December 24–31, 1998

dance

Dancing: Postmodern Stepchild?

Footprint/Songline, Community Education Center, Dec. 19

David Forlano and Roko Kawai (artistic as well as romantic partners) beautifully complement each other in Forlano's new video/music/dance creation, Footprint/ Songline. With his thick, long torso, solid legs and full head, Forlano's physicality suggests a strength and weightiness that grounds the petite Kawai's propensity for lightness. Although the work did not include really developed, risky, extended periods of partnering, when the two did connect, they did so with great sensitivity, fluidly predicting each other's next move.

With its eclectic array of objects (silver bowls, surgical gloves, a little child's chair), awesome music and evocatively edited video, the piece worked well as a visual arts installation. Yet, choreographically, the performance was dissatisfying. I longed to walk among the performers so that I could see the action from all sides as they played with the objects. Witnessing the action from my seat only heightened the performance's overwhelming two-dimensionality. The movement in Footprint never went beyond minimalism and reductionism to unleash multifaceted motion.

Instead of movement variety, the choreography favored quirky, idiosyncratic mannerisms tellingly reminiscent of Kawai's own jointy, release technique moves. This limited movement palette begged for more complexity: Except for moments when Kawai crawled on the floor around the perimeter of the space, the dancing never spooled out onto the ground or engaged the air (what variety comes with jumping!), never made the torso, arms or head arc and bend in multiple dimensions. Nor did the dancers extend out into space with legs, arms, heads or hips in a manner that took them off their centers of gravity. In this long work (over an hour and a half without intermission) with a reduced movement vocabulary full of repetitious, robotic gestures and simplistic interactions with props, the presentation became boring.

Warning to this and other interdisciplinary works that call themselves "choreographic": Deal with movement forthrightly by probing the body's capacity for rich motion. Or else, as in Footprint, the over-reliance on otherwise wonderful visual art concepts will make dancing the weak link.

-Jonathan David Jackson