It starts with the lines of women in black dresses and goes towards us. As the tides in their bodies return, another woman appears through them. She pays our attention both in otherworldly fluidity and in flashing nails. She points to us with casual commands and then to shimmy. She looks over her shoulder with the tiniest laugh as she leaves.
Something is happening with John Jaspase's “Tise.” This premiered at the start of the 20th anniversary of Lamama's Movement! Dance festival. Much of the magic comes from casting. The pointing woman is Jody Melnick, who has captivated audiences for decades. Later, another veteran spellcaster, Vicki Sick, wagged his finger. However, the hidden power is jaspase. The choreographer guides the compositional skills and artistry to guide the talents of these exceptional performers into the special magic of modern dance.
“Tide” honors a particular lineage. Melnick, Chic and Cynthia Kopp are connected with the prominent postmodern Trisha Brown, an inspiration for early jaspase. The young dancers of “Tise” Maria Fleischmann and Jace Weyand were students of Jaspase and Melnick. There is a suggestion that older dancers will take younger dancers under their wings when they combine, combine, and protect their eyes from the moon.
Some dramas come from Haanlow's strange qi awakening score, ranging from Poltergeist noise to Technobeat. Ben Demarest's lighting line up on the sides of the stage in a section similar to catwalk modeling, illuminating the walls of his back, highlighting the dancers who are mysteriously tying their bodies together, partially blinded by incoming headlights. But the main accusations of “The Tide,” one of the most engrossing dance works I've seen this year, comes from the choreography.
“The tide” has begun the thrilling but inconsistent Lamama moves. This continues on Sunday. This festival is customarily a charming arrival end base of the fledgling experimental dance. The premiere by Jaspase, the leading choreographer whose work has appeared in major theatres like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, can be read as an act of treat and generosity on an anniversary, or as a nasty symptom of the dance ecosystem in a crisis.
This past weekend, the two sharing programs have returned to the festival business as usual. Many first draft ideas and one Undersung delight. In “Dance for Ending,” Jesse Theritt and Pamela Pietro tried all sorts of things. But there was nothing fun or interesting in reality.
Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a thoughtful and talented choreographer when he has multiple bodies at his disposal. However, his solo “Mooncry” was stunned. After the business of releasing his throat as he enters and leaves the stage, he reads the names of the audience and throws mint at them. He said it is a study of crying while standing on a pile of books. However, this research appears to be in its early stages, and occasionally bumping into strong ideas, like when hanging out a wig on the microphone stand next to the fan.
In other shared programs, Megumi Eda tackled intergenerational trauma with her solo “Please Cry.” Her grandmother was a Japanese nurse during World War II, but never discussed her experience. She taught Eda not to cry. We learned some of this as Eda streamed live, talked to her dead grandmother on her phone, shared her home movies, and hit the wall wearing a nurse's coat. Eda, a standout dancer at Karole Armitage's company decades ago, was left surprised, but the work remained unchanged.
This kind of flaw should be expected from this festival, as well as discoveries like Nick Garreis. Gareis, a master step dancer in Irish and Appalachian traditions, is not known in New York. He was presented at the Irish Arts Centre and last week at the Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival. Nevertheless, he is an unexposed treasure.
In Lamama, Alexis Cortland has joined Garice. He plays French Canadian fiddle tunes on a Baroque violin. Garice washed and rubbed against the sandy floor, slowly soaking her flashy flat feet in surprise, knocking on her heels and clicking on her toes. Often he would stay in place with his feet directly under him, breathing and dancing – muttering and whispering. He spoke about his collaboration with Chartland as a “mesh of Sonic intimacy,” so it was mainly quiet and beginning to get quiet.
At one point, the underworldly charming Gareis commented on being in the experimental theatre, giving the audience permission to express themselves in the “noise of joy.” He also described him as a “sick and strange child” who rebelled against the prohibition of rubbing the feet of his Irish dance teacher. These two comments were probably the answers about how traditional dancers like Gareis (who are proud of in the traditional field) fit into the frequently uncooked avant-garde of Lamama's movements and how he quietly cheered it up.
