Towels, Balloons, and Buffoonery: Keigwin + Company at the Joyce

Larry Keigwin’s interests in cabaret and concert dance reach a point of perfect fusion in his new “Elements,” now at the Joyce Theater. Humor runs all the way through, but Mr. Keigwin saves most of the extended dance invention for the second half of the program.Dancers wrapped only in towels don’t seem particularly sleek or graceful, and in the first segment, “Water,” Mr. Keigwin’s troupe concentrates instead on pool-party clowning. When Mr. Keigwin pulls off Andrew Cook’s towel and Mr. Cook reflexively wraps his arms around his middle, we’re about as far into baggy-pants buffoonery and arch titillation as we need to go. Despite Mr. Keigwin’s inventiveness, his gags often seem without subtext or irony; sometimes his humor is disconcertingly similar to Mark Morris’s silly playground.In “Spa,” Alexander Gish spits out water in a solipsistically uncouth solo — more boor than dolphin. The dancers pay overt tribute to water via nautilus shell spirals and lapping sea ripples undulating the body, or simply the dancer’s flicking hands. Controlled madness ensues in the concluding “Splash,” in which we all but see and hear the slamming doors of a locker and pool cabana. Towels are waved overhead in the manner of early modern dance mobile canopies. Mr. Gish’s propensity for expectoration now spreads to the rest of the ensemble as they face upstage and spout.Fire is the element next considered by Mr. Keigwin. Here, Liz Prince’s costumes supply four dancers with long chiffon sleeves that turn them into flamethrowers. The floor is a buoyant springboard for airborne sallies, but at other times it is the floor that has the last word, pulling the dancers down to the ground in all-fall-down slapstick.“Earth” features two good solos, one for Mr. Keigwin himself and one for Liz Riga. In “Gecko,” Mr. Keigwin performs to Debussy’s flute solo “Syrinx,” and his movements echo the solo created to this music by Georgi Alexidze, performed alternately by Natalia Makarova and Alla Osipenko at the Leningrad Philharmonic in the 1960s. (This would seemingly be one of the most remote locations and cultures to a Western postmodern choreographer, but not so in the post-perestroika electronic era: Ms. Osipenko’s performance is accessible via the “Glory of the Kirov” DVD.) Mr. Keigwin’s solo also incorporates references to Nijinsky’s “Faune,” which was also choreographed to Debussy, as well as Petruchka, another great role created by Nijinsky. Mr. Keigwin’s imagination caroms from reference to reference; he runs through and truncates the borrowed imagery in a way that makes it his own.Ms. Riga’s “Dragon” solo is entirely different. On the soundtrack, Etta James sings “Stormy Weather,” while it’s Ms. Riga’s emotional barometer that seems buffeted. She moves with tense preoccupation, walking in a distraught circle.“Air” begins with the entire nine-dancer troupe onstage, dressed as flight attendants. To the accompaniment of the Fifth Dimension singing “Up, Up and Away,” they perform a campy spoof that is funny as well as endearing. They wheel around luggage; their arms extend like glider wings; their fingers point in the air, indicating exit doors. In “Float,” Ying-Ying Shiau does just that, her pink chiffon trailing her pattering runs that echo Debussy’s harp “Arabesque.” In “Breeze,” Messrs. Keigwin and Gish inflate balloons and then pop them. In “Wind,” everything comes together to the sound of Philip Glass’s astral minimalism. The dancers make running leaps into waiting arms of outfielding partners, somewhat in the manner of Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade.Everyone’s wearing more or less the light suits they showed off in “Fly,” and there’s a spaciness to their high-powered kinetic exertions, before Mr. Keigwin returns to the balloons motif: They rain down as the curtain falls.Multiple partners and nonstop partnering ensembles appear throughout the evening. In “Water,” Mr. Cook, Mr. Gish, and Mr. Keigwin are revolving-door partners to Ms. Shiau, while in “Earth,” Mr. Cook and Mr. Keigwin take a tag-team approach to tossing Ashley Browne and Nicole Wolcott around in the manner of circus acrobats.Mr. Keigwin’s sophmoric bent is his weakest creative link, although his humor is almost always amusing nevertheless. What’s more impressive about “Elements” is the way it functions as a virtuoso exercise in shifts of tone, sometimes orchestrated simultaneously as a form of sleight-of-hand, and aided by Mr. Keigwin’s catholic taste in musical accompaniment.Until August 1 (175 Eighth Ave. at 18th Street, 212-691-9740).

Towels, Balloons, and Buffoonery: Keigwin + Company at the Joyce

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