Jan Erkert & Dancers
at the Athenaeum Theatre, through March 21
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Erkert uses her freedom from narrative to burrow deeply into how things feel. Her 1995 Whole Fragments conveyed what recovery from a physical disability felt like. Yet there were no obvious roles, such as patient, doctor, or nurse; the set and costumes gave no hint of hospitals. That dance was dreamlike, set in a morphine haze. Shadowy people arrived on the scene, then disappeared; sometimes people were nurtured, and sometimes they were alone and terrified. The first time I saw Whole Fragments I didn’t understand or like it. I came to appreciate it only when a friend who’d been hospitalized as a girl told me that Erkert had captured her feelings perfectly. Yet Erkert tends to avoid depicting emotions–for example, the sickening fear of those who are helpless–trusting that these will emerge as subtext. In many ways it’s a novelistic method. But Erkert can get lost inside her voluptuous textures. Her Unweavings got off to a very slow start as her dancers dodged between the set’s layers of handwoven cloth.
The two dances Erkert presented recently at the Dance Center of Columbia College–Love Poems and 4:14 a.m.–are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Love Poems, which premiered a year ago, is accessible and relatively representational; based on poems from the Heian period in Japan, it’s about love between men and women. 4:14 a.m., on the other hand, is nonrepresentational with a vengeance; Erkert even chose its title from ideas submitted by audience members at a preview.
The movement is often small and constrained, its quality slow and sticky as if the dancers were half asleep. Few relationships develop between them; they seem to slide by one another without connecting. The clearest image is of a woman half lifted by the rest of the dancers, who crowd around her; it made me think of a woman in hell surrounded by flames.
Bartoszek’s other work suffers from similar problems. Sweet Baby, Baby Suite has some inspired moments of silliness, especially when babies tumble from the sky into women’s arms, but it ends up repeating the same movements endlessly. Shattered Ground, about two Civil War soldiers, has some interesting partnering between the men but is predictable and similarly bogged down in movement. Good efforts by new choreographers, both company members, round out the program: a solo by Michelle Blakely and a duet by Joan Pangilinan-Taylor.
