International Choreographers Commissioning Program
International Choreographers Commissioning Program
American Dance Festival
Duke University, Durham, NC
July 18, 2006
Reviewed by Lea Marshall
Potted plants, hula-hoops, shrieks, whispers, and clouds of flour: All crossed the stage during ADF’s International Choreographers Commissioning Program. Experimentation and theatricality characterized the eclectic works shown by Luis Garay of Argentina, Tayuka Muramatsu of Japan, and Tatiana Baganova of Russia.
Luis Garay’s 12, created for the International Choreographers Commissioning Program
Photo by Tian, Qinzheng/ADF, courtesy American Dance Festival
In Garay’s 12, dancer Yi-Chun Chen, in red dress and high heels and clutching a cordless microphone, led us on a bizarre emotional journey with glimpses inside the choreographic process. Strolling among a landscape of seated dancers with potted plants, Chen murmured lovingly into the mic in Chinese. At intervals, as dancing washed through the bodies onstage in twos and threes, translations of Chen’s words were projected on the scrim; she mused on an absent lover, or described the structure of the piece and screamed directions at the dancers, sometimes physically manipulating their movement. Were they projections of her psyche? Mnemonic tools? Subjects of her tyrannical rule? Their eventual rebellion might have brought Chen peace. But control was what she wanted; miming a gunshot to the head, she fell back into the dirt that her subjects had piled around her feet.
Takuya Muramatsu’s Mark of the Sun, created for the International Choreographers Commissioning Program
Photo by Tian, Qinzheng/ADF, courtesy American Dance Festival
Takuya Muramatsu’s butoh-style Mark of the Sun evoked a contemplative state; movement, sound, and images flowed by as if in a dream or underwater. White-faced women in wild-patterned nightcaps fluttered about, emitting small shrieks and brandishing hula-hoops. A thin man (Muramatsu) crouched behind a tattered black umbrella like a broken-winged bird. Women in white sat in a horseshoe as the thin man struggled with a fishing net, his eyes gleaming red in a nightmarish face. The dancers seemed to serve either as manifestations of or as settings for the man’s inner journey.
Tatiana Baganova’s Post Engagement, created for the International Choreographers Commissioning Program
Photo by Tian, Qinzheng/ADF, courtesy American Dance Festival
Tatiana Baganova moves dancers in such seamless, satisfying combinations that you feel that her dances could go on forever and never grow tiresome. In Post Engagement, men might deposit their partners gently on the floor and then burst into jumps in attitude. White balloons blossomed from the mouths of a line of women, who then bourr�ed while clacking spoons in coffee cups. The image felt ominous until one dancer sipped from the cup and said, “Mmm!” A red wall provided a vertical dancing surface; the dancers used it as a partner, a barrier, a support.
Shifting series of groups, trios, and duets made images that expanded and contracted�strange, comic, or mysteriously beautiful. Processions moved along paper pathways, one dancer on another’s shoulders, scattering flour onto a third who rolled and spun before them. Tatiana, keep telling us how the beautiful and the absurd live side by side in your dancers’ bodies, on the side-lit wall, in the clouded air, on the flour-strewn stage. See www.americandancefestival.org.
