By Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
We drove down to Mather Dance Center for the first time in a long while to see Case Western Reserve University Dance Department’s annual fall concert. Nary a familiar face among the 20 or so MFA candidates, dance majors, and dance minors although all 4 of the choreographers were familiar to us in one way or another.
First on the program was Department Chair Karen Potter’s Veiled Tears set to the well-known aria O let me weep from Henry Purcell’s masque or semi-opera, The Fairy Queen. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, upon which The Fairy Queen is loosely based, fairy queen Titania is awakened from her enchantment to say simply:
My Oberon!
What visions have I seen!
Me thought I was enamour’d of an ass.
Shakespeare leaves it to his audience to imagine Titania’s distress as she learns that her “visions” were real. Ah, the morning after, particularly when mind-altering substances were involved the night before. Particularly for women, how poignant can be the grief and regret. How appropriate that Purcell’s plaint for Titania goes on for 12 minutes instead of 2 lines.
Potter’s composition pushed at the limits of form to emphasize the fairy queen’s grief and regret. Before the lights came up on Veiled Tears singer Beth McGee emitted not song but anguished cries. Choreography for the ensemble gave them opportunities for lamentation; they cast their eyes down to the ground and covered their faces with their skirts.
We found it easy to imagine Veiled Tears or something like it inserted into a production of Fairy Queen. Although McGee sang only briefly during Veiled Tears she remained on stage to dance with the much younger ensemble, demonstrating how a vocalist could be integrated into this dance, or how this dance could be part of an opera.
One problem with this premier staging of Veiled Tears was the appearance of some of the dancers in the costume Potter designed and executed for them. True to her long association with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Potter built her costumes around a leotard without tights, a perfectly valid costume choice but tough for many women to look good in. Hips and thighs are notoriously slow to respond to even the best regimen of diet, dance, and exercise, so here is perhaps a long-term challenge for Case Dance Department’s Wellness Program. http://dance.case.edu/wellness.php
Friday’s concert was the first time we’ve seen Assistant Professor Shannon Sterne at MDC but we were already familiar with her choreography for her ballet students at Cleveland City Dance. At MDC Sterne premiered an entertaining 23-minute dance, Inundation, which offered each of the 13 dancers, including herself, a chance to shine in a loose and forgiving format.
Inundation alternated between duets and ensemble dances. In the concert we saw, the duets were danced by Sterne herself and Ryan Andrew Dick. The 12 women in the ensemble were costumed in an assortment of black dresses and slips, a slightly edgy but becoming costume in harmony with the Café Müller VIBE suggested by the chairs that filled most of the stage space.
Each of the duets and ensemble dances established an emotional tone that informed the movements of that section. The initial duet suggested a flirtation. In the first ensemble dance the dancers presented themselves as angry, not with each other but perhaps with the audience. In the 2nd duet the dancers entered angry with each other and exited to opposite wings without a reconciliation. In the 2nd ensemble passage the assorted chairs were strung across the stage to create a perilous passage which the dancers negotiated one at a time with a lunge between chairs here and a promenade there; dancing on chairs, a convention of contact improvisation, fit in with the contact partnering in the duets.
Despite Inundation’s near-complete lack of unison dancing and the references to contact improvisation, we feel safe in saying that Inundation was not an improvisation. Individual performances had apparently been judiciously edited for unity of tone and style. And if Sterne was influenced by Pina Bausch’s Café Müller, we applaud her and her dancers for leaving out the interminable slow motion and the near-total darkness that characterize that well-known dance.
Artistic Director Gary Galbraith’s Remote Encounters was built around video cameras located upstage and downstage of a large white screen. Life-size, real-time images of the 2 dancers, Karina Browne and Dani Dowler, were projected onto the screen as they danced in front of and behind the screen. The 2 women danced solos and eventually duets with their own images, with images of each other, and in every combination one could think of.
We’ve seen many dances that tried and failed to combine video images and theatrical lighting but Galbraith and Technical and Lighting Director Brad Petot make it look easy.
We like to think we’re open to theatrical innovation but we admit that, ultimately, we’re interested in dancing rather than technology. Whether we put a dance DVD into our blu-ray player or schlep through the slush to see a dance concert behind a proscenium arch, technology is for us a means to an end.
So, how was the dancing in Remote Encounters? Pretty nice, we’d say. Galbraith’s choreography gave dancers Karina Browne and Dani Dowler flourishes and poses apparently inspired by Spanish dance. The dancers and their dancing looked good in real life and, if anything, better on the video screen. We noticed only one brief passage when Browne was unlit from the waist down.
The final dance in the evening, Canonic 3/4 Studies, was performed at the Palace Theatre just last March by Mark Morris Dance Group. The Case dancers must have been excited and happy for a crack at this sure-fire audience-pleaser, a very entertaining and funny music visualization set to an assortment of short keyboard pieces in 3/4 time. See our descriptive review here.
The 11 Case dancers mostly did a good job bringing out the humor in the choreography and they were impeccably on the music as performed live by our favorite accompanist, Karin Tooley. They had fun smacking floppy feet on the floor in the choreography’s exaggerated parody of postmodern pedestrian locomotion. Judging from their response, the audience at Mather enjoyed this dance a lot.
We enjoyed Canonic 3/4 Studies, too, but were disappointed that the dancers did not take advantage of this dance’s many opportunities to show their ballet technique. Just one good arabesque!
Au Courant runs through 11/9/2013 at Mather Dance Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Dates and times at http://dance.case.edu/spotlight/ Tickets call 216-368-5246.
[Photo: Brad Petot]
We saw Au Courant on Friday 11/1/2013.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.Cleveland, OH 44106