The Parsons Dance Company presents: Mixed Bill
April 19, 2004
By
ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com
The Parsons Dance Company. Photo by Lois Greenfield.
It is not, I think, an insult to call the Parsons Dance Company the ideal middle-class modern dance entertainment, a thesis with which audiences from all around the world would concur. Founded in 1987 by David Parsons, who for nine years was one of the more exciting performers in the Paul Taylor Dance Company, the nine-member troupe has success written all over it. The troupe's most recent Bay Area appearance Sunday (April 18) at Marin Center, San Rafael, was a demonstration of the virtues of formula. There is, after all, something to be said for fulfilling expectations. Some dance aficionados just don't want to sit in black box spaces watching performers tearing out their guts in the name of profundity, while dancing a little.
True, that in recent years, the company's formula has been relaxed a bit. Parsons has begun to mingle his own dances with commissions from promising young choreographers in the field. In the current program, Robert Battle's Takademe aroused considerable interest. Either Parsons or the local presenter declined to date the dances in the handout program, but if you had attended one of the company's performances a decade ago, you might have seen the three dances - Sleep Study, Caught and Nascimento - that comprised the second half of Sunday's program.
Parsonstalent lies in the carefully crafted vignette, constructed around the appropriate vocabulary or framed in distinctive technological trappings. There are no subtexts here, nothing to keep you up all night puzzling over interpretive possibilities, though you might wonder, "How did he do that?" Still, instant pleasure beats chronic misery every time.
Caught, which Parsons created for himself in the 1980s, has been performed by virtually everybody but your Aunt Sally and it is durable still. This is Parsonsstrobe-light essay; the performer seems to traverse space in vast leaps, caught in a unique moment of time and guided by Robert Fripp's score. It's gala stuff that never ceases to impress. Sumayah McRae did the honors here to great whooping from the audience. Sleep Study is a dream piece; the dreamer conjures a stage full of supine bodies rolling over each other, with intermittently amusing results. The insistently perky score by Flim and the BB's is a definite plus. Nascimento deploys music by the Brazilian composer Milton Nascimento for a big ensemble piece that borrows Taylor's scooping arms, but adds its own jazzy inflections, all bathed in Howell Binkley's luscious light. I believe this is what is called a crowd pleaser.
The Parsons Dance Company. Photo by Lois Greenfield.
Parsonsmore recent pieces are somewhat more diffuse; and he tends to run them together without a break. Fill the Woods With Light (to a jazz score by Phil Woods) starts with a spot focused on a dancer's face and points of illumination (each dancer toting two flashlights on a dark stage) and introduces silhouette gambits, but doesn't really heat up until the performers supplant the gimmicks. There's a casual virtuosity to the movement, which suggests improvisations and the eight dancers comprise a polished crew. Parsons borrows a bit from the slashing arm gestures he picked up from Taylor, but the choreography maintains its own character. The 2001 Kind of Blue (music courtesy Miles Davis) united four dancers in jeans (Abby Silva, Katarzyna Skarpetowska, David Reuille and Brian McGinnis) for a series of irreverently amorous exchanges.
Battle's Takademe made you sit up and take notice. To music by Sheila Chandra, Mia McSwain launches one of the cross-cultural numbers that fascinate this choreographer (as in Juba, the recent Ailey commission). The foot work is vigorous and complex, reflective of, but not subservient to Indian classical dance. The other Parsons commission, Skarpetowska's Stand Back, was less memorable in its reiterated unisons and a Nandor Weisz score that batters you into submission.
The Parsons Company will perform its Joyce Theater, N.Y. home season June 1-13. Visit www.parsonsdance.org for details.
