Dance Review: Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet

(Photos by Paul B Goode)

In a virtually unprecedented move, Benoit-Swan Pouffer, former Alvin Ailey dancer and current artistic director of the fledgling, Chelsea-based dance company, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, invited members of the blogging community to attend the dress rehearsal for their spring season performance, which opened last night. About ten writers showed up for a cocktail mixer, a performance, and an informal Q&A, where Mr. Benoit explained that we had been invited because he “likes bloggers”; more explicitly, he believes in the vitality of internet culture, in both its immediateness (which can often achieve a tangible if at times ill-aimed quality of passion) and the ability of blogs to disseminate information to a wide range of readers. Even before the performance began, Mr. Benoit welcomed us as special guests before a modest crowd mostly of friends and family of the company (which included Danny Tidwell of ABT and, more realistically, “So You Think You Can Dance” fame). The occasion is certainly of note, and perhaps a hopeful sign that alternative media might play a larger role in shaping the future of the arts. The wine was delicious and the welcome gracious: Consider our ego stroked. Now, let’s get down to business.

Cedar Lake Dance seems to have made its first big splash last season with a repertory performance of Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin’s “Decadance.” If memory serves, most of the criticism surrounding the engagement said essentially that the dancers still looked like they were finding their way into Naharin’s “Gaga” language. Indeed, Mr.Benoit said that Cedar Lake is still “establishing the company identity,” which, judging from Wednesday night’s dress, they are whittling through flashy works by European choreographers with a penchant for perpetuum mobile and expressionistic virtuosity.

The Italian-born choreographer, Jacopo Godani, provided the first piece of the evening, “Symptoms of Development,” for which the choreographer also created the lighting, costumes and video. This might be the reason for the works myopic tendencies, which presented the audience with a Euro-industrial-future-robotic aesthetic that was both oppressive and, oddly for a dance, scary.

The dancers, clad in drab, Sci-Fi inspired gray-green underpants and tank tops with black chest harnesses, forced themselves through movement that sometimes made them machines, other times, modern jazz flash dancers.

A bellyaching litany of apocalyptic voice overs, sometimes provided live by the dancers on stage, were shallow in their philosophy and condescending in their presence.

In the press release, Mr. Godani claims to be exploring his “belief that as a society we have gone astray in our humanistic progress.” But Mr. Godani makes the mistake of aiming his ire at the general population of humanity, which includes the audience, without heart or compassion; or evidence. It seems, rather, that Mr. Godani has halted the progress of dance, aesthetics and taste. His dystopian universe, via dark, soulless lighting (going so far as to employ the use of a strobe light), half-baked projections (a literal countdown from 40 is projected onto the bare belly of one of the dancers, a skeleton onto the body of another) is typically antagonizing, like so much end-of-civilization forewarning can be. The music, credited to Ulrich Muller and Siegfried Rossert of 48Nord, was unrelenting in its rough-hewn industrial electronic gratiness. The entire enterprise was literally mind-numbing.

The only hopeful sign was a brief moment when one of the female dancers came out wearing a pelvic harness. Two men at her sides picked her up and spun her around. The possibilities were there, but this evaporated so quickly into yet another warrantless shift into yet another terrifying situation. When the final projection on the back wall read “Continue,” just as the lights were going out, I was relieved that this dance, in fact, would not.

“Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue,” a new work by Vancouver-based Crystal Pite, who worked with William Forsythe while he was directing the Ballet Frankfurt, is a thoughtful succession of duets that elide together beneath the sensuous–if electronic–music the composer Cliff Martinez wrote for Stephen Soderberg’s film “Solaris.”

An elliptical copse of ten or so stage lights affixed to movable posts outlined a performance area for the dance (lighting by Jim French).

The movement style is similar to that of Mr. Godani’s in it’s near non-stop activity. This is something Ms. Pite has picked up from Mr. Forsythe. The difference seems to be that where Mr. Forsythe’s movement maintains a kind of architectural sub-structure, even in his works with greater improvisation freedom, Ms. Pite’s movement is composed with more liberal parameters. Certain vernacular movements are brought in, but the greater bulk of the material is a free flowing succession of quite virtuosic “dancy” dance.

But virtuosity is its own kind of earnestness. Where Godani’s work was conceptually earnest (to a fault), Pite’s work, in contrast, becomes earnest in the way it necessitates virtuosity (actually, this could be said of every dance on the program). Even the theater elements of this work–like the image of a man (the talented dancer Jon Bond) running in place behind a woman who just stands facing away from him–mostly take a back seat to the fast-paced, intricately expressive choreography.

Stijn Celis, also hailing from a Ballet Frankfurt background, concluded the evening with “Rite,” a freely interpreted version of Le Sacre du Printemps, danced to Fasil Say’s Gould-esque recording of Stravinsky’s own transcription of the score for four hand piano.

I liked this more than the pair of “Rites” that came through the Performa Festival. It was an attempt to, at the very least, take the music seriously. There was something wonderful about the piano version; you could hear through the cracks of Stravinsky’s composition, allowing you to detect yet more things in the score, particularly capturing what is often so simple (and genius) about some of the musical ideas.

The dance opened with two bright green catwalks (made up of interchangeable, rectangular boxes). A female dancer is posed on hands and knees, alert, ribcage anxiously rise and falling in apprehensive arches. Soon she is joined by choruses of men and women, all dressed like her in short and strapless dresses (designed by Catherine Voeffray) that have big, colorful and shiny floral patterns on them. The dresses have a rigid architectural, hourglass shape, which, depending on your taste, either looked fiercely couture or like gaudy lampshades.

A particularly visceral moment, and the most classical movement of the entire night, came when, during a rising accumulation of gloriously tragic chords in the music (in the symphonic score, played by the trumpets), the men launched into amazing leaps, bounding over the boxes like balletic water nymphs, while the female dancers toiled away ground-level.

“Rite” was the most theatrical of the three pieces, although its attempt at narrative fell just short of clear: At best, I could make out that the men (in drag–that is, they are dressed like women, and not vice-a-versa–which is not quite “androgynous” as the artist’s statement claims) were learning to mimic the movement of the women, which was made most obvious when the four male dancers produced a fashion show-like posing session on top of the green boxes, now rearranged to create a v-shaped gap between them.

The piece continued the streak of dance virtuosity (although the still moments were the best in this work). But there is something about this group of dancers (all talented and young, yes; attractive, yes, with the men pushing the “too” side of muscular) that felt more concerned with flash and less concerned with control, so the virtuosic aesthetics suffered. I never felt that the dancers ever quite had their footing on the floor. But for them, the directors, and their supporters, the flashiness seemed sufficient. And if ballet stands on two legs, one sophistication, the other showmanship, Mr. Pouffer’s company leans dangerously on the latter, where, in contrast, Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses Company would tilt slightly the other way.

It’s funny, I never would have thought of Ohad Naharin as a “flashy” choreographer–arrogant, maybe, but not particularly over-the-top showy–until I imagined the Cedar Lake dancers doing his movement. (I would be curious to see their repeat performance of “Decadance” this Sunday: Any chance of press tickets, Msr. Benoit?)

But the tendency toward wildly expressive dance makes sense; most of the choreographers involved in Cedar Lake hail from either Alvin Ailey (classically expressive) or William Forsythe (expressively classical). It might be good for the company to try out some choreographers with either a more linear discipline or a more adventurous theatrical sensibility. Even utilizing some New York-based choreographers would probably dilute the company’s stylistic myopia and invigorate it with a much needed alternative perspective. But when I asked Mr. Benoit if Cedar Lake would consider bringing in the New York school, his answer was affable but ambivalent; he is interested in keeping Cedar Lake a company international in scope.

On a final note, when going through the publicity photos of the dances presented Wednesday, I was struck by how much more interesting these dances looked on film. There is something that communicates volumes in a flat still than much of this dance did in person, particularly Godani’s work. Perhaps the superficial veneer resonates in flatness. Whereas, I was not going to see Jerome Bel’s “Pintchet Klunchun and myself” specifically because of the press photo they released (an unispired wide shot of Bel watching Klunchun in Thai dance pose), but that work–that experience–was far more resilient and connective than any of the dances presented by Cedar Lake.

But we shouldn’t write-off this youthful company that is steadily carving a place for itself in the modern dance scene, which can seem to practice a reverse discrimination against both classicism and flair. There is obviously an audience for the kind of middle-ground dance (not ballet, not modern jazz) that, in time, may be more becoming as the dancers’ techniques solidify, and the directors’ tastes become more cool.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s winter season runs through January 20th.

CORRECTION:

It was Jacopo Godani who worked with the Ballet Frankfurt, not Stijn Celis.

January 11, 2008
Categories: Dance, Review . . Author: countercritic

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