Ballet X: Female Choreographers

I am woman, watch me choreograph

JIM RUTTER

For its “All Female Choreographers Project,” Ballet X commissioned new works by three women. Unfortunately, as Ballet X’s co-director Christine Cox acknowledged during the post-performance talkback, good women choreographers (other than herself) aren’t that easy to find.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa certainly proved that female choreographers could possess ambition. Her three-part work Still @ Life (or Still Alive) attempts to envision what would happen if Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures came to life. Strangely enough, she treats this fascinating concept with a comic brushstroke that tried to capture the absurdity of her reaction to the Sistine Chapel, where the effrontery of a work so beautiful and overpowering began to strike her as sick, menacing and, ultimately, funny.

Still @ Life opened on an ensemble of dancers in a fixed pose at center stage, all clothed by Martha Chamberlain in black tops and skirts (even the men). Their bodies were intertwined, making it difficult to discern where one limb ended and another began. But one of them held the point of focus: that most “Biblical of fruits,” the apple, which for theologians represents a form of fixed knowledge. When the dancers began passing the apple back and forth between them, they came alive, extending their movements outward and through a small space, a web of motion spun with the intricacy of a cat’s cradle. At the end of the first section, these living, breathing performers returned to their sculpture-like poses that nevertheless lacked the vibrancy of a Michelangelo painting.

The apple as metaphor

Through the next two sections, Ochoa used the apple as an inhibitor of life, thought, creativity and movement. She also used color to show that as these dancers begin to play with the apple (and what it represents), they emerge into the fullness of life and joy. She infuses the entirety with comedic gestures: whistling, “ohs” and “ahs” that accompanied the movements like sound effects, and the vision of Tara Keating defiantly sticking her tongue out at another dancer.

Ochoa further inflated the humor through the dance itself. Though she intended many of the motions to resemble Michelangelo’s sculptures— hoisting the wonderful Anitra Nurnberger on another dancer’s shoulders with her arms outstretched to heaven—at other times the ensemble appeared like nimble corpses. In a series of dizzying movements, the five men awkwardly attempted to outdance one another, and each new section of Still @ Life began and ended with one dancer dragging a colleague by the arm across the floor of the stage.

Needed: Strong bodies

Many of the paired movements required great strength: A female would drape her calf across the shoulder-height outstretched arm of her male partner— and then as he grabbed her wrist, he would use only those two points of contact to lift her above his head into the air. I understand what Ochoa hopes to evoke—anyone who’s seen Michelangelo’s “Slave” sculptures in the Louvre understands that his figures really could break themselves free of their stones—but she attempts too many concepts in this short piece: strong sculptures awkwardly coming alive while simultaneously composing a still life and playing with that pesky apple. Talk about multi-tasking!

I’ll never tire of dance works set to the short works of Bach, but ultimately Ochoa’s piece needs a larger (or longer) tableau to encompass her three only partially unified themes. Otherwise, her piece appears too frivolous to express both her sense of wonder and awe and her feeling of being overwhelmed and sickened by the Sistine Chapel. However, the ending (as she intends), shows her dancers finally liberated from the sterile truths of the Biblical fruit and dead-on-the-vine apples, and they burst forth into a vibrant explosion of colors and movements, running and leaping across the stage before resuming their original sculpted position. The dancers at least, are still indeed alive.

Eroticism gone limp

If any of the evening’s pieces conveyed a “traditional woman’s perspective,” it’s Christine Cox’s Numb Roads, which focuses on couples and their often troubled, spiritually numbing relationships. In almost linear fashion, each of this work’s sections reflects an emotional stage, starting with the flirty dance hall moves of swing and waltz, where couples begin to move in tandem (while two singles, like wallflowers, dance alone), then becoming sexual and erotic. Flirting first, sex and relationships after—as I said, it’s traditional.

A pair of dancers (Emily Wagner and Meredith Rainey) draped their limbs and then whole bodies over each other. But Wagner hesitated too much when lining up her leap into Rainey’s arms, making the jump appear artificial, like a diver at the beginning of the board rather than a woman plunging openly into her lover’s embrace. In any case, even suggestiveness and sexuality ultimately becomes repetitive; and this movement, like many in Cox’s work, falls victim to the set lengths of the music (by Portishead, Sour Times and others), and the eroticism ebbs in the process. But who knows? Maybe Cox wanted to mirror this pitfall of relationships, too.

In the next section, the couple had their first fight, as Ja’Malik stood with his arms crossed, his standoffishness contrasting with Keating’s pained expression and wracked, torturous dancing across the stage. She would tense up in the middle of a side-step, her face in utter anguish, before leaping into his emotionless embrace, her dancing by itself elevating this common situation into art.

Imitation Bob Fosse

Unfortunately, the rest of the piece remains at the obvious level. Cox’s choreography attempts Bob Fosse’s style in her jazz-as-ballet movements, but she never infuses enough intensity into the work (not to mention the sexual, animal energy inherent in Fosse’s movements). Where Fosse’s dancers would strut like a lion stalking its prey, Cox’s ensemble merely stood at the back of the stage, relying on Drew Billiau’s slick lighting to make them look sexy.

The mostly-depressing music that Cox chose made the relationship appear fractured and disjointed. Her final movement tried to suggest coming together, but the lyrics whined about the singer’s pain. During the talkback, Cox called her work semi-autobiographical. I couldn’t help thinking: “Jesus, I hope not.”

An aggressive lover’s tango

The choice of music can make all the difference in a dance production (though some choreographers, like Merce Cunningham, might disagree). Cox should have followed the example of Helen Pickett, who hired her brother-in-law, Bernd Sippel, to compose an original piece for her work, Union.

An eerie, haunting series of piano keystrokes repeat through the first movement (before building to a stunning intensity later), mirroring the sense of emergence in the dancing of Keating and Francis Veyette, in which many slow individual movements progress into a very aggressive and controlling lover’s tango. The dancers initially move in their own space and patterns before trying to force each other to cooperate and “behave” by twisting a leg around the other’s knee, or with a forceful pull or push of the neck.

Unlike the mixed signals couples pass back and forth every weekend on dates, in Union body language became a far more precise form of communication, as Pickett sublimated aggression into seduction and made a stranglehold into a flirtatious gesture. By the end of the first section, Keating has taught Veyette to follow all her moves, and much like any “union” between men and women, he plays along before breaking away to reassert his own initial pattern of movement of leaps and fouettes.

When eyes dart over shoulders

Stylistically, Pickett’s work stayed more in the ballet tradition than Ochoa’s or Cox’s while still displaying forceful, fast, athletic and occasionally very graceful movements. Her ensembles danced far more explosively and flirtatiously— most noticeably in Wagner’s eyes darting in over-the-shoulder glances. But the last movement, danced by the full ensemble, created moments of distraction that detracted from Pickett’s otherwise visually exciting patterns: As four dancers moved in tandem, another broke off to execute a different movement. Rather than extend the theme of dissonance within harmony that she had established in the first two sections, Pickett distorted it.

Ultimately, the “union” of the title referred more to the synthesis of the music and the choreography than to any aspect of the dancing. When the pace increases, these dancers’ movements quicken, lashing outward in bursts and leaps.&nb