Fri 3/11
We drove down to Akron to see Neos Dance Theatre at the Akron Civic Theatre with high expectations. This was the same company that had entertained us so successfully with their retelling of the Dracula legend and their 1940’s Nutcracker. Stunning multimedia projections by Emmy Award-winner Andy Gardner had played no small part in those productions, and the upcoming program promised premieres with more of his work.
But before the premieres and the multimedia dances, Neos performed Flight, a dance that they debuted in 2014 but that we’d never seen. Flight manages to be continuously engaging and surprising despite a consistently low-key approach. The dancing is balletic but down to earth (à terre, as they say in ballet class) with scarcely any big jumps or multiple turns and no straining for effect. And the lighting by Dennis Dugan is downright dim. Somehow it all works.
How does Flight draw us in? The short answer is that choreographer Penny Saunders simply has the knack of entertaining us. A longer answer might describe the danceable music she chose — six short cuts from movie sound tracks — and how she arranged those cuts to emphasize contrasts — a cute march is followed by a drunk dance to Hank William’s Ramblin’ Man. She found movement that fit that music to a T and developed that movement within each dance.
And Saunders throws some variety into the choreography and the stage space, such as when the dancers suddenly perform a wave across the stage or the small platform two steps high that the dancers occasionally gather round as if it were a political soapbox or a sacrificial altar. On the page all this might sound like movement studies for Choreography 101 or stunt night at sleepaway camp but now that we’ve seen Flight on stage we consider Saunders an emerging choreographer to watch. Multimedia is not the only thing that Neos has going for itself; they also commission dances from excellent outside choreographers like Saunders. See video of Neos performing Flight at 4:48 minutes.
After the intermission came the premiere of Illustrious Disillusion set to seven torch songs, laments of unrequited love from the Great American Songbook of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Gardner contributes green screen and visual compositing. Neos’ artistic director and co-founder Bobby Wesner wears three hats in this piece — choreographer, dancer and videographer.
Illustrious Disillusion starts off with a brightly lit stage on which we see two staircases, a large shadow of a moving figure (Wesner) on the cyclorama, a lip-synching “vocalist” (Anna Trumbo) and a chorus of seven dancers in white. We were reminded of a Busby Berkley musical, except that the Neos dancers are much better dancers than Busby Berkeley’s chorines.
In each of its successive numbers, Illustrious Disillusion gradually gives us more and more. Soloists begin by lip-synching but gradually dance more and more. The ensemble joins in the dancing rather than watching from the staircases. The multimedia projections start out as accents or teasers in the early numbers with just a single figure or a close-up of an eye or a mouth projected onto a small part of the cyclorama. But for “Get Out of Town,” halfway through Illustrious Disillusion, the entire cyclorama is filled by a big landscape obviously shot from a moving car.
Two of the numbers in Illustrious Disillusion seemed designed to earn what Akron Civic’s publicity releases described as a PG-13 rating. One number is set to “Love For Sale,” a song that was considered risqué when it came out in the 30s. Wesner’s choreography for Trumbo picks up on the song’s general tone of seductive disillusion but the dancing makes no specific reference to the song’s lyrics until the very end — “If you want to buy my wares, Follow me and climb the stairs” — when she suddenly runs up the stairs where she lounges to watch the next number.
In “Censored,” set to an instrumental version of “How High the Moon,” we see a full-screen image of a woman dancing. Her apparent nudity is covered by two obtrusive black horizontal bands that have been superimposed on the video. Yes, you might want to leave the kids at home for this one, but the dancing itself — jazzy, rhythmic and well-executed — is a world away from the live burlesque and sexploitation cinema that persisted along Akron’s Main Street through the 50s.
Illustrious Disillusion cranks up to a formidable finale danced to an over-the-top vocal version of “Take All of Me.” Individual dancers take short solos downstage. A male and then a female soloist dance with one, two, 16 video clones on the cyclorama. Brooke and Bobby Wesner take tap breaks. Wow! Neos has worked with jazz dancing and the styles of Broadway and Hollywood musicals before, but for multimedia effects, unity of style and sheer magnitude, this production sets a high water mark for their work so far.
A Broadway/Hollywood finale might seem like a hard act to follow. But the premiere of Nothing In Particular, choreographed by Mary-Elizabeth Fenn, replaces the black-and-white palette of Illustrious Disillusion with brightly colored costumes including orange and blue wigs.
Pulsating, full-color animated projections show the interior of a house. Led by Fenn, the dancers are animated dolls bopping through the rooms as animated doors open and close, writing appears on the walls of the animated rooms, and shadowy animated figures perform various antics. After their curtain call the dancers reprise their final number and have the audience clapping along.
The concert began with Suite for Strings created on Neos by Joseph Morrissey, a dance that continues to look fresh since it premiered last summer.
The idea of a multimedia dance concert has been around forever, but we seldom see it done this well. Kudos to Dugan and Gardner for making lighting design and visual effects work together so well. As in past Neos productions, the costumes by Inda Blanch-Geib are beautiful, becoming and fully functional, whether voluminous Victorian dresses in their Dracula ballet, Count… The Legend of Dracula, or simple trunks and tops, everything Blanch-Geib does looks better the longer we look at it.
Next for Neos, Boots and Ballet, Sat 5/7 at Raemelton Therapeutic Equestrian Center in Mansfield well worth the 90 -minute drive for a dance company seldom seen north of Summit County.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]Akron, OH 44308