The Woman Who Mistook a Door for Her Body

Some dances catch your eye; others steal your heart. Joanna Haigood’s fanciful, lighthearted, and technically lean “Dance in a Doorway” does both. The short work, which made its New York premiere at the Fall for Dance Festival on Thursday, also tickles the imagination. A whimsical adventure through space, it offers a glimpse of freedom and wonder in the most domestic of settings.All weekend the festival, which wrapped up last night, spoiled dance audiences with an embarrassment of riches. And if the length of the line outside the City Center waiting for unclaimed tickets was any indication, the weekend was an overwhelming success. The organizers aim for variety, presenting on a single bill works from across the spectrum and the globe by companies big and small. But in general the performances have been big, signature pieces. For this reason, “Dance in a Doorway” levitated to the top of my list; it was a quiet triumph.Part movement study, part musical shtick, “Dance in a Doorway” was Ms. Haigood’s interpretation of Remy Charlip’s “Air Mail Dances,” a series of pen-and-ink doodles sent to different choreographers around the world on 8-by-11-inch sheets of paper. With her plinth-straight spine, shock of long dark curls, and simple black clothes, Ms. Haigood cut an impressive figure. Her dance involved a scenario in three discrete sections around a floating door suspended above a black stoop. Its appearance felt miraculous, and powerful stage lights shone in front of her, intensifying the mood of self-consciousness. With careful deliberation, she approached the steps cautiously, looking back at the audience. After taking the big first step, her extended leg froze in midair to the brassy punctuation mark of the big-band music of Nino Rota, the Italian composer who has the charming cinematic sound of Henry Mancini at his most “Pink Panther.”As she grabbed hold of the doorframe, Ms. Haigood swam out over the stage, balancing on the Dutch midrail like a trapeze. With weightless control, she paddled through the air with her feet and explored the inside of the frame. Her body assumed different shapes with the clean articulation of Mr. Charlip’s stick-figure drawings: A handstand curled into a comfortable nook, inches away from oblivion.Although Ms. Haigood’s San Francisco-based company, Zaccho Dance Theatre, is probably best-known for aerial feats on clock towers, military forts, and grain elevators, “Dance in a Doorway” concentrated her facility and wit, giving us a close-up view of her strengths as a natural mover. More impressively, she displayed a keen eye for metaphor and narrative development. The door (designed by Wayne Campbell) was the exact height of Ms. Haigood: Ultimately, it represented her body, and her flights of fancy, inviting us to escape from our perceived habits and limitations of domestic spaces.Other highlights on Thursday’s program included Keigwin + Company’s “Angels of Anxiety,” and “Sacred Vessel” by Urban Bush Women. In the former, set to Philip Glass’s unmistakable arpeggios, Larry Keigwin and his ensemble of adolescents broadcast their angst with red helium balloons. The 12 dancers used nervous and caffeinated shivers to mimic the spirited highs of rave life and the serotonin-deprived hangovers the morning after. But the work was really an ironic study of the mass conformity of counterculture. In a pack, they hustled without moving very far. One dancer extended his arms in flight and the others followed. Eventually, they collapsed in hemorrhages on the floor.***Although Fall for Dance’s mixed bills ignore any explicit unity, each evening has a distinct flavor. Friday night explored, in particular, the relationship between dance and music.Molissa Fenley & Dancers performed two excerpts from her early work “Hemispheres,” which she created in collaboration with the composer Anthony Davis. Each section altered the circumstances of composition – sometimes the music was written before the dance, sometimes the other way around. On stage, three dancers cut expansive swathes in the air with their arms. In silence, they moved through unpredictable combinations before a 10-piece band slowly materialized onstage with a dynamic jazz-fusion score.New York City Ballet performed in its old home theater with Balanchine’s radical abstract work “Variations pour une porte et un soupir.” Tom Gold was captivating as the formless sigh – flirtatious, resigned, and exasperated in turn. Arching backward on his knees, his torso vibrated like a string that had been plucked in Pierre Henry’s score. Maria Kowroski personified the door in Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s costume and scenery, and curtains of fabric were attached to her leotard. The creaking of doorjambs resembled the painful cracking of her joints as she opened up to a black phantasmagoric wind that eventually engulfed both of them.The evening finished with the dynamic escalation of Pascal Rioult’s “Bolero” and Alvin Ailey’s solo “Cry.” These were danced compellingly by Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell to the recorded spiritual and R &B music of Alice Coltrane, Laura Nyro, and (in a particularly raucous number) “Right On, Be Free” by the Voices of East Harlem. Intended to embody the emotions of “black women everywhere,” the choreography used a single bolt of white fabric as an altar runner, a wash towel, a shawl, a blindfold, and an elaborate headdress.***On Saturday, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal performed excerpts from Ohad Naharin’s “Minus One,” an evening-length work that draws from previous ballets spanning a 12-year period. Mr. Naharin is currently the artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, a troupe originally co-founded by Martha Graham. He has produced works for com panies as diverse as the Pittsburgh Ballet and the Nederlands Dance Theater. “Minus One” is a powerful synthesis of his many styles: the showboating cool of mambo, the ritualized intensity of Graham, and the abstract expressionism of Jiri Kylian.The work was already in progress as audience members took their seats. Wearing dapper formal wear, Anthony Bougiouris shot the cuff to “Mambo Fever,” tipsy in a persistent duet with his costume. The entire company eventually swaggered in, men and women dressed alike, for “Zachacha.” Seated in an authoritative half-circle, they formed a tribunal that in previous performances actually enclosed audience members who were invited or coerced on stage. The company, faceless under fedoras, imitated the minutes of an important meeting to the pulsing surf music of Dick Dale. In lightning-quick transitions, the dancers stood in objection, slouched down in diffidence, or barked laughter side to side. At intervals, they threw off their jackets, their white-collared shirts, and eventually their pants, too, leaving both men and women exposed in their intimate apparrel of regulation gray.In “Anaphaza,” six women mapped out abstractions with the body’s lineaments, followed by the potency of ritual imagery in “Black Milk.” Mr. Naharin made trenchant use of each idiom, always availing himself of the power of replication. As each section gained momentum, his movements seemed to detonate with fierce accuracy.Nai-Ni Chen created a nice contrast with her somber “Passage to the Silk River.” In her solo, accompanied live on a bamboo flute and an ancient zither, Ms. Chen wore the exaggerated sleeves of Chinese opera. As she shook her wrists, she evoked the image of falling water. Likewise, when she caught her sleeves, there was a sense of pent-up energy and conserved strength.Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company descended from the flies amid clouds of stage fog in their New York premiere of “Air-Condition.” Her company departed from the cirque nouveau high-wire antics. Instead, the bungee cords took on a psychological property, especially in the duets; the aerial machinery was a restriction as much as an expansive means of flight. In the final section, a bandonion could be heard in an electronic tango. Ana Armas and Leonardo Haedo arrestingly reinterpreted the seduction, resistance, and tug of war between the sexes as she scaled his leg, or partnered her man while upside down.Also on the program was Benjamin Millepied’s “Circular Motion,” set to a combined score for two pianos and performed by fellow NYCB dancers. The choreography, while risk-taking at times, failed to achieve the unity of the score or the program note, which promised a “moving between worlds – one of expression and passion, the other of technique and sheer physicality.” For me, it was little more than a rum parentheses around the other abstractions coming out of the company, a smallish exception that proved the rule. Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade” completed the evening.

The Woman Who Mistook a Door for Her Body

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