Fearless at Battleworks

“Take it easy; don’t hurt yourself,” I wanted to say to the dancers of the Battleworks Dance Company, which alternated performances with Keigwin + Company at the Joyce Theater. Robert Battle’s choreography sets his dancers slamming to the ground or seemingly having it pulled out from under their feet, springing through the air in flips before making crash landings, all of which are executed fearlessly by his dancers.Mr. Battle’s duet “Unfold,” performed by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in its most recent New York seasons, demonstrated another characteristic of his work: the way that he likes to work against the music he’s chosen. He does this, too, in “Overture,” which was the best work on the Joyce program. The piece is danced to a collage of Bach pieces, ranging from piano variations to tutti concerti, in contrasting tempi which are sometimes ignored and sometimes heeded by the choreography. Sometimes Mr. Battle picks up on the processional flavor in the music, but does it his own way, emphasizing percussiveness as well as a certain streamlined starkness that recalls the austerity of early modern dance. At times, the dancers drag their limbs behind them, wielding an oppressed weight that is almost ball-and-chain. The dancers frequently walk or run backward, moving in both modern dance triplets and balletic glissades. Often they enter moving backward, so that there is an inevitable connotation of time rewound. Amid their frequent exits and entrances, sometimes upright, sometimes rolling or scuttling, we see individuals lost and found, hiding, seeking their way around the stage thicket.Battleworks’s Joyce program opened with the New York premiere of “Reel Time,” in which the score by John King rattles and thrums with something of an African flavor. As the piece transpires, we see what sometimes look like a rite of possession that catches in its coils different members of the six-member cast by turns. Following that there is “Ella,” a solo danced by Marlena Wolfe to cascades of Fitzgerald scat singing, which elicit from Mr. Battle flights of zany onomatopoeia. When Fitzgerald’s vocalizing slides into an “eeee,” Mr. Battle translates that visually into a puppet string pulling Ms. Wolfe upright. A file of dancers, including Mr. Battle himself, make a suddenly and incongruous crossover à la the Marx Brothers.The second half of the program begins with “In/Side,” a solo performed by Samuel Roberts. On the soundtrack, Nina Simone sets the time to which Mr. Roberts dances, but nothing could be farther from Simone’s purling, purring tones than the jabbing quality of the movement. Mr. Roberts starts off moving across the stage by means of a spasmodic sidle. His drubbing, dribbling, pummeling legs suddenly come to rest in moments of full-stop or minute muscular isolation. Mr. Battle puts something of everything in this solo, including having Mr. Roberts emit frightened-sounding yelps, and making a pantomime of defensive jive talk. It was a virtuoso workout, but felt crowded.“Juba,” which closed out the program, was created for Ailey company in 2003. Battleworks’s performance of it benefited from a live performance of John Mackey’s score — a gleaming exercise in what be called chamber symphonism — by five musicians clustered at the front of the stage. (The Joyce doesn’t have an orchestra pit.) Erika Pujic, Kanji Segawa, George Smallwood, and Mr. Roberts performed the work. All four dancers stand with their arms raised over their heads, then clasped together in temporary solidarity. The choreography’s blunt shapes and foreshortened lines are driven by pounding feet that sometimes assume the character of a jig or a hop. There’s an undercurrent of belligerence, as there is frequently in Mr. Battle’s work. Each dancer in turn separates from the pack and goes out on his own. As the lone woman, Ms. Pujic is the most apart of them. She hinges down to a kneel, while her three male companions are moving spasmodically. She’s swung around by them, wheeling out high through the air.Mr. Battle uses the folk-dance motif of dancers patting or pounding their own thighs, and here they also pound each other’s. Are they supplying plangent rhythmic platform, coded communication, ritualistic initiation? We’re not meant to know conclusively, but there’s no question that, kinetically speaking, something was going on, here and throughout the evening’s program.

Fearless at Battleworks

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