Headlong Dance Theater: The Big Reveal, Sat., April 4, ArtsBank

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Headlong Dance Theater: The Big Reveal, Sat., April 4, ArtsBank

POSTED: Thursday, April 16, 2009, 4:27 PM

Filed Under: Arts Dance

headlong.org

body moving.

The performances of Headlong Dance Theater are so deeply collaborative that it's generally impossible to pinpoint the style of the individual artistic directors, who have been working together for 15 years. In response to a challenge by choreographer Tere O'Connor, Headlong's three co-founders (David Brick, Amy Smith and Andrew Simonet) independently created three new pieces and then ' offering a rare glimpse into an artistic process still in motion ' revealed their work to one another in front of a packed audience at the Arts Bank.

In the discussion after the three dances, longtime company member Nichole Canuso described a creation process in which each choreographer, so used to operating as part of a whole, would "start a sentence, and then remember that there was no one else there to finish it." While the performances ranged from merely puzzling to truly transcendent, each offered unfinished sentences and half-formed ideas along with flashes of Headlong's signature brilliance ' in widely varying degrees.

The first piece, choreographed by Brick to a soundtrack of almost complete silence, was the most opaque of the three. For most of the time, the dancers moved with the utmost slowness, every move executed as though underwater. Much of the action ' if it can be called that ' focused on a jointed wooden doll that was manipulated into different positions throughout the dance: The dancers alternatively echoed the positions of the doll and interacted with it as if it were human. The most memorable visual moment occurred when injured company member Christina Zani came out completely naked, on crutches, and engaged in a slow, extended kiss with another dancer; time seemed to stop, and the image created onstage managed to rise above its initial shock value and become something genuinely moving. While the piece's occasional bursts of frantic energy were all the more pronounced given the prevailing molasses-like pace, the performance overall seemed closer to a series of poses for an aesthetically interesting photo shoot than a dance.

Next, Smith's piece, set to a series of static-filled songs, opened strong with six company members wearing muffs, dancing in controlled unison then working up into a frenzy. The performance showcased a series of interesting ideas that never quite coalesced into a cohesive piece: Dancers slow-danced with the air, ran into each other, lay on their sides and scuttled around the stage like crabs. Each section was well-executed and visually compelling, but the movements seemed disjointed and directionless, never quite moving toward a whole. The piece hit its stride when text was introduced, giving the performers overlapping monologues with out-of-context survival instructions like "double up on mittens" and "you can use your teeth to open the package." With the dancers empowered to speak, previously disparate pieces became thematically linked around the idea of survival in in hostile environments.

The last piece, choreographed by Simonet and featuring a disembodied voice offering frequently hilarious health-related advice ("you love cigarettes, but no matter what, do not smoke them;" "eat cookies;" "on the first day of your period, smoke marijuana"), was an appropriate finale both for its topical focus and its success. With more thematic clarity and crescendo than the first two pieces, this work felt more fully-formed and ready to stand on its own. It opened with a solo dancer jerking around frantically in the center of the stage, while the rest of the company ' like disaffected stagehands ' busied themselves milling about and setting up a table and chairs. The people in the background chatted amongst themselves, looked at papers, snacked and drank water, while the featured dancer grew increasingly frenzied until stopping, punching a time card and joining the rest of the group. The established line between active dancers and dancers at rest broke down toward the end, when a couple dancing slowly in the foreground suddenly broke away and ' in a rather riveting climax ' proceeded to destroy the set. Simonet's post-dance explanation of his desire to show "dance as a workplace," where "we do extraordinary things, then sit around and eat nuts and talk about it," gave additional depth to a piece that was already fully engaging.

In the end, it's not necessarily important which parts worked and which parts didn't, or whose piece soared and whose fell flat: The Big Reveal succeeded in doing what it set out to do, which was to pull back the curtain on an often mysterious artistic process. Rather than showing clearly which parts of Headlong's style come from each of its directors, it instead showed that Headlong as an entity offers a third and separate thing, that can't quite be understood as any sort of logical combination of its founders' choreographic styles. The final piece they come together to create for LiveArts '09 may use some parts of these dances ' or none at all.

During a Q&A period at the end, one audience member expressed frustration with the show, and especially with the first piece. "I'm used to your work being immediately accessible," he said. Tere O'Connor, seizing the opportunity to champion challenging contemporary dance, immediately shot back: "Is that something you'd expect from a painting?"

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