Dance Theater Workshop
Feb 11 – 13

This year’s Fresh Track’s program offered a captivating cross-section of contemporary dance ecology in New York City. Clocking in at nearly two-hours, the excellent selections made by the panelists and the smart programming made the experience seem much shorter; nothing went on too long. I left the theater wanting only to know and see more work by every one of these creators.

“up and down” a whimsical duet by Makiko Tamura performed with Ryoji Sasamoto opens the show with levity and visual treats. Sasamoto is a breath-taking performer, combining whirling, jumping turns and physical humor, as when he walks right out of his shoes. The dance is framed by a semi-circle of assorted clothing strewn on the floor around the back of the stage, which the two later toss up into the air. At one point, two small disco balls on the floor, and later one spinning ball of multi-colored lights bathe the dancers in starlight, apropos environmental effects for this animated dream.

Eleanor Smith’s “The Miner” is an extraordinary solo as performed by the tenacious and captivating Molly Lieber. This tour de force of pure dance with no music begins with Lieber in a dark blue dress standing with her back to the audience, swaying from side to side. She begins to move, repeating strong, self-assured, defiant gestures, like punching, and heavily labored jumps. These episodes are offset by poses and phrases, which transmit more resistance and futility—slipping backwards against the stress of unseen forces, scrubbing and swiping at the floor—but the struggle continues. What makes this piece so extraordinary is that it succeeds in projecting these meanings through movement language and a performance that does not rely on cliché or stereotypes or irony, but a third-wave feminist remediation of those things.

Vanessa Anspaugh’s “We are Weather” was a curious and sometimes wry trio performed by Aretha Aoki, Lily Gold, and Mary Read. The piece began with a dynamic physical tension between Aoki and Read, leaning into each other in almost a wrestling fashion, holding each other up only by mutual opposition. Eventually they join Gold who has been lying down at the back of the stage, and they move in unison, rolling and sliding on the floor. From the tense opening, through the random center that is the calm eye of the storm, the work ends with a hurricane force solo by Aoki of head-banging hair-ography with an undercurrent of trauma suggested by the repeated abrupt downward scraping of clenched hands against skirted thighs.

Jen McGinn’s dance “Naughty Bits” is a splendid dance employing structure, dandiness, and potent imagery in order to obvert sexualization, a combination one might say typifies the ideologies of Hollins University where McGinn earned her choreographic chops. Her brother James sporting a long black tail uses a bird whistle to produce the first part of the iconic theme from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” and whistles the rest on his own. This witty motif repeats throughout. Dancers Erika Hand in black horns, Jeung-eun Kim, Dawn Springer, and Emily Wexler join him and they circle the stage with turning jumps, slicing arms, and aggressive arabesques. After lining up at center, Kim walks away, and takes off her pants and underwear. As she dances bottomless across the back of the stage, the other four come downstage into a cluster, and make expressive faces while tilting their heads in unison—a rather amusing counterpoint that drove the title home.

Projecting an aggressive and sexualized projection of herself wearing only thigh-high tube socks and black arm warmers onto a flat white wooden sculpture in the shape of her own enlarged silhouette, Liz Santoro sets up the classic tension between live performer and the mediatized self. Exacerbating matters, Santoro the performer presents herself here as the title character, the “Good Girl,” doing ballet movements dressed in a white Greek tunic with blue trim, and appearing tentative in the face of the larger-than-life representation—that bad girl she is known as in performances with artists like Sam Kim and Ann Liv Young. It’s a funny and very effective dialectic, especially when she finally takes charge of the situation. She approaches the laptop at the front of the stage from which the video is being projected, and using her toes, she pauses and then finally shuts off her electronic other.

Mesmerizing ive and recorded music by The Great Republic of Rough and Ready provided a circular (or four-cornered) structure to Enrico Wey’s “Heart Ain’t In It: Four-Chamber Studies.” Four performers—Caitlin Marz, Elissa Spencer, Sam Stein, and Wey—enter the space drinking from Styrofoam cups; Stein is holding a guitar. They chat, undiscernibly, and then stand in formation, as if watching the audience. Recorded music with stylized scat plays low, from the back corner of the stage. The players put down their drinks, move to another location, and repeat the looking. When assemble at the back, Spencer sings the now familiar music while Stein plays it, drooping over further and further as he does. After Marz lays down, the quartet exits, and are replaced in exact position by four completely different performers as recorded music rises from the back of the house—opposite the original source. This piece resonates on many levels—from theoretical questions about the nature of performance and of identity, to the practical matter of teaching living works to new performers over time and how it changes the work. I couldn’t help thinking this kind of work would probably fare well in galleries or museums: it shares certain qualities with the work of Tino Sehgal, not least the fact that it’s credited as an “arrangement” and not as choreography.