Fri 3/23-Sat 3/24
We had not seen the Cleveland State University Dance Company for a long time, so when we learned that their upcoming concert included choreography by Antonio Brown and an appearance by Brown’s own company, Antonio Brown Dance, we hurried downtown to the Allen Theatre.
Brown first came on our radar when he was a promising young dancer at Cleveland School of the Arts. The next thing we knew, he had graduated from the Juilliard School and landed a job with the prestigious and controversial Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Brown swung back through Cleveland from time to time, choreographing some nice pieces for Verb Ballets and for Terrence Greene’s 2014 concert, Dance on the Edge. Now he’s (supposedly) retired from dance the better to focus on his own company. Everything Brown has choreographed has been well worth watching, but we were especially excited to see his company. How many dancers would he bring to Cleveland?
We should have run a reality check on our expectations. Like most new dance companies, Brown and his company surely need to keep expenses to a minimum when teaching and performing away from home, and surely that was part of the calculus when he brought only one dancer from his company, Kaylin Horgan. The two performed together in Brown’s duet HERE. It’s mostly unison dancing to James Brown recordings but both dancers riff and take solos. Brown’s included a dazzling succession of contrasting shapes. Like many of Bill T. Jones’ solos, look away and you’ve missed it, but it was the highlight of the evening. Horgan’s solo featured inverted poses from breakdance, shoulder stands and the like that she presented not as stunts but as fully realized sculptures.
Both delivered the heightened physicality of performance which we associate with, and so enjoy in Brown’s work — quickness, extension, following the movement’s force through to the very end (and then some). Brown is now a big, powerful guy, so sometimes the velocity and range with which he performs is both surprising and rather awesome. Tiny Horgan was a fine foil for that and the two dancers seemed to thoroughly enjoy dancing in partnership.
Brown’s piece for six CSU dancers, Race, used a recorded score that he had variously composed himself, copied from an open source music site, and repurposed from the Comedy Central spoof Reno 911. Toward the end there’s an extended voice over in which Usain Bolt describes his race strategy. Brown’s choreography mostly stays away from the competitive athleticism suggested by his score.
Brooklyn-based Doug Gillespie choreographed Emulous on Ulia Spiridonova and DeAndra Stone. As its title suggests, it appears to be built around an improvisational technique well-known among modern dancers, mirroring, in which two dancers face each other and slowly imitate each other’s movements. Music for Emulous was Kangaroo by Albert Mathias, electronic dance music that created an ambience for the dancers.
Throughout the concert, we reminded ourselves that CSU has just begun to offer an undergraduate degree in dance. It will take time for their program to attract talented students and for the current leaders and students to confront the many artistic problems that dancers must deal with. That said, the current CSU dancers would have a tough road ahead, with a few talented and promising exceptions, were they expecting to go on to dance careers. However most of them are double majors and clearly have their sights set of other careers. This detracts not at all from their pleasure in performance.
EarthSongs (1993), a mixed-media combining dance, percussion and spoken word, the final piece in the program, circumvented many of those problems. Beautiful projections of the desert sky at night (credited to Steven Gutierrez) set the scene. Accompanied by texts spoken by faculty member Chris DiCello and Jul Big Green, the dancers provided a kind of haze of background movement content. Six musicians led by CSU accompanist Matthew Apanius provided a propulsive live score.
Theater majors Cheyenne Bizon and Timothy Richard Parks provided a surprising leaven to the concert. In a series of short entr’acte vignettes, Bizon introduced herself as an aspiring ballerina (“If I were a world-famous ballerina…”) and proceeded to demonstrate both her skill as a comedian and her complete lack of any ballet training. Parks was her attentive porteur and straight man. Ernesto the dog puppet also appeared, making a compelling case for dogs in ballet. There’s no easier target for parody than ballet — but we laughed. We hope to see Bizon, Parks, and Ernesto again soon.
The Cleveland State University Department of Theatre and Dance presented its Spring Dance Concert on Fri 3/23 and Sat 3/24 at the Allen Theatre.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]
Cleveland, OH 44115