Choreographer Finds Groove
Pop Opera Rocks: Parsons Dance @ Ohio Theatre 6/11/11
We went to see Parsons Dance at the Ohio Theatre on Saturday only half sure what to expect. The program was to start with the short but spectacular Caught (1982), a piece we’d seen at least once before. Rounding out the evening was a piece new to us, Remember Me (2009), a collaboration with East Village Opera Company and at 75 minutes Parsons’ first venture into evening-length narrative. Remember Me opened in New York to scathing reviews.
Caught played out much as we remembered. Dancer Miguel Quinones initially appeared standing in a succession of hot overhead spots that exaggerated his ripped, shirtless muscularity. Then the strobe light started, catching the apex of each of his jumps in intense light and concealing his landings in darkness. Quinones appeared to levitate in the air as he bounced up and down in place, bounded around the stage in a circle, and hopped forward and back; elementary choreography, perhaps, but the dancer and the operator of the strobe light were in perfect synch and the audience gasped, murmured, and chuckled during the piece and burst into tumultuous applause at the end.
Apparently Caught makes use of carefully guarded craft secrets for — despite the many uses of strobe light in dance and the loose copyright protections afforded to choreography — no one we know of has achieved comparable effects in a dance performance.
Like Parson’s The Envelope, frequently performed locally by Verb Ballets, we’ve enjoyed Caught every time we’ve seen it, but with a certain reservation. Both dances — by far Parson’s best before Remember Me — succeed despite a one-dimensional quality that reduces much of the rest of his work beneath serious consideration as choreography. We’re not the only ones who felt (past tense) this way about Parsons. (http://NYTimes.com/2009 and http://NYTimes.com/2011.)
East Village Opera Company is a Grammy-nominated cover band for opera’s greatest hits. A fairly traditional rendition of, for instance, the Overture from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro begins and then rock percussion and electric guitars, recorded for the Ohio Theatre performance but live in many EVOC shows, enter the arrangement in an effort to impart a hip, contemporary vibe. Not everyone likes this kind of thing, but Saturday’s audience at the Ohio Theatre certainly did, expressing enthusiastic acceptance throughout the show and applauding at great length during the choreographed curtain calls at the end.
We felt that the two EVOC vocalists, Ann Marie Milazzo and Michael K. Lee — who were very much live and in person at the Ohio — were particularly successful in bridging the gap between operatic aria and contemporary pop vocals. But Remember Me owes its success to more than the music.
Each of the 12 scenes in Remember Me used music, dance, and background projections to advance the story of a love triangle that ended — remember, this is opera — tragically but then with the transcendent, triumphant reunion of the lovers. The Parsons dancers, projecting glamour and dazzling technical prowess as always, powered through the broadly drawn narrative. Backgrounds (by Production Designer Jason Thompson and Lighting Designer Howell Binkley) projected on the upstage cyclorama put each scene in an evocative setting and allowed lightning scene changes, but seldom distracted from the dancers.
As we said, we were never big Parsons fans before, but Remember Me has forced even Vic to concede that Parsons has either grown as an artist or found — in rock and roll story ballets — a form that he can navigate successfully. The story line of Remember Me was clear despite surprising turns. What seemed at first to be gimmicky props were used in unexpected ways that proved organic to the story. The emotions depicted by the choreography resonated.
After 29 years, David Parsons has grown as a choreographer. Is there nothing we can rely on?
Parsons Dance in collaboration with the East Village Opera Company was presented by Dance Cleveland and Opera Cleveland at the Ohio Theatre on Sat 6/11/11.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.
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