ODC/Dance in Brenda Way’s In the Memory of the Forest. Photo by David and Hi-Jin Hodge.
ODC/Dance’s artistic director Brenda Way is a choreographer who is never short of ideas about movement or life. Occasionally in the past, those powers of invention have struggled with each other for supremacy and what remained to us was a gorgeously executed muddle, which despite what you may read on the blogosphere in conjunction with other companies, is not enough for a satisfying dance experience. But the Brenda Way who works through her personal histories and emotional crises by recasting them through movement surrogates, that Brenda Way is often capable of fusing all the elements of dance theater into a single powerful entity.
That was the case with the tender Investigating Grace a few years ago, and Way has achieved comparable results with In the Memory of the Forest, one of the two company premieres featured in ODC’s Dancing Downtown season currently at the Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through Sunday (March 29). The inspiration for the work, seen March 20, were the taped memoirs of the choreographer’s mother-in-law, Iza Erlich, who succeeded, against crushing odds, in escaping from Poland in 1942, at height of World War II. Way recorded the woman’s reminiscences many years ago, and it is Erlich’s voice we hear in a muddy recording near the end of the piece (the transcription of the text is in the program and should be perused before the performance).
What the dance does is to approximate the state of mind of a person in flight between a world of madness and death and an uncertain future. And for this, Way has lined up an impressive team of multimedia collaborators. Video artists David and Hi-Jin Hodge have provided a film of a forest in which dancers emerge from the brush and sometimes retreat into it. The performers sometimes blend into their live selves, and if it looks a mite confusing, well, our memories sometimes don’t earn points for logic, either. Elaine Buckholtz designed the moody lighting, while Way herself designed the period costumes. The commissioned and recorded score by Jay Cloidt (with additional music by Paul Dresher) heaves a bit too much with klezmer allusions and “Jewish” intervals (shades of John Williams and Schindler’s List), but it seems to propel and complement the action without a hitch.
Rarely have the strands of memory been so aptly communicated as in this shape-shifting piece. The 12 dancers, hands linked and in summery whites, emerge from the void and advance towards us; they seem to retreat and surge again. They may be fugitives, or they may be members of a community, which will be shattered forever. Way has no need of stressing the Holocaust connections, but she does include one very brief tableau, of contorted bodies (referencing Picasso’s Guernica), and it is a shattering image, all the more so because of the choreographer’s restraint.
This community slowly disintegrates in a series of duets which grow increasingly unorthodox, as solidarity yields to desperation and bodies can seem like weapons. You sense the transition most acutely in a duet for the principal couple, Yayoi Kambara and Jeremy Smith. The pair smooth their way into a tender waltz, but the choreography gradually segues into something more ominous. And it is that disorienting process, that hallucinatory flow that lends In the Memory of the Forest its compelling theatricality.
This season’s revivals are worth noting. I somehow missed Way’s Origins of Flight when it was introduced in March, 2008, but it’s inconceivable that I will miss this delicious abstraction again. The music is drawn from violin sonatas from the 17th and 18th centuries by Biber, Corelli and Schmelzer. This is quirky, eccentric writing, full of mistunings, strange ornamentation and fanciful exploitations of the instrument’s potential. The literature inspired a range of whimsical movement strategies from the choreographer and they brace you for the entire evening. Annie Zivolich and Daniel Santos, none better, lead the pack in this first number of Program One.
Anne Zivolich and Corey Brady of ODC/Dance in KT Nelson’s Grassland. Photo by Steve Dibartolomeo.
In her new work, Grassland (on the same program), ODC co-artistic director KT Nelson invites us to spend a half-hour in a wild animal park (there are, of course, a lot worse places to spend 30 minutes, like your accountant’s office), and Nelson smooths the journey all the way. She has commissioned a striking décor from Matthew Antaky, dominated by a thicket of metallic reeds bathed in lime green hues, suggesting a savanna in Africa, or, more appropriately, a clearing in the Brazilian Matto Grosso. She has ordered, too, loose-fitting, fibrous costumes by Coeli Polansky. And she has inspired a compelling and eminently kinetic score by the Brazilian Marcelo Zavos, dispatched by piano and string quartet and performed live at the third performance (March 14). After an evening like this, you realize again how much canned music diminishes a dance concert.
Nelson sends her dancers flying across the stage like fauna circling a watering hole. They dip, they slide, they nuzzle each other, they twist each other’s limbs in combinations that suggest mating rituals. It’s all bathed in a kind of sweet innocence, and there isn’t a predator beast in sight. Most touching of all are the moments when nothing happens, when the dancers stand around, legs turned in, or shuffle modestly across the stage. The feeling here is positively Edenic. Zivolich, hair piled high, is a stand-out as usual, and her deft duet with Corey Brady is a cunning study in self-induced inertia.
But Grassland, for all its incidental delights, doesn’t, on first look, go anywhere. We watch the furry and feathered folk at play, we love their gamboling; then, we get back into our jeep and we drive on to the next attraction in the preserve. Perhaps, that is all that the choreographer intended. The revival, on the same program of last year’s tension-laden Hunting and Gathering with an all-male cast (Brady, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Santos) seriously alters the sexual dynamic of the original and finds Nelson at her focused best as she explores a series of anguished relationships.
ODC/Dance Downtown continues at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through Sunday, March 29, at 2 p.m.
Tickets: 415.978.2787; www.ybca.org
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