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Women
on the Verge, 2: Facing Effacing
Shick, Screened and Unscreened
By Nancy Dalva
Copyright 2003 Nancy Dalva
NEW YORK -- Vicky Shick
is such a modest and reticent performer and choreographer that she
does everything in her power, which is considerable, to disappear
herself from the very stage on which she sets her work. Her new
dance "Undoing," first performed on March 4 and 5 at Dance
Theatre Workshop (to be repeated on March 13, 14, 22
and 23), makes you feel as if you are spying on her, and on her
four lovely female dancers, glimpsing this and that through lamp-lit
windows. This voyeuristic sensation recalls Trisha Brown, who made
a solo called "If You Couldn't See Me" some time after the six excellent
years Schick spent in her company. (Incidentally but interestingly,
another former Brown dancer, Stephen Petronio, otherwise a very
different kind of choreographer and a totally different kind of
dancer from Schick, evoked that same voyeuristic mood in his recent
"City
of Twist." ) "Undoing" is elliptical, calligraphic, elegant,
and unreadable, yet narrative. Imagine opening a book to find almost
all the words erased -- here and there an adverb, a noun, an indefinite
article -- and the pages out of order. That would be "Undoing."
The women -- the choreographer
and Juliette Mapp, Jodi Melnick, Eileen Thomas, and Meg Wolfe --
are dressed by the visual artist Barbara Kirkpatrick in pretty,
contemporary beige-ish versions of street clothes, with an addition,
in two segments of the dance, of an outre white coat and train that
appear to be fashioned out of cellophane garbage bags. At the right,
a gossamer white gown is suspended from the ceiling. Underneath,
on a platform, is a large white bowl that -- once carried on --
is never used. (You might decide that the dress is hanging up to
dry after being washed in the bowl, but you'd be making it up on
slight evidence. ) In addition to two low platforms underneath these
items, the set consists of several moveable screens on wheels --
they appear to be coat racks with muslin stretched and gathered
on them, like curtains. These not merely suggest but create the
actuality of things hidden and concealed, as the dancers move then
here and there. At one point, they line the screens up one behind
the other, and dance between them, hidden. Then they step out to
the left, in unison, mid-phrase, and there's slight laughter in
the house. (What a subtle joke! You can see them!) Throughout, there
are snatches of silence and of music heard the same way you might
hear music from outside, drifting in to you.
Even when dancing in
front of the screens, the women seem secretive, as if dancing at
home, behind windows with the curtains closed. Occasionally, they
step out into the light, and the screens recede. The movement proceeds
in random seeming fragments, like excerpts. After a time printed
phrases begin to appear sequentially on the dark backdrop. These
enhance the suggestion of missing narrative, but they don't enhance
interpretation. Rather, they erase the reassuring arc of continuous
time. "Earlier that day," reads one. "Six months from now," says
another. "Three weeks ago," says a third.
A sparing but creaturely
femininity; a deep but self-abnegating glamour: these remain, enacted
in meticulous kinesthetic minutiae, evocative, focused, intentional,
and slight. An elbow bends. A knee is raised. An overgarment is
removed from one person by another. A dancer lies down, rolls over.
In solo, the women are inward. In duet, they are attentive to each
other, yet self contained, the way you might imagine nuns in a cloister.
(They don't really need us, do they?) And so we'll never know what
"Undoing" is about, any more than we'll know what the neighbors
are thinking as they live their lives with the shades half up. We
could guess, of course, but watching is enough, and then some. Isn't
it?
Nancy Dalva is the senior writer for 2wice.
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