For several years, Robert Moses has been an artist in search of an adequate venue. Until this week, his unofficial address has been the auditorium at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. There was also one visit last year to Stanford University’s Memorial Auditorium, where Moses is on faculty. At JCCSF, the performances looked OK, but somehow lacking in punch. Thursday (Sept. 18), Robert Moses’ Kin moved over to the Novellus Theater at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, under YBCA sponsorship, and it took about three minutes to realize that Moses had come home. This was dancing that almost dares you to look away.
Despite my doubts about one of the program’s revivals, it was clear that this was the local stage this company was destined to inhabit. The dancing acquired an expansiveness, a freedom that one always suspected was there all the time. It helps, of course, that the 10-member dancing team ranks among the very strongest Moses has fielded since he formed his company 13 years ago. What was clear Thursday was that Robert Moses’ Kin, whether on a sponsorship or rental basis, should set up shop here in the future.
Appropriately, the YBCA commission, the often astonishing Toward September, is about limitations, about dance expanding to meet the space available to fill it. At the start, the nine dancers cluster upstage right in a pool of light. The movement is tight, cramped, restricted. Arms reach and retract. The dancers move out from this still point and the performers inhabit the arena with slashing, bruising encounters in which emotional states are expressed without inhibition. The combinations, as bodies meet in passing, grow in intensity. We get transitory unisons, fierce isolations. Partners’ limbs are scrutinized, there’s a fixation on hair, on holding on to anything in a tempest of feelings. Daisy chains erupt. Occasionally, the company devours the stage as a unit, but unanimity is only a passing phase. At the end, the dancers, like animals who have been left out to pasture, are returned to the oppressive square of illumination in which we first saw them. That nothing holds for long seems central in the piece.
There’s a message in Toward September, and it has to do with the perils and transitory pleasures of submitting to our most anti-social urges, but most observers will probably bask in the dancing. Moses remains an instinctive maker of movement, mingling academic formulations with urban forms, caring little for pedigree, if it feels right at the moment. Brendan Barthel and Amy Foley stood out in this absorbing essay. Less alluring was Moses’ own recorded score, which mingles natural sounds, like rolling coins, with tinkly music and oral musings.
Moses’ pounding, generic accompaniment for Approaching Thought (introduced last winter at JCCSF) is even less appealing. How the choreographer conjured a cogent essay from such technopop clichés remains a source of wonder. But this sextet (in which Caitlin Kolb, Todd Eckert, Norma Fong and Nicholas Korkos join Barthel and Foley) sizzles though a remarkable dance in which spontaneous acts of kindness and cruelty strike through to the heart.
Moses uses ballroom dances as emblematic of the social order. A couple will launch a waltz or a samba, only to fall apart a moment later out of sheer inertia. Dancers who bend are toppled, dancers who embrace another are rejected and the final tableau of Foley repeatedly jostled by Fong as she attempts to rise is so caustic that it leads you to ask Moses if life is really that horrible. Rarely has a choreographer capitalized so successfully on such inherently dispiriting material.
Sad to say, Jokes Like That Can Get You Killed (2007), the one program entry with an explicit message, fails to sustain interest. An essay on the perils of homophobia is always welcome in this ominous juncture in our political life, and Moses deluges us with theatrical trappings, which include a collage score and a production rife with projections that distract the attention. All this would not matter if the choreography communicated some quality in addition to rage. Yet aside from a few same-sex partnering gambits, the work could be about anything unpleasant, as the images of obvious heroes and villains flashed before our eyes. One feels the movement has been imposed on the material, rather than rising organically from it, and that does not seem Moses’ way. In addition to the dancers cited above, Moses’ Kin also included Natasha Johnson, Michael Velez, Yeni Lucero and Antoinette Lum.
Robert Moses’ Kin performs Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at Novellus Theater, YBCA, in San Francisco. Go to www.ybca.org or call 415.978.2787 for tickets.
