Meaningful Motion, 'New Dances'

Author: Kate DeForest

This year's fall presentation of student choreography, "New Dances," showed a strong trend toward conscientious and studied movement, "motion with meaning" as Amy Chavasse, resident artist in dance, so concisely put it. Composed of two to five dancers, the pieces represented the culmination of a semester's worth of working, rehearsal and reworking, and showed triumph over what Chavasse termed "a tremendous challenge."

The dances were very much part of a process; during the question and answer session following the performances every choreographer present stated, in one way or another, that, had they more time, they would have done something a bit differently within their respective pieces. However, the dances were clearly at a stage where public viewing was profitable for both audience and artist, meaningful in performance as well as process.

"Left of Leading," choreographed by Kate Prouty '02, was the ironic kick-off to the night's performances. The most ambitiously staged piece with five dancers, Prouty was successful in creating a sense of chaos, but did so in a very conventional and unsurprising way; her dancers whirled across the stage, wind-milling their arms, congealing in a mass of bodies with limbs flying. It was disorganized and confusing movement, but it wasn't a particularly interesting way to illustrate a lack of leadership.

Prouty's aesthetic sense seemed most fully realized during the duets that punctuated the piece, which showed a great deal of artistic maturity and consciously weighted movement, able to evoke a certain sense or emotion from the audience. There was a smoldering sort of desperation as the dancers intertwined, paired and re-paired, forming moments of profound clarity even as the dancers themselves struggled for direction.

Prouty's sense of movement in relation to music was unerring. She set the piece to Michael Chion's "Requiem," a jarring sort of noise interspersed with silence. By synchronizing the dancers' movements toward the end of the piece, with the exception of Paige Ellwood '02, who broke away from the pack to become an individual rather than an authoritative presence among the rest, during one of these silences, Prouty succeeded in cultivating the sense of unease that was, I think, her goal.

The second dance, "Miss," was a clear departure from the first, and proved to be quite different from the pieces that followed as well. It was a narrative piece, styled so that there were very clear differences between the roles of the male and female dancers, in both form and content. The choreographer, Elizabeth Logue '03, presented both an emotional as well as aesthetic landscape, through which her dancers moved in a sequence both surprising and necessary. Katie MacDonald '03, carried herself with a graceful eloquence that translated Logue's phrases with great emotional depth, and belied her own classical training.

In "One and Another" Meg Neville '03 manipulated her dancers, forming and dissolving alliances through motion and space. Set against Clara Schmuann's "Andante-Allegro vivace in G," a dynamic work for piano, Heather Beal '02.5, Ellwood and Andrea Templeton '04 moved with agility and purpose through a series of sequences that concluded with a sort of tableau, three dancers intertwined.

The fourth showing was the most polished, both dancers and choreographer seemed to meet at a deliberate focal point. Visually, Sean Hoskins's "So We Pivot," was a stunning composition. The movements of his dancers showed an understanding of the range of the human body, as well as a range of emotion. He was also able to accomplish the illustration of a paradox, that is to evoke a sense of paralysis through motion.

Beal's contribution as a choreographer was a piece that reflected much of the energy she shows as a dancer, only this time channeled at a frenetic pace. Her "Butterfly With Bullet Wings," a title whose meaning she kept guarded throughout the question session following the performance, did have a hard edge to the precision of movement she demanded, though as to the exact meaning of name it is fruitless to speculate.

The performance was rounded out by what is typically a crowd pleaser, this year being no exception. The Newcomer's Piece, "Love Songs: I Behave Badly," incorporated a large number of dancers of various experience with text and music from the intellectually quirky band, Magnetic Fields. The piece, choreographed by Peter Schmitz, visiting assistant professor in dance, in collaboration with the dancers, ended the night with a tongue-in-cheek look at love, and the perceptions we hold of it and ourselves.