DANCE REVIEW
Toe to Spine, a Study in Precision
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: October 14, 201
The amalgam of formality and informality, of technique and rawness (sometimes wildness) in the work of the choreographer Liz Gerring is something rare. Her six dancers, all attractive, look purpose-bred. The intensity with which they all use their backs is particularly impressive, as is the accentuation they bring to very simple steps. Yet they look neither homogenized nor groomed. Though the way any one of them raises a limb often looks wholly unschooled, you later realize that each moves the very same way the next time, and that so do the others. What looked naïve proves to be precise.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Jessica Weiss and Brandin Steffensen, center, performing “She Dreams in Code.”
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Ms. Gerring’s work “She Dreams in Code,” currently at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, has several steps that stay powerfully in the memory, chiefly because of the way these dancers move their torsos. Above all, there’s a tiny advancing jump from foot to foot that becomes extraordinary because, with each transfer of weight, the performer bends right over as if to touch the floor. Then there’s a turning jump from which dancers land with one foot tucked up to the knee: what’s remarkable about it is the way the torso curves right over, so that an intricate lower-body maneuver turns into a full-bodied change of shape.
Seldom in these dances is the spine still. Often it plunges, rears, arches. Surely there must be extensive training behind all this? These dancers, however, never look like polished technicians. Now they look like sports players, now like wild animals.
I saw an earlier, incomplete version of “She Dreams in Code” in San Francisco this spring. Since then it has become a real theater piece, with a beautifully poetic stream of video imagery by Willy Le Maitre as décor; individualized dimly blue costumes by Jillian Lewis; and a score by Michael J. Schumacher that, like Mr. Le Maitre’s video projections, covers a wide range of subjects and moods. Carolyn Wong’s lighting is marvelous: There is one especially fine use of strong side-lighting, whereby dancers are pronged by two separate beams from contrasting angles on the audience’s left.
The partly feral intensity of Ms. Gerring’s last work, “Lichtung/Clearing,” from 2010 (which will be performed as part of this year’s Fall for Dance Festival), reminded me of Merce Cunningham’s “RainForest.” The dance theater of “She Dreams in Code” has Cunningham qualities too, but owes more overt debts to the first generation of postmodern choreographers. Trisha Brown must be the influence on how nonvirtuoso movements (like jogging) or short phrases are submitted to analytical procedures — retrograded or iterated — so that simple movement is held up to scrutiny.
Remarkably, this analytical aspect becomes part of the work’s overall stylistic coherence, which ranges from a wide supply of strong-lined arabesques for the women to slow-rolling backward somersaults for members of either sex. It’s a group dance that contains multiple solos (often different ones simultaneously), duets and other ensembles. Male-male partnering and female-male partnering at times occur equally side by side, but the general emphasis is heterosexual: Only women are lifted, and in one emphatic sequence the three women are supported identically by the three men at the same time. In one haunting image a woman clings to a man’s chest, facing up into it, as he slowly crawls forward across the stage.
It’s a mysterious piece — you wonder, following the title, if Ms. Gerring not only dreams but also choreographs in code — but it stays compelling. The six riveting dancers — Ben Asriel, Tony Neidenbach, Adele Nickel, Brandin Steffensen, Jessica Weiss and Claire Westby — bring it a fullness, naturalness and absorption that help it to create a stage world that keeps deepening as you watch, and then again further in recollection.
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