Ruth Page Dance Series
at the Athenaeum Theatre, February 26-27 and March 14
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These were the pleasures to be found at the Ruth Page Dance Series. A collaboration between singer Joseph Cerqua and dancer Wilfredo Rivera for the Cerqua Rivera Art Experience, Mood Swing is based on an idea so perfectly executed that the dance starts to morph into something else. The idea is simply to have musicians and dancers occupy the same space and interact. The piece starts with the musicians in the dancing area; a dancer curls around the ankles of each musician, a gesture at first suggesting dependence but actually connoting intimacy. After this initial image, the dancers and musicians move into rival camps, but eventually each dancer bonds with a musician and dances a solo as that musician plays a solo. When the dancers perform a duet, so do “their” musicians.
Since I dislike pop culture, it’s a pleasure to see it deflated. Anna Simone Levin from Same Planet Different World sends up Latin pop music delightfully in Mujeres caiandos. Four women start seriously, with anguish-tinged angular movement set to a tango. Levin’s unpredictable movement has rhythmic texture; the ensemble is tight but the dancers are having a lot of fun. Eventually the tango disintegrates into a section in which the women do a “come hither” sequence with only their legs sticking up from empty galvanized steel washtubs. It ends with two women, clearly in anguish over their men, dunking their heads repeatedly in the tubs and flinging water over the stage; meanwhile the other two women vamp seductively. Levin takes the sexual allure of Latin music to its logical, ludicrous conclusion. And Jason Ohlberg of Same Planet Different World explores the hard-edged side of love in his duet Daphnis & Chloe Are Dead: Ohlberg and Katie Saifuku burn with sexual intensity as Diamanda Galas sings over and over “you mean everything to me.”
Tye’s large pleasures don’t come solely from the expert use of mass. May is a balletic duet for her sister Aimee and Jason T. Wiser. The first half is unexceptional, but the second includes a number of astonishing lifts. It ends with Tye seeming to lie on top of Wiser, except she’s floating two feet above his body–an amazing lift with an untraditional shape. Tye doesn’t end in conventional ballet ways but with a suggestion of carnality–a more logical ending point.
