EmSpace Dance 5th Anniversary Home Season
Oct 17, 2005
By
ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com
EmSpace Dance. Photo by Andy Mogg.
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The finest few minutes in the concert given Sunday (Oct. 16) by EmSpace Dance at San Francisco's Dance Mission Theater by were not choreographed by the company's founding artistic director Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, but by guest June Watanabe, the veteran Bay Area dance talent who served as Stuart's mentor in Margaret JenkinsCHIME Program last year. What apparently Watanabe did not pass on to her colleague was how to make even the slightest gesture resonate; in the solo, Two Degrees of Freedom, which Watanabe made for Stuart, virtually nothing'and almost everything'happens.
Stuart's performance in the premiere lifted the spirits with its emphasis on details explored, reintroduced and tied together with invisible silk threads to create a small organic work of art. Formal elements, a slow revolve, arms crossed and head raised, made this more than a minimalist excursion, and the industrial strength sound score suggested much. However, in the three works signed by Stuart, those elements are either slapped together or elided, rather than explored. Thus, the sensation of patchwork in two works, based on pop songs by The Mountain Goats: Songs for You (2004) and a premiere, New Monster Avenue. The other premiere, How To See Red, delivered more formal satisfaction for this observer, but throughout, there was a sense of discontinuity and dissociation.
Dance, as we know it, barely figures in the two song-inspired numbers, performed by six company members: Blane Ashby, Ann Berman, Damara Ganley, Phil Halbert, Noel Plemmons and Julie Sheetz. One encounters drops to and freezes on the floor (a posture Stuart overuses to the point where it exceeds clichto become an artistic curse), pawing of partners and desultory lifts. Evidently, these songs hold great personal meaning for the choreographer and to members of the audience, but to one who has never heard them before, bewilderment dominates.
EmSpace Dance. Photo by Andy Mogg.
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Dancers confront each other, they embrace, jump into each other's arms, occasionally trade partners and stare at us vacantly. The lighting is crude, the costuming is unflattering and the undraped windows looking out on 24th Street do nothing for atmosphere. One longed to see a movement relationship charted in depth. I gather that, in some circles these days, superficial is synonymous with profound, but not here.
How To See Red looked promising in excerpts last summer, but it still needs refining. Set for seven barefoot dancers to a whirring, whispering score by Jonathan Norton, the work uses the space almost voluptuously. If there's tension here, it's between chaos and order, the latter represented by the lines, clusters and circles into which the dancers periodically flow. Much of the time, they are spread across the theater, pointed in all four directions, colliding with each other, or running in a figure 8 pattern. The piece shuns a consistent movement vocabulary and barely touches on the theme of consciousness, stated in the program. Yet, the dancers, of wildly disparate sizes and body types, go at it with commitment. The promise is still there.
The program was completed by the premiere of Jenny McAllister's inconsequential The Perils of Playing Hopscotch After Dark. Sean McMahon and Sarah Sass were the dancers tossing sticks of chalk and fabricating childhood street games. Stuart dances with Huckaby McAllister, so there's a bit of sentiment involved. Let's call these few minutes of physical comedy a trifle and be done with it.
