Next Generation Project
These voices batter our ears and minds all day long, always promising. The journalistic voice, for example, is tough, promising to go behind the scenes and see the way things really work. It’s not surprising that such voices have penetrated everywhere, even into dance. Popular dance, not surprisingly, is dominated by the sweet voice of advertising. Chorus-line dancers talk about “selling” to the audience; bright smiles and hyperkinetic movement are part of the candy-bright colors used in advertising.
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Wilfredo Rivera–one of several choreographers on the second program of the Next Generation Project–has got the pop voice down pat. His Broken Glass starts with five pretty women in flowing pastel dresses dancing elegantly in classical style as three cellists play live. Rivera enters in a red dressing gown, black pants, and a curious black vest that leaves the upper part of his chest bare. He gestures and six dancers dressed in black–mini dresses, uniforms, business suits, nuns’ habits–capture, torture, and kill the pretty women. Rivera gets his own fair-skinned beauty to abuse. When all the black-dressed dancers disappear, one beautiful survivor dances elegantly again, but with more feeling. Rivera accomplishes all this in less than ten melodramatic minutes, using the elements of a 60-second spot–instantly understandable characters, a clear plot with clear conflicts, comprehensible movement that delineates the characters’ social classes, boffo costumes and set, simple emotions, and a black-and-white worldview.
The text drives this half of the dance, drawn from sources including a biography of Claudel, Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters, and the Book of Psalms; it’s erudite but doesn’t hang together well enough to be comprehensible. The other half of the dance is driven by movement and explores the source of the artist’s creativity. Three women act as figure models: lying nude on red cloth, they move slowly and gently into many classically depicted shapes. Claudel molds them as she would a model, though the man who’s Claudel’s lover also adjusts their positions and eventually lies with each of the women. Only one line of text illuminates the movement: “Sculpture is about the impulse to touch.” And the women’s shapes are so exquisitely vulnerable that our natural response is to comfort through touch.
