Equal Footing/Earing
Carter goes through the same movements as before until she seems to realize that no one else is dancing. Her movements become dispirited and halfhearted, and finally she slows to a stop. She isn’t exactly still, yet she doesn’t seem to be waiting or listening. Instead, she’s frozen. She gazes at a rear corner; her gaze is blank rather than pensive. The other three women bounce out from the sides and sweep her up in their activity; each of the four dancers touches the others constantly, as they quickly form and reform tiny tableaux. Frequently one falls and is caught by another dancer, who puts her into a different shape. In the midst of this activity, Carter slips away; again, she stares blankly at a corner. The other three women again sweep her up, but after a short time she slips away once more.
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A Crack in the Ladder, a piece by composer Charles Kim and choreographer Michelle Kranicke, is not as close a collaboration, nor is it as successful. When Kranicke told Kim that she wanted to make three solos for different women, he decided to write three movements, the first about innocence, the second disappointment, and the third resolution. This must have been too much structure for Kranicke, because she seems to have ignored it, working instead with pure movement. Nonetheless, the dance and music fit well together, and Kim’s lovely, gentle composition defies categorization (after the performance, Kim said that he’d been listening to tango, folk music, Bartok, and Stravinsky as well as jazz and rock). Kranicke’s three solos have the same basic movement material, embellished by the dancers’ idiosyncratic gestures: Emily Stein is languid and bored, Kelly Hayes nervous and fidgety, and Kranicke herself high-strung and rather angry. Placed side by side, the dance and music are both good, but nothing lifts them to a higher level the way the butoh movement does in Autumn/Familiarity.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Marianne Kim photo by Marianne Kim.
