Two Decades of Amazement
AXIS Dance Company: Joe Goode’s the beauty that was mine, through the middle, without stopping; Sonya Delwaide’s A Room with No View; Kate Weare’s Foregone; Alex Ketley’s Vessel
Sonsheree Giles and Rodney Bell of AXIS Dance Company in Joe Goode’s the beauty that was mine, through the middle, without stopping. Photo by Brian Rdzak-Martin.
Over the weekend, AXIS Dance Company celebrated its 20th anniversary by showing us how the troupe, based in Oakland, reached that landmark. Two decades ago, a dance organization that enlisted performers both with and without disabilities seemed a good idea for reasons like empowerment, which are noble and even inspirational, but have nothing to do with art. Since then, a host of prominent local and internationally celebrated choreographers have made dances for AXIS, and in every case that I have witnessed, the company has accepted the challenge and flown with it.
I won’t say that the program presented Friday (Nov. 14) at Oakland’s Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts was one of AXIS’ greater nights—the choreography was too variable for that—but, in all cases the troupe proved alert and sensitive to the dancemakers’ demands, amazingly flexible and uncommonly committed to the task at hand. The best of the AXIS spirit was here, and it was thrilling to experience.
Few repertory dance companies can boast material all of which was made expressly for its needs and virtues. However, the best of this AXIS concert was found in works previously introduced. Kate Weare’s 2007 Foregone proved uncommonly significant. For most of the piece, this canny choreographer goes out of her way to show us how little legs really matter in a dance. Two of the wheelchair-bound participants, Rodney Bell and Janet Das, assign themselves a battle royal in which emotional inflections are delivered via sudden changes of direction and the ferocity with which they are launched. At one point, the pair rear up in their motorized vehicles like a palomino ritual. There’s something feral, too, about the way in which a woman leaps on artistic director Judith Smith’s chair and obsessively plaits her hair. The music, three pop-folk songs by The Seldom Scene, Dolly Parton and Gillian Welch, finds and sustains the right tone.
Vessel, Alex Ketley’s febrile duet for Bell and Sonsherée Giles, was the discovery of last August’s Summerfest, and on Friday, the choreographer implemented that sizzler with a quasi-improvised section that introduced Giles and Sheppard to the mix. Generally, these affairs don’t work for me (the taint of self-pity is always lurking in the vicinity). Somehow, Ketley transcends the merely autobiographical, as word and action seem to prosper and blossom in a genuine synthesis. Bodies thrust and retreat, enablers become partners. I still prefer Vessel in its original version (will choreographers ever wake up to the fact that they have a hit on their hands and leave the darn thing alone?), but the added material still packs considerable power.
The Joe Goode work that opened this program was first seen in a rag-tag program in last May’s San Francisco International Arts Festival, where it stood out from the nonsense around it. Made for five dancers, this is also a talky number that comes close to looking like a therapy session. But choreographer-performance artist Goode and his performers (Bell, Das, Giles, Smith and Lisa Bufano) have hit upon a theme that involves self-image (much deployment of picture frames and feigned mirror image gambits) and how it shapes us that continues to resound long after the curtain falls.
By contrast, Sonya Delwaide’s new A Room with No View abounds in sharp, decisive action and telling gesture, propelled by recordings of rhythmic complexity by UAKTI and others. Still, despite the performances by Bell, Das, Giles and Sheppard, something was missing here, perhaps a feeling of trajectory amid all the muscle-flexing and confrontational stances. A mixed evening, then, for AXIS. One looks ahead to better nights.
