Best of 2011-2012

Editor's Note: This year's Sage Awards will take place on October 17 at the Cowles Center. This author's next performance will be this weekend at the Southern. When asked to describe the best thing I “experienced in the theater over the last season” I decided against consulting my calendar and instead identified work that has lingered, that is still accessible in my emotional memory. Two dance works sprung to mind, extremely different yet similar in their vitality and poetic daring. One challenges the notion of how and where dance is usually presented, redefining the fourth wall and reframing the work. The other is embedded in a specific traditional and historical context while retaining a freshness; it is at once new and well-used. Both are dances first and foremost yet contain theatrical and scenic elements that stretch the definition. They were dance experiences, sparkling in their execution and imagery. See, I still remember… Jiri Kylian’s La cathedrale engloutie, performed by Minnesota Dance Theatre and In Habit: Living Patterns, created and performed by Aniccha Arts. These works felt necessary, essential. They needed to be made and thus performed and thereby witnessed. One tradition in repertoire dance companies is to revive old works and acquire others. (This is ironic and interesting alongside a post-modern mandate to constantly investigate and create new work.) What isn’t always understood is that old work can be investigated too, and made new. The promise of seeing Kylian’s La cathedrale engloutie drew me to Minnesota Dance Theatre’s spring concert at the Cowles Center. It was both a revival of an older work and an acquisition, made new by virtue of the fact that new dancers danced it, and beautifully. This Czech-born dancemaker is my all-time favorite choreographer. He made the vast majority of his repertoire upon Nederlands Dans Theatre, an amazing company that has toured here twice in my eighteen-year tenure. Seeing any of Kylian’s work live is a rare treat. The piece, originally created in 1975, did not disappoint. It remains fresh and affecting yet feels like a classic. It reminded me that simplicity can be a bold choice. Iconic images can be read and linger. So much of today’s contemporary ballets are studies in frantic movement. Every count in the music gets a move, or several; these passages get layered; and the whole effect is dizzying and exhausting to watch. La cathedrale engloutie gave me breathing room, space to see and track its singular movement vocabulary. There was verticality, as there is in most work that is derivative of Ballet. Too there was horizontality, an expanded mode of traversing space that utilized the classical modern notions of a back contracted, contorted, spiraled. There was surprising partnering, male/female but also male/male. I especially remember a moment when one man knee-crawled in a circle while supporting the other. That weight-bearing rotation was a painful sacrifice, which seemed precisely like the point. I had just enough of an idea of the piece’s “aboutness” (based on the title’s translation: The sunken cathedral) that my imagination could knowledgably run away with the rest: I saw brokenness in solos and that male duet, wholeness through other pairings and in community, striving, stoic elation and always, a sense of the earthbound. These were humans after all, displaying their beautiful foibles like a living fresco. It was a ceremony, a rite, a prayer, and like all prayers once they are offered up, it was ephemeral.

Under the bridge

Aniccha Arts’ In Habit: Living Patterns was created for the Northern Spark Festival that takes place here every June. Performing on a square stage (about 12’x12’) under the Central Avenue Bridge, this hour-long string of sixteen dance episodes occurred nine times between 9pm and 6am. We arrived around midnight. The scene was electrifying as we walked down the winding stairs. I took a seat on the concrete amid the cool crowd that was already gathered. The work was underway. Directly above the stagespace hung another like-sized square. Miraculously secured to the bottom of the bridge, this one was about 10’ high and had projections on it that, for the most part, served as the lighting. There were five performer/collaborators. When they weren’t onstage, they sat on the edge of it, alert and watching. Projected words on the bridge’s underside wall named the sections: Rumor, Adaptation, Revision. Men in plan clothes, presumably audience members, revealed themselves to be extras as, at one point, they strategically stood or squatted near us, too close for comfort, challenging our view and personal boundaries. The night was black; the performers wore white. They seemed as though from the future, a band of urban dwellers using movement as communication while video images colored their faces. Original electronic music resided alongside and supported the dances. Each contributing element was thoughtful and well conceived. Putting them together added up to something surpassing the sum of the parts. I felt the logic, the great brains, behind the machine that was this monster of a work, confronting the audience as it did, unrelentingly, for nine hours. We stayed through a cycle. I felt, in no particular order: confronted, challenged, moved beyond words, inspired, tired, joyful, delirious and like I was in the absolute rightest place in all the world. I experienced dance on a riverbank, under a bridge, in the middle of the night. I don’t think it gets much better than that. The dancing was thoughtful, brainy and viscerally superb. Movement described the words, but never too literally. Some sections were only gestural, some were red-hot unison sequences exhibiting technical, quick-footed prowess. The performers were at once human and otherworldly. There was contortion and reigned-in technique. I saw performers as choice-makers, whip smart and sinewy. Toward the end of the cycle the audience were engulfed by the performers as they made their way further and further afield, running in circles around us. I found myself on the inside, threading into the pattern of humanity.