By Elsa Johnson & Victor Lucas
We’re just like everybody else. If it’s new, we’re there with bated breath and pupils dilated. So, a world premiere got us across town to the concert. But 2 dances we’d seen before made us glad we came.
GroundWorks DanceTheater’s concert at Breen Center began with Groundwork’s Artistic Associate Amy Miller’s For the Life of Me (2008), a dance we’d seen any number of times before, but at Breen on Friday we saw it as if for the first time.
Perhaps it was especially well danced or well lit. Fleet barrel rolls reminded us of Miller’s own excellent execution of athletic and acrobatic movements. Partnering with the men’s hands on the women’s hips emphasized how centered the dancing was. And the ending, with all 5 dancers walking upstage with arms around each other’s waists, seemed emblematic of what we understood to be Miller’s intended tone for FTLOM, high spirits among warm and playful companions.
We’re not totally sold on FTLOM. Dancing to songs with words can be distracting for the audience. In one section of FTLOM, for instance, the dancing took place to a spoken text, a recipe for coffeecake. We remember the recipe for coffee cake but the dancing not so much. Still, we have to hand it to the choreographer of FTLOM, , for trying something different nearly every time she choreographs. Miller continues to do well in New York City where she was recently named Associate Artistic Director of Gibney Dance.
Luna, the second dance on the program, seemed to have much more lively, interactive dancing than we remember from its premiere last winter on the Breen stage; it’s easiest to describe as a series of duets that punctuate ensemble dancing. Early in Luna the two men, Damien Highfield and Gary Lenington, did what must have been an exhausting duet that traveled around the stage with one dancer and then the other falling and rising back up to rejoin the traveling dance.
Luna’s men’s duet was followed by 2 female / male duets, Annika Sheaff with Highfield and Felise Bagley with Lenington, then a distinctly confrontational duet between Noelle Cotler and Sheaff. After 2 more female / male duets, Sheaff performed a solo center stage and ended Luna by walking up stage. Lots of dancing. Hard to describe but well worth watching and in our memory an improvement over the 2013 premiere. See Luna excerpts http://vimeo.com/85030828 HERE.
The evening’s world premiere was House Broken guest choreographed by Rosie Hererra. Lawn mower noises on tape and a real lawn mower on stage quickly declared that this dance was a spoof of life in the suburbs. The music for House Broken, a selection of pop singles released 1963 through 1971, would seem to suggest a focus on issues of those years but Hererra also directs our attention to the 1990’s phenomenon of Super Dad, equal partner in child care as well as bread-winner.
House Broken includes some very funny stuff. Lenington chipping (light, plastic) golf balls into the audience got some smiles. Highfield’s Super Dad on a treadmill — literally juggling babies, cell phones, and a sex life — was a sustained hoot.
Lenington was aptly cast to dance to Ballad of the Sad Young Men as sung by Roberta Flack, but Hererra left the number badly under-choreographed. Overall, House Broken was long on social commentary but short on dancing. It was not until the last musical number of House Broken to the music of spaghetti western composer Ennio Morricone that Hererra finally gave the GroundWorks dancers an all too brief opportunity to dance at their best.
Herrera has done some high-profile work on the national stage but she’s not the first guest choreographer to give GroundWorks less than they’re capable of. See Hererra and GroundWorks in rehearsal here.
GroundWorks DanceTheater performed at Breen Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, 2/28 and Saturday, 3/1/2014.
[Photo: Mark Horning]
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.