By Margaret Putnam - "Why do the dancers just stand there?," complains a woman in the lobby about Mark Sean Panzarino’s Adam and Eve and God: a dance for two. "If I wanted to watch someone just stand, I’d watch my husband stand at the sink and pretend to be washing dishes."
Panzarino relayed that comment and several others he overheard during intermission at Texas Dance Theatre’s "A Season of Choreographers: Gala Finale."
He got an earful. "He’s from New York," observed another audience member. "“Maybe that’s why the music sounded like broken glass and muggings." And, "what was it with the balloons? There’s no New Year's Eve in the Bible."
That’s what you get for eavesdropping. I was outside so he didn’t hear my assessment of his messy, silly dance, to wit: "God must be laughing, or else thinking 'what have I wrought?' Can I throw them back and start afresh?"
Adam and Eve begins to screeching, ear-piercing noises. As a bar that stretches the length of the stage slowly rises, pulling up a curtain, it eventually reveals the slumped over forms of Adam (Dan Westfield) and Eve (Josie Baldree). For a while, they dance nicely enough, with Adam swirling her off the ground, and the two waltzing.
Then things get weird. The stage turns dark, and when the light comes on, it reveals crumpled paper and balloons strewn about, and Eve lying at a heap at one end, and nothing more of Adam than his legs sticking out.
Once upright, Adam jumps over the balloons, legs straight and forward, and then stops, shivering as if tormented by an itch.
And so it goes, the two looking bewildered even as they stand still, and even more bewildered at they pass balloons back and forth.
Compared to this little foray into the absurd, the rest of the program Friday night at the Scott Theater was pretty conventional, from the opening Confugium to the ending work, Webern Variations.
Emily Hunter’s Confugium featured seven dancers in purple bathing suits and diaphanous skirts. Their movement is all curves, leaps and turns. Hunter’s Dreamers is a lovely if unremarkable duet for Hunter and Westfield.
Some of the same lush, curving movement from Confugium shows up in Krista Jennings Langford’s returning away, but what makes it arresting is the deployment of dancers in space. The four dancers start out scattered, their limbs creating different viewpoints that give the effect of a breeze rustling flowers. They also dance in tandem, in trios and duets, backs arched and arms stretched out.
From the title of Elizabeth Gillaspy’s Duet you would expect two dancers. Instead, it is a single dancer (Hollis Hock) and a barre. In black leotard and pointe shoes, Hock goes through the usual ballet exercises of developpé, grand battement, rond de jambe and arabesques, but has other ideas. She folds over in half, slides to the floor and pulls herself back up. Near the end, she pulls her hand away from the barre as though it is too hot to touch, and, now free, runs off. On one level, the dance is straightforward, but on another—thanks in part to Piazzolla’s pulsating tango music—it seethes with sexual tension.
The best was saved for the last: artistic director Wil McKnight’s Webern Variations. Shades of Balanchine run through all four variations, but who is complaining? Not me. Crisp footwork, elegant arabesques and that signature Balanchine touch, rocking on bent knees, look fresh here. So does the use of space, geometric lines and repetition. Several times two sets of dancers form a diagonal in arabesque penché, and many times simply rotate at a 45-degree angle doing nothing but lifting arms. As in von Webern’s music, the simplicity is telling.
►Margaret Putnam has been writing about dance since 1980, with works published by D Magazine, The Dallas Observer, The Dallas Times Herald, The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, Playbill, Stagebill and Dance Magazine.
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