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Flash Review 1, 3-8:
Style-Busting Daddy
Seamless Swimming with Munisteri & Crew
By Alicia Mosier
Copyright 2001 Alicia Mosier
Ben Munisteri brought
his lean, mean, gorgeous company uptown last night for the first
of five performances at the Duke on 42nd Street, as part of the
seventh annual 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project. With a tight-knit
program of three pieces, Munisteri presented a concert so bold and
satisfying that, frankly, if somebody told me his group was performing
in some guy's living room in Jersey on a Tuesday afternoon, I would
drop everything and get on the train. But this is not an ensemble
that will be performing in anyone's living room anytime soon. They
are masterful, and it was excellent to see them in their debut with
Harkness.
The buzz on Munisteri
-- a Brooklyn-born choreographer who got his start in dance clubs
and has been presenting his pieces in New York for seven years --
is that he's come up with an inventive mix of club dance and ballet.
What I saw last night was a mix that didn't look like a mix. It
was a fully articulated style that comes at you from a single, comprehensible,
confident point of view. Sure, Munisteri will follow an entrechat
quatre with some Saturday Night Fever arm action; there's a pas
de bourree to die for, right before the hip swivels that would put
J. Lo to shame. But the real revelation in Munisteri's style is
that all of this is completely integrated: no seams show. This places
it in a different category from most of the other hybrids out there,
whose ballet/modern/hip-hop juxtapositions look like exercises out
of a textbook about how to be postmodern and cool. Munisteri's dances
look like *dancing,* and there's not a cliche in sight.
A huge part of the reason
that's so is the spot-on musical sense that shows up in his pieces.
Maybe it's his history of listening to great DJs that gives Munisteri
his ear for these connections. There are fresh beats from the Ohio
Players, old-country wails from Iva Bittova, and the soaring sounds
of Renee Fleming all edited together by Evren Celimli in "Unspeakable
Plastic Plastic Earth"; brooding Richard Strauss and the unbelievably
funkadelic Celimli again in "The Rosenkavalier (Lust is a Pig, Wallowing
and Groveling in Mud and Filth)"; and Bela Bartok and Kate Bush,
who turn out to be soul-mates in a weird way, in "The Day I Learned
to Swim." The flow from genre to genre in these scores is analogous
to the flow from movement to movement in Munisteri's choreography:
the stylistic interruptions are not ruptures, the mixing's not mixed-up.
It all makes a delicious sort of sense.
It also makes for a delicious
sort of tension. Every single thing makes you cock your head and
surrender to it all at the same time. In "Unspeakable Plastic Plastic
Earth," Lisa Wheeler does an arabesque penchee while cradling her
cheek in her hand, an intrepid, tender gesture that telegraphs the
mood of the entire piece. The almost hieroglyphic silhouettes that
begin the sensual and refined "Rosenkavalier" turn into a menage
of fluid angles in trios and duets; then there's Christine McMillan
regally perched on the head of Munisteri, her feet on another dancer's
shoulders. When Celimli starts to make that Strauss score rock about
halfway through, you see five dancers lined up with breakdancing
arms and pulsing grand plies, or burning across the stage in whip-fast
half-turning leaps. The partnering is smooth and creative -- a lot
of the partnering at the New York City Ballet isn't as strong as
this! -- and the slightly skewed patterns on the stage are invariably
beautiful. It's just what you want to see: movement that's both
surprising and right.
"The Day I Learned to
Swim," which premiered last night, began as a project at the Pyramid
Club, a venerable dive in the East Village, and I wish I'd seen
it there before it came uptown. Its energy was hot on the stage
of the Duke, but at the cramped, smoky Pyramid it must have been
absolutely fire-starting. The piece begins with Munisteri doing
push-ups to Bartok and ends with three simultaneous duets, in exquisite,
explosive slow-motion, to a keening Kate Bush. What happens in the
six sections in between has the same dynamic range and magic I saw
in the other pieces. Munisteri moves his dancers through drastic
shifts in velocity and more subtle shifts in style without ever
losing the clarity of his design. There's a hint of a doggy paddle
and an almost-plunge in "The Day I Learned to Swim," and a suggestion
of risk and trust and trials and errors, but there are no pretentious
lessons here -- just a total experience, at once raucous and reflective,
that evolves through intelligent movement. I liked the short purple,
pink, gray, and black patchwork tunics Julia N. Van Vliet designed,
and here as elsewhere Kathy Kaufmann's lighting made a wondrous
world out of a boxy stage.
And what dancers! Every
forty seconds I had a new favorite. They make a tight team, but
their distinctiveness is never hidden. Munisteri himself has a casual,
Brooklyn-boy air, long legs and arms, and incredible strength. Mikey
Thomas was sweet and shy in "Unspeakable Plastic Plastic Earth."
Toby Billowitz was an axis of power in "The Day I Learned to Swim."
Wheeler has been with Munisteri from the beginning; she dances like
she doesn't care who's watching her, and it makes you want to watch
her even more. (She also choreographed one section of "The Day I
Learned to Swim.") McMillan, who dances with the Metropolitan Opera
Ballet, has a degree in ballet and psychology, which may explain
the wry, wild consciousness you can see edging out of her classical
body. Dusan Tynek caught my eye as one of a pair of warm, wide-eyed
brunettes in the first piece on the program; he was friendly yet
detached, and beautiful to watch. The other half of that pair was
Tricia Brouk, who has a Julianne Moore pallor and a style so clear,
honest, and eloquent that -- especially in her dance to Kate Bush's
"This Woman's Work," with Wheeler dancing the same steps a couple
feet away -- it brought tears to my eyes. Toward the end of the
show I couldn't stop looking at her.
Catch Ben Munisteri at
the Duke, 229 W. 42nd Street, tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m., and
Sunday at 3 and 8 p.m. Call 212-415-5552 for more information. You
can find more on Ben by visiting
his web site.
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