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Flash Review 2, 7-26: Baganova Triumphs
When Pigs Fly
International Choreographer's Work is Season's Strongest at ADF
By Byron Woods
Copyright 2001 Byron Woods
DURHAM -- It's so regular an occurrence
at the American Dance Festival that it's almost no longer newsworthy. A foreign
choreographer with only a fraction of the resources and rehearsal time available
to the visiting professional companies creates a dance in less than six weeks
time -- with a cast of amateur undergraduates -- that defines some of the strongest
work of the season. In recent years, the achievements of Shen Wei, Brenda Angiel
and a host of others have demonstrated repeatedly that a hungry choreographer
with an equally hungry cast is capable not only of stealing a show. Sometimes
they steal the whole season.
When they do, it's a fitting reminder
to all that, at this level of achievement, artistic vision remains the great equalizer
-- particularly when it's nurtured for a month and a half under a blue Carolina
sky.
Which is why you should probably
remember the name of Tatiana Baganova. She's the artistic director of the Provincial
Dances Theater of Ekaterinberg, surely an ironic name translation for one of the
Russian Republic's premiere modern dance troupes. Five years after enrolling as
a student at ADF, Baganova's acerbic "Crows" was featured in the 1999 International
Choreographers concert.
This year her trenchant "Wings at
Tea" proved the strongest new work of the season at the American Dance Festival.
The premiere of the work came at the end of an already lengthy International Choreographers
concert last week at ADF.
Perhaps it was too easy. For artistically
this was in some respects the year of the miser at ADF, as a number of choreographers
tried to somehow stretch a small handful of motifs or ideas over an evening-length
frame. In contrast, Baganova simply outbid them, with artistic capital to spare.
Only Merce Cunningham packed more fresh moments and ideas into an evening this
season.
To striking images, movement and
music, "Wings at Tea" asked when will men and women get over sexuality. Thus spake
Baganova: when pigs fly. If Dorothy Parker had repeatedly gotten pawed while growing
up somewhere near the Ural Mountains in the 1970s, the outcome might have looked
something like this.
Actually, a mechanized toy pig with
wings does fly, suspended at the end of a string, throughout the work while a
group of oafish, bulky men in grey suits and cigarettes moves women around the
stage with all the grace and tact of teamsters wrestling packing crates across
a loading dock. These unsuitable suitors unreel dyspeptic variations on the dance
of love in sequences that range from the merely grubby to the truly desperate.
Demon-cellist Chris Lancaster's live
musical accompaniment veers between tender irony and caustic sarcasm when it's
not blended with the jaded musings of German cabaret singer Zarah Leander. Patrick
Holt's costumes place women in a dress in a wooden frame -- one with pulleys and
strings attached at all the articulation points. Of course, men will pull those
strings repeatedly and with little reservation or skill. Later, long-haired women
are accompanied by courtiers who appear to be carrying designer ice chests. They're
containers of water, which the women use to saturate their hair -- and then fling
the liquid in wild joint parabolas across the stage, whipping the men who've been
so singular in their attentions. Similarly arresting visuals riddled the evening,
stole the show, and defined a new, strong feminist voice in dance.
But getting there was less than half
the fun. Earlier in the concert, Sabine Dahrendorf's new "Knistern" opened the
evening on Matthew Eggleton's portentous precipice set, but, ironically, its repetitive
imagery of pilgrimage never seemed to coalesce or go anywhere.
"A Time of Darkness" followed, Sukarji
Sriman's new setting of a work by classical Javanese poet and mystic Raden Ngabei
Ranggawarsita. Sriman's unconventional solo and ensemble vocalizations were evocative,
as were the geometric group movement patterns. Still, we watched as twelve women
choreographically devolved into an undifferentiated chorus line suitable only
for framing the lengthy and not terribly compelling actions of three men.
Sriman played an old man abused by
a younger (and jarringly tone-deaf) master, before appealing to an unlikely deux
ex machina: Donald McKayle. The famous African-American choreographer walked on
in what seemed an increasingly arbitrary, last-minute search for an ending to
the piece. McKayle's singing narrated this last section, but his vocals, inflected
with more than a trace of the African-American spiritual tradition, failed to
mix that well with the microtonal Indian music in place. All in all, it made for
an unsteady end, vocally and choreographically, to a work that started strong.
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