liberate her footwork.

Her tactic is contrast. She juxtaposes the snapping accents of her crisp footwork with the lingering curlicues of her wrists. A flurry of motion is punctuated with sudden stops that seem to take the presence of the musicians, of her audience, into account — as if she’d been roused from her reverie. This technique builds up density element by element, and especially when “De la cava” culminates in a series of intricate, masculine foot brushes, her rhythmic clarity is jaw-dropping.

Yerbabuena plays a different conceptual game in “Espumas del recuerdo (mirabras).” She’s dressed in creamsicle layers, and her solo is a sassy exploration of how her fringed orange shawl can extend flamenco dancing’s Moorish curves into the space surrounding her. During her set figures and their variations, her enormous, frothy train follows her around the stage like an amiable pet, and she disciplines it as she bends and twists, transforming it into a series of shifting environments that she can span and dominate.

Dancing in the year of the Rat

DEBRA CASH — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:14:01 GMT

Flamenco, funk, and Boston Ballet hit the boards
If you’re hot for Victoria’s Secret ads and addicted to Dancing with the Stars, Tango Fire will be right up your alley.

ANNUAL VISIT: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will perform Maurice Béjart’s Firebird and new work by Robert Battle.

Inaugurate the year of the Rat (representing spirit and alertness) with the 100 classical Chinese dancers, musicians, and vocalists assembled for a CHINESE NEW YEAR SPECTACULAR at the Opera House (January 10-12; 800.954.4606) and the GOLDEN DRAGON ACROBATS at Symphony Hall (January 13; 617.482.6661). In February, the New Year celebrations continue with DANCE REVELASIAN AND BOSTON GUZHENG ENSEMBLE at Springstep in Medford (February 23; 781.395.0402).

If you’re hot for Victoria’s Secret ads and addicted to Dancing with the Stars, Tango Fire will be right up your alley. The Argentine dancers of ESTAMPAS PORTEÑAS appear at the Cutler Majestic (January 11-13; 800.233.3123).

Eight mostly veteran Massachusetts troupes (Andary Dance, Caitlin Corbett Dance Company, CrabtreeDance, EgoArt, Inc., Kelley Donovan & Dancers, Kelli Edwards, Megan Schenk and Nell Breyer) provide a tasty sampler of local talent in “TEN’S THE LIMIT” at the ICA (January 18-19; 617.876.4275). If your appetite is whetted by EGOART’s offering, you can venture further into Nicole Pierce’s contemporary dance and video sensibility at Green Street Studios in Cambridge (January 25-26; 617.864.3191).

Expect to hear Russian spoken in the lobby of both the Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford and Boston’s Symphony Hall when the MOISEYEV DANCE COMPANY comes to New England (January 19 at the Zeiterion, 508.994.2900; January 20 at Symphony Hall, 617.482.6661). MOMIX brings its humor and black-light stage illusions to the Cutler Majestic (January 25-27; 800.233.3123). Love indeed triumphs — and so does historically informed performance — when the world of Louis XIV’s court is evoked by the KEN PIERCE BAROQUE DANCE COMPANY and ENSEMBLE CHACONNE performing at Springstep in Medford (January 26; 781.395.0402).

BREAK! AN URBAN FUNK SPECTACULAR traces hip-hop’s 30-year journey from the street to global prominence at Northeastern University’s Blackman Theatre (February 1-2; 617.373.4700). Choreographer ELIZABETH STREB and theoretical physicist BRIAN GREENE discuss “Movement and the Calculations of Truth” at the ICA (February 6; 617.478.3103).

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER makes a brief Black History Month stop at the Zeiterion (February 5; 508.994.2900) before its annual Celebrity Series visit to the Wang Theatre (February 7-10, 617.482.6661). In addition to Ailey’s own works, this year’s offerings include the Firebird of the recently departed Maurice Béjart, the important revival of Talley Beatty’s The Road of the Phoebe Snow, and Unfold, a new work by Robert Battle. Battle brings his own energetic company, BATTLEWORKS, to the ICA soon after (February 22-23; 617.876.4275).

Waters of Narcissus?

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:55:29 GMT

Maureen Fleming at the ICA
Fleming created a one-woman Art Deco extravaganza — with herself looking like nothing so much as a Rolls Royce hood ornament.

“THE IMMORTAL ROSE”: Machine age meets new age.

I don’t imagine that when Japanese-born American surrealist dancer Maureen Fleming decided to create a suite of six dances — “Waters of Immortality,” “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” “The Stairs,” “Driftwood,” “Mother and Child,” and “The Immortal Rose” — inspired by the writing of William Butler Yeats, she was planning to evoke the period of the 1920s in which he wrote much of his mature poetry. She was, rather, intrigued by his comment, from 1900, how “the purpose of rhythm . . . is to prolong the moment of contemplation . . . in which the mind liberated from the will is unfolded in symbols.” Nonetheless, with Waters of Immortality, the new and newly repurposed multimedia piece on display at the ICA last weekend, Fleming created a one-woman Art Deco extravaganza — with herself looking like nothing so much as a Rolls Royce hood ornament.

As a performer, Fleming is a wonder of pliancy. In “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” she kneels, bends one knee behind her and reaches over her head to grasp her pointed toe: her body becomes a yogic triangle, bordered by a mysterious biting snake, with a Masonic eye glinting in the empty darkness. In “The Stairs,” she lies upside down with her legs scissoring and floating. Her back bends to become a waning crescent moon braced against a stepped black sky. In “The Driftwood,” the duplicative oval of water at the edge of the stage ripples very slightly as she lies curled at its edge like a piece of beach jetsam, crossing her wrists in a way that transforms her body into a figure eight, a symbol of infinity.

Fleming’s imagery is powerfully loaded and often restful. The problem is that it fails to accumulate into a point of view. Her streamlined, elegant nudity could read as pure, vulnerable materiality. Instead, the choreographer busily polishes each image to a high, and high-minded, gloss where machine age meets new age. Trained by some of the most distinguished butoh masters in Japan, including Kazuo Ohno, and having toured with Ohno’s son and artistic heir Yoshito, Fleming scours that tradition of its rage, sorrow, and existential politics, leaving only erotic reverie.

Busy busy

DEBRA CASH — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:33:12 GMT

Something for everyone
“If you pulled the cord and the chute didn’t open, how would you dance on the way down?”

Maureen Flemming

Fall preview 2007
“Happy endings: Bad news begets good tunes.” By Matt Ashare.
“Stage worthies: Fall on the Boston boards.” By Carolyn Clay.
“Basstown nights: The new scene emerges; Halloween preparations.” By David Day.
“Bounty: The best of the season’s roots, world, folk, and blues.” By Ted Drozdowski.
“War, peace, and Robert Pinsky: The season’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.” By John Freeman.
“Trane, Joyce Dee Dee, Sco, and more: A jam-packed season of jazz.” By Jon Garelick.
“Turn on the bright lights: Art, women, politics, and food.” By Randi Hopkins.
“War zones: Fall films face terror at home and abroad.” By Peter Keough.
“Locked and loaded: The fall promises a double-barreled blast of gaming greatness.” By Mitch Krpata.
“BBC? America!: The networks put some English on the fall TV season.” By Joyce Millman.
“World music: The BSO goes traveling, and Berlin comes to Boston.” By Lloyd Schwartz.
“Singles scene: Local bands dig in with digital.” By Will Spitz.

“If you pulled the cord and the chute didn’t open, how would you dance on the way down?” That’s the query behind the Philadelphia-based GREEN CHAIR DANCE GROUP’s athletic For Emergency Use Only, which kicks off the local dance scene this fall at the Dance Complex in Central Square (September 21; 203.247.5723). That there are at least two performances every weekend from early October through Thanksgiving is tribute to the grassroots work of local dancemakers and the expanded options offered by new performance spaces.

ROKAFELLA (Anita Garcia) and KWIKSTEP (Gabriel Dionisio) lecture on NYC hip-hop street culture in the afternoon and perform in the evening at MIT’s Kresge Little Theater (September 24; 617.253.2877). Terrific jazz choreographer DANNY BURACZESKI headlines the showcase of dances by BU DANCE FACULTY AND ALUMNI with guest dancers from BOSTON BALLET II at the BU Dance Theatre (September 28-29; 617.358.2500).

October begins with the timeless and eerie BUNRAKU NATIONAL PUPPET THEATER OF JAPAN bringing two traditional plays, Oshichi of the Fire Watch Tower and Miracle at the Tsubosaka Kannon Temple, to the Cutler Majestic Theatre (October 2-3; 800.233.3123).

Stand-up choreography

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:24:01 GMT

David Parker + the Bang Group
David Parker was born too late for vaudeville.

SLAPSTICK: Hour upon the Stage seems preoccupied with the sheer physical effort it takes to make
dance happen.

David Parker was born too late for vaudeville, but he’s been making up for lost time. Best known for Nut/Cracked, the naughty-and-nice holiday reworking of The Nutcracker that he will be bringing back to Boston under the auspices of the Theatre Offensive next November, David Parker & the Bang Group have as their calling card the shtick that pops up just this side of slapstick. The good news is that the laughs come at no one’s expense — except, perhaps, that of outmoded sissy stereotypes.

Take Critical Mass, which Parker and Sara Hook choreographed in 1999. In his red football jersey, Parker could be a hefty guy ready to knock back a couple of beers in front of the tube. Then he starts singing “Là ci darem la mano,” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and hangs onto the curtains for support as his balletic efforts thud and his duet with Jeffrey Kazin goes disco. He inserts jokes into a fluent choreographic line that sets up certain expectations. Then he turns around and gives his audience a cream pie in the kisser.

The more recent Show Business reads as a footnote to Critical Mass, as a brave-seeming Emily Tschiffeley in poufy blue tulle flops on her behind to a strange, a cappella version of Ethel Merman singing “There’s No Business like Show Business.” It’s a theme all right: loving all the strutting and fretting upon the stage, but feeling a bit bruised by it all.

That theme ran through all of Saturday night’s performance as David Parker & the Bang Group made their 11th consecutive appearance at Concord Academy under the auspices of Summer Stages Dance. For this visit, Parker cut his hour-long Hour upon the Stage (which premiered in New York City this past spring) down to an 18-minute quartet. From the opening, where Kazin in an orange muscle shirt jogs around the perimeter of the space, to an escape from a syrupy “Moon River” ballet, Hour upon the Stage seems preoccupied with the sheer physical effort it takes to make dance happen. Kazin held his thigh as if it were a heavy weight he had to lower to the floor. Amber Sloan pushed his puffed-out chest to deflate it like a plastic bag full of air. Nic Petry sprinting backward, almost wiped out.

Life is but a dream

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:32:22 GMT

Aurélia Thierrée and Coleman Lemieux at Jacob’s Pillow
Children from theatrical families are often said to have been born in a trunk.

AURÉLIA’S ORATORIO: Surrealism with
sweetness rather than nihilism at its core.

Children from theatrical families are often said to have been born in a trunk, but in Aurélia’s Oratorio, Aurélia Thierrée turns the cliché on its head. We first view her disembodied hand emerging from the drawer of a wooden dresser, waving a sinful cigarette, grabbing a luscious slice of cake. When a foot pokes out from a different drawer, the hand somehow manages to slip a red suede pump onto it, and the foot wriggles with an unmistakable air of satisfaction. By the time Thierrée has slung her whole body out of the bottom drawer, looking for all the world like a sultry lounge singer rising from a swoon against the lid of a piano, the “fact” that she has three legs seems a completely convincing explanation of the earlier contortionism. Those red pumps — feminine, popping with color — grow as talismanic as the potions and cookies that guided Alice on her adventures down the rabbit hole.

Aurélia Thierrée’s trippy world is the product of a collaboration with her mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, who’s credited for the show’s concept and direction. Chaplin is the youngest daughter of Charlie Chaplin and Oona O’Neill (which makes Aurélia Eugene O’Neill’s great-granddaughter); she was born in California before her parents were exiled to Europe. Boston audiences with long memories may recognize the roots of Aurélia’s Oratorio in her parents’ Cirque Imaginaire and Cirque Invisible, which played at American Repertory Theatre almost 20 years ago. Performed at Jacob’s Pillow Doris Duke Studio last week, as part of what has become a smash national tour, the 75-minute piece offered surrealism with sweetness rather than nihilism at its core.

Aurélia’s Oratorio is a series of “perils of Pauline” episodes that Thierrée endures with kewpie-doll eyes and a resilient demeanor. Her mother has invented an amazing sequence of shapeshifting props and costumes — a red opera scarf that turns into a hammock and a slackrope, tasseled red velvet curtains that sway like the rigging of a storm-lashed clipper in a storm. Incongruities and swift reversals crop up without warning. Aurélia meets a street vendor who presides over what looks like a flaming cauldron, and she buys an ice-cream cone. She is menaced by a dinosaur made of lace who chomps on her leg. Voilà! — our plucky heroine grabs her knitting needles and quickly knits another to replace it.

City limits

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:29:27 GMT

Boston Cyberarts’ ‘The Body’s Limit’ at Green Street, ‘Ten’s the Limit’ at the ICA
There’s nothing like the first weekend of beautiful weather to raise skepticism about digitally mediated experience.

RECYCLED AIR: Boston’s aspiring choreographers play well with others?

There’s nothing like the first weekend of beautiful weather to raise skepticism about digitally mediated experience. Yet huddling with the explorers of sensors and video delay, remote broadcasting and haptic interfaces, as well as some of the international cadre of conceptualists of the new performance practice meant that last weekend in Boston you could see the augmented future of theater coming over the spring horizon. Eventually.

At the Boston Cyberarts Festival’s second biennial “Ideas in Motion” conference, which was held at Green Street Studios, polished artmaking took second place to discussions of the labor-draining challenge of developing and learning to manipulate all these new toys. Much of the work on display in “The Body’s Limit” was tedious. Other items reflected conceptual strategies that amounted to Merce Cunningham’s low-tech I Ching chance operations tarted up with bar-code scanners. As MIT’s Noah Riskin pointed out in the conference’s prickly closing plenary, much cyberart — visual and sonic arts included — is subtly shaped by the “grammar” of tools created for science. Too often those tools are leading the art instead of the other way around.

Which doesn’t mean that “The Body’s Limit” didn’t include moments of beauty and enlightenment. In Palinopsia, where Pauliina Silvennoinen wore a constructivist white dress, half sail, half armature, a camera crept under her skirts to broadcast images of her wriggling toes and Peter Kirn’s computer reanimated the image with poetic, painterly effects. Sarah Drury offered tape from her ongoing work with disabled artists including Cathy Weis, whom Cyberarts will present at the ICA April 28-29 in her Electric Haiku: Cool As Custard, turning signals from her sensor-equipped shoes into vectors that looked like packs of pick-up sticks.

There was direct, gorgeous movement by former William Forsythe dancer Antony Rizzi. In his inventive Every Body Tells a Story, a helium balloon attached to his back pocket stood in — first comically, then horrifyingly — for the head of a closeted high-society gay man. There were a range of video projects too, “extending the body” through digital camerawork and animation effects. Hans Beenhakker’s Shake Off, running in a loop from dusk till 2 am in Harvard Square, updates Maya Deren’s famous experimental film study of Talley Beatty, here danced by Prince Credell and a crew of digital doppelgänger. Both Rizzi and Nell Breyer provided footage that isolated body parts and mirrored them to create comical new creatures, an effect made without any technology — and without any underwear — in a Mummenschanz-like episode by Xavier Le Roy.

Terpsichore’s delight

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:08:27 GMT

The joys of spring dance
Traveling troupes and local dancemakers spring up around the Boston area this season.

FRANCHISE: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater takes on Twyla Tharp at the Wang April 26-29.

Traveling troupes and local dancemakers spring up around the Boston area this season. The poetic circus artists of CIRQUE ÉLOIZE sing in the rain with water cascading onto the stage of the Cutler Majestic Theatre (March 13-18; 800.233.3123). In a free performance at the BU Dance Theatre, LISA BUFANO, who is a double amputee, performs Five Open Mouths by former Bill T. Jones dancer HEIDI LATSKY and Latsky performs her own solo Woman at an Exhibition (March 16; 617.353.2748). NICOLE PIERCE presents “Empirical Laws,” a walk-through performance-art installation, at Mass College of Art (March 16-17; reservations required; 617.628.3175). MOBIUS ARTISTS GROUP rethinks John Cage’s multichannel Variations II for the 21st century at the New Art Center in Newtonville (March 24: 617.964.3424). At the ICA, CRASHarts presents LES BALLETS JAZZ DE MONTRÉAL in works by hot choreographer Aszure Barton as well as Rodrigo Pederneiras’s Mapa, which is based on Brazilian street dance (March 30-April 1; 617.876.4275). Vitality has no expiration date: EIFMAN BALLET does its adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Cutler Majestic Theatre (March 28–April 1; 617.233.3123), and PROMETHEUS DANCE ELDERS ENSEMBLE presents a work inspired by the film Le roi du cœur|King of Hearts at the Dance Complex in Cambridge (March 31–April 1; 617.576.5336).

The dance calendar is at its most crowded in mid April, with BEBE MILLER COMPANY bringing Landing/Place, her sophisticated meditation on a home created of movement and digital environments, to the ICA (April 13-15; 617.876.4275). CRASHarts’ annual showcase of Greater Boston choreographers, “TEN’S THE LIMIT,” is curated this time around by choreographer Robert Battle, and 10 minutes, as always, will be the limit at the ICA (April 20–21; 617.876.4275).

The schedule for the Boston Cyberarts conference “IDEAS IN MOTION: THE BODY’S LIMIT” includes live performances, film, lectures and conversation (April 21-22; conference details at www.bostoncyberarts.org). Associated cyber-performances include CATHY WEIS’s “Electric Haiku: Calm As Custard” at the ICA (April 2; 617.478.3103), XAVIER LEROY at Green Street Studios and MIT (April 22-23; 617.524.8495), and Boston’s KINODANCE doing the world premiere of Denizen, an intermedia collaboration inspired by travels through Armenia, in a Celebrity Series presentation at BU’s Tsai Center (May 2-3; 617.482.6661).

Twyla Tharp has been licensing her works at a remarkable rate, and the Celebrity Series brings in ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER to take on Tharp’s ecstatic The Golden Section at the Wang Theatre (April 26-29; 617.482.6661). CAITLIN CORBETT DANCE COMPANY is at the BU Dance Theatre with three premieres including an ensemble work set to the sounds of stamping, whistling Ghanaian postal workers (April 27-29; 617.358.2500).

Dancing across the city

DEBRA CASH — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 07:12:27 GMT

Between the opening of the new ICA and Bank of America's de-funding of Celebrity Series, will Boston be a city on the move or on the make in 2007?
The ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, with its sprung wood dance floor and wrap-around windows framing the harbor, is positioned to become Boston dance’s most significant venue.

COMPLEXIONS: makes its Boston debut at the Tsai Center.

The ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, with its sprung wood dance floor and wrap-around windows framing the harbor, is positioned to become Boston dance’s most significant venue, and World Music/CRASHarts and the ICA’s own programmers are hoping to lure audiences into this glam, 325-seat space with more cutting-edge dance offerings than we’ve seen in Boston in years.

Stephen Petronio’s high-velocity uptown New York troupe will fit easily into the context of the ICA’s current “Super Vision” show, since he’s already collaborated, if peculiarly, with Anish Kapoor and Cindy Sherman. Presenting the Barbara Lee Theater’s first show (January 12-13), Petronio’s company will offer BLOOM and its prelude, Bud, to familiar and commissioned songs by that retro hipster Rufus Wainwright, plus The Rite Part, an excerpt from Petronio’s 1992 Stravinsky-inspired Full Half Wrong.

Athletic and amped, tough-girl-makes-good Elizabeth Streb appears at the ICA with her troupe in the aptly named STREB vs. Gravity (February 22-25). Guess who wins? Charismatic, introspective poetry-slam champion Marc Bamuthi Joseph explores the embattled history of Haiti in Scourge (March 2-4), with choreography by hip-hop elder statesman Rennie Harris and Adia Whitaker of the Ase Dance Theatre Collective and texts by emerging San Francisco writers. Aszure Barton’s hot company hasn’t come to Boston yet, but we get a peek at the wild Canadian dancemaker who wowed them at Jacob’s Pillow (with an erotic duet performed while the woman bit her male partner’s tongue) when Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal brings a new Barton work and Rodrigo Pederneiras’s Mapa (March 30–April 1). Bebe Miller’s Landing Place is a poetic work inspired by her trip to Eritrea and concepts of home and community and augmented by the sophisticated motion-capture and animation projections of Vita Berezina-Blackburn and Maya Ciarrocchi (April 13-15). Even more technology-driven is Cathy Weis’sElectronic Haiku: Calm As Custard (April 28-29), which will play with the full range of the new theater’s film-projection and lighting capabilities.

Local dancers and choreographers won’t be left on the outside looking in: the stopwatch-driven “Ten’s the Limit” comes to the ICA (April 20-21), and Anna Myer, who collaborated so thoughtfully with conductor Susan Davenny Wyner in her All at Once, premieres Penumbra, with a neon set and live music for string instruments by Andy Vores (May 3-5). The season ends with the flourish of a world premiere from Mark Morris — with any luck, a significant improvement over his last premiere here, the dud he tossed off for Boston Ballet. That’s May 15-20, preceded by a March 7 conversation between the acid-tongued and quotable Morris and his buddy former Boston Globe classical-music critic Richard Dyer as the new work gets under way. For ICA-event tickets, call 617.478.3103 or visit www.icaboston.org or www.worldmusic.org.

Ordered steps

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:34:40 GMT

Ronald K. Brown at the Majestic
“I will not move without Your consent,” swears the text at the heart of Ronald K. Brown’s 2005 work Order My Steps.

SNAP IN GRACE: Camille Brown still has it.

“I will not move without Your consent,” swears the text at the heart of Ronald K. Brown’s 2005 work Order My Steps. Brown has paced that journey in almost all the work he has created over the past 20 years. As he searches to find a way to illustrate the toll and the triumph of spiritual struggle, both personal and communal, his best work faces the temptation of easy political answers and dance cliché and beats the Devil.

Evidence, his contemporary company, performed in Boston last weekend under the auspices of World Music/CRASHarts. When the new Institute of Contemporary Art Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater didn’t open on schedule, the engagement was transferred to the Cutler Majestic at Emerson. At the ICA, Evidence would have looked beautiful and taken its place amid other meaningful contemporary art, but in the Theater District the performances looked powerful and gritty. This program was a salient and timely reminder that the presenters in the new museum venue will have to make special efforts to preserve and extend access to a multicultural audience.

Brown’s downtown-Brooklyn style combines easy, even cocksure strides with West African polyrhythms: the choreography reads as ancestral culture breaking through the crust of urban life. A big loping entrance suddenly gives way to an angular break at the knees and turns into kneeling; lanky Juel Lane’s forward locomotion is arrested and flung backward by a hunch of his shoulder and by Chad Boseman’s text describing a junkie’s sensuous last date with his crackpipe.

In a work like Order My Steps or the signature Grace, which Brown created for Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater in 1999 and later reset on his own dancers, the carefully chosen music is part of the message. Whether the choice is Bob Marley’s jaunty reggae, the Kronos Quartet playing Terry Riley’s minimalist score, or Jennifer Holliday belting out Ellington to the schmaltzy accompaniment of a huge orchestra, Brown seems to prefer a steady motor or a smooth musical line he can syncopate and ornament. He’s not competing with the music, exactly; he seems to be complementing it by saying, “You go your way, friend, and I’ll go mine.”

All of this wouldn’t work if his dancers were not so strong, so precise, and so vividly committed to their own performances. Brown has assembled a diverse group of performers — neither carbon copies of him nor of one another — and it’s been wonderful to witness their artistic growth over the past few seasons.

Happy feet

DEBRA CASH — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 21:50:11 GMT

From butoh to Swan Lake and back
The architectural team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the new Institute for Contemporary Art as a 325-seat jewel box, its transparent walls allowing the Boston harbor and skyline to serve as a scenic backdrop or turn opaque as the performance requires.

RUSSIAN MADE: Danila Korsuntsev and Uliana Lopatkina dance in the Kirov Ballet’s Swan Lake.

The architectural team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the new Institute for Contemporary Art as a 325-seat jewel box, its transparent walls allowing the Boston harbor and skyline to serve as a scenic backdrop or turn opaque as the performance requires. This glam architecture will probably be beautiful even when the room is empty, but it will fulfill its potential only if it brings contemporary dance and performance the fresh visibility they so desperately need and deserve.

We’re going to have to wait a few more weeks. Although at press time the ICA’s fall schedule was up in the air because of construction delays at the new site, the Sapporo-based butoh duo GOOSAYTEN — Morita Itto (who in his day job doubles as a professor of psychology) and his dance partner Takeuchi Mika — are still scheduled to perform their meditative To the White, To the Sky on November 8. The following day they’ll take it to UMass-Amherst’s Fine Arts Center (413.545.2511). Check www.icaboston.org or call 617.266.5152 for the latest ICA developments.

The Lee Theater will also be the venue for many World Music/CRASHarts events in the months ahead. BEBE MILLER ’s company and LES BALLETS JAZZ DE MONTRÉAL/BJM_DANSE have been postponed till spring, but still on the ICA schedule is the stopwatch-driven TEN’S THE LIMIT showcase of local dancemakers (November 17-18) and RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE ’s repertoire evening (November 30–December 3). CRASHart dance-related programs at more-traditional venues include SON DE LA FRONTERA featuring flamenco dancer PEPE TORRES (Somerville Theatre, September 29), MOMBASA PARTY/ROYAL DRUMMERS OF BURUNDI (Sanders Theatre, September 30; also in Amherst September 29), and kathak master BIRJU MAHARAJ (Somerville Theatre, October 8). All World Music/CRASHarts tickets are available on-line at www.worldmusic.org, or call 617.876.4275.

As part of its commitment to bring one big (and necessarily expensive) ballet company to Boston each year, the Bank of America Celebrity Series (617.482-6661) hosts the return of the KIROV BALLET in Swan Lake (Wang Theatre, November 9-12). It’s dancing the optimistic Russian version, where evil is vanquished and the lovers are reunited during the B-major closing chords of Tchaikovsky’s score. Later in the season, PILOBOLUS turns away from an ugly legal struggle with one of its co-directors to presents its illusionistic, kid-friendly repertoire (Shubert Theatre, December 8-10). BOSTON BALLET opens its season with the Rudolf Nureyev production of Don Quixote, with restored costumes and a set that includes a turning windmill (Wang Theatre, October 19-29; 800.447.7400).

Not so simple gifts

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 17:37:23 GMT

Tero Saarinen at Jacob’s Pillow
The Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” has been appropriated for everything from exultant wedding recessionals to a ludicrous car commercial, but I don’t think anyone has ever heard it in quite the same way as young Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen.

THE PAIN OF RENUNCIATION: — and it’s a galvanizing pain.

The Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” has been appropriated for everything from exultant wedding recessionals to a ludicrous car commercial, but I don’t think anyone has ever heard it in quite the same way as young Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen. “Simple Gifts” is the quaking heart of Borrowed Light, which received its US premiere at Jacob’s Pillow last week (July 19-23). Saarinen stages the song as a meditation thrown into emptiness. Flame-haired Ninu Lindfors is dressed like her fellows — men and women alike — in a severe black cassock softened only by a hint of petticoat. As if trying to determine and test its edges, her arms begin to circle around that dark silhouette, her hands batting at her head and face. Staggering forward, she looks over her shoulder; her fingers, curling and uncurling, do not know what to clutch. Saarinen isn’t celebrating simplicity; he’s exploring simplicity’s cost, the visceral pain of physical and emotional renunciation. Against the innocuous lyric “we shan’t be ashamed,” we are startled to learn that she is ashamed, and that this is a galvanizing pain.

“Borrowed light” is an architectural term describing natural light channeled through interior windows. In Shaker architecture, this scheme allowed the community to extend its workday in the days before electric lights without the expense of candles. Saarinen borrows and channels Shaker music and public myth, too. In his Pillow Talk Wednesday afternoon, he said that that when he first encountered Shaker design and architecture, he found it oddly familiar, almost Scandinavian. Yet the functionalism of Shaker artistry has not led him to create a dance milieu nearly as scoured and pure as the combination of Shaker, Finnish, and even Japanese æsthetics (he has studied butoh in Japan) might imply. Borrowed Light wears raw feeling on its severe black sleeves.

“Simple Gifts” is the melody that runs through one of dance’s greatest collaborations, the famous Appalachian Spring score Aaron Copland made in 1944 as a “ballet for Martha” Graham, another choreographer with a taste for uncompromising distillation. Saarinen has been fortunate in his collaboration with Joel Cohen and the Boston Camerata. Finding the Camerata’s Simple Gifts: Shaker Chants and Spirituals in a CD bin in Lyon led him to zap an e-mail into cyberspace suggesting the two organizations work together. (For Cohen, what sealed the deal was seeing Saarinen’s version of Petrushka with the Stravinsky score played on dual accordions!) The men’s backgrounds and sensibilities are very, very different, but on stage the visions are complementary.

New Orleans story

DEBRA CASH — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:34:51 GMT

The Royal Ballet’s Manon
When the Royal Ballet touches down at the Wang Theatre this month, quash any visions you might have of tea-and-crumpets decorum.

Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta

When the Royal Ballet touches down at the Wang Theatre this month, quash any visions you might have of tea-and-crumpets decorum. The Royal, still most identified with legendary ballerina Margot Fonteyn and choreographer Frederick Ashton, celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. And for its four Boston performances — June 15-17, presented by the Bank of America Celebrity Series and the Wang Center for the Performing Arts — this huge, world-class company has chosen a real bodice ripper: the revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 Manon.

You think poverty and desperation in New Orleans is news? Wait till you see Manon, the conniving Parisian courtesan, reduced to degradation in the Louisiana swamplands and dying in the arms of Des Grieux, the student she once scorned. Crime, prostitution, betrayal: the story is replete with flawed characters and dark intimations. MacMillan’s choreography is overwrought in ways that read as sensual, with acrobatic lifts and swooning pirouettes — but this is also a ballet about how a woman uses her sexual allure as a bargaining chip, to maneuver within a set of constrained choices.

The title role is a juicy diva role that a dewy ingenue just can’t pull off. Manon’s mix of hauteur and desperation calls for a ballerina with acting chops and some life experience in her pointe shoes. Boston will see Spanish-born Tamara Rojo partnered by Carlos Acosta, whom some will remember fondly from guest spots with Boston Ballet. Rojo herself danced Odette/Odile in the Royal’s 2001 Boston performances of Swan Lake, and she once described her own reading of Manon as a young woman who needs the money — the furs, the jewels — her rich admirer lavishes on her. Tiny Romanian-born ballerina Alina Cojocaru, who trained and danced lead roles in Ukraine, will be partnered by Johan Kobborg, and Zenaida Yanowsky, sister of Boston Ballet principal dancer Yury, dances with Kenneth Greve.

Secondary roles in big story ballets usually fly under the marketing radar, but when former Boston Ballet principal Sarah Lamb dances Lescaut’s Mistress on Thursday and Saturday evenings, she can expect a lot of friends and fans in the audience. A Boston native, Lamb was the star pupil of Madame Tatiana Legat, and in Boston Ballet’s 2003 production of Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée, she danced Lise to Acosta’s Colas. At the end of the 2003–2004 season, she accepted a position as first soloist with the Royal; at the end of this past May, she was promoted to principal, just in time for these performances on her home turf.

Rewriting histories

DEBRA CASH — Fri, 12 May 2006 13:58:14 GMT

Rennie Harris and Rebecca Rice
Family histories are inextricably political.

RENNIE HARRIS: Modern dance that’s not in Kansas anymore

Family histories are inextricably political. Rennie Harris knows the only two certainties of his life are that he has to “stay black and die.” Distinct fates flow from those two stark facts, whether you’re from the mean streets of Philadelphia, as he is, or you’re caught in the New Orleans Superdome without food, water, or a government that’s paying attention.

That’s why it makes sense — painful, smart, artistic, furious sense — that he’s now working on a project to expand the autobiographical solo Lorenzo’s Oil and elements of “Endangered Species” from his 2003 evening-length Facing Mekka. Prince Scare Krow’s Road to the Emerald City is threaded with scrapbook light-heartedness: projected photos of Harris as a seven- or eight-year-old flashing a peace sign; as a buff, sexy teen; and in a homemade video goofing with his buddies in a blaxploitation version of the opening sequence from his beloved West Side Story.

But the smiles fade when Harris begins his solo, trudging on stage as if pulled by one shuddering hand. The word “racism” is a knuckle gun blasting through his head. He uses every popping isolation in his arsenal to trace the path of a bullet ricocheting through the muscles, bones, and organs of a teenage victim. Harris’s grimaces are as extreme as the faces of a kabuki actor. They are also as intimate and immediate as the looks of fear and rage glimpsed on the faces of Katrina’s desperate survivors. Harris crafts a near-narrative dance language, fulfilling his aspiration to make hip-hop technique subtle enough to handle human meaning. It’s not clear what direction Prince Scare Krow will take as he amplifies his storytelling over time, but it’s safe to predict that the punch line will echo the immortal observation “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

There’s a similar if less compelling realism behind March of the Antmen, which was conceived at the conclusion of Bush père’s Gulf War and is now dismayingly pertinent to his son’s debacle in Iraq. Deployed troops, street gangs, and hip-hop crews share many similarities: tough-guy demeanor, fierce loyalty, and the awareness that at any random moment someone’s life could end. Here, Harris’s message is more obvious: war, and especially a war overwhelmingly fought by poor men of color, is hell. Nonetheless, Antmen is full of acute details: one grunt rolling a joint; the rhythmic precision of a foxhole crawl; agitated cursing from the men squashed into the cab of a Humvee.