NextMove Dance presents Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company with the Ahn Trio

Last-minute adjustments

So, I was surprised when, before the program began, choreographer Chen explained changes to the order of the dances and the replacement of one piece of music, “Skylife,” for another: variations on Prince’s “Purple Rain.” She asked us to let the music guide us to wherever our imaginations went.

Her words pointed to a less cohesive experience, which is what we got. Chen also said that we should take special notice of the art, costumes, and lighting design, and she was correct; the design was well worth the attention.

Unfortunately, the rest did not live up to my hopes. The performance opened with “Space Oddity,” variations on the David Bowie song. The thematic movement of the piece appeared to be towers of dancers straining for the sky. Lighting designer Yi-Chung Chen placed them in pools of light on the dark stage. The Space Age costumes — shorts and jackets or leotards in red and blue by costumer Anna-Alisa Belous — gleamed futuristically.

But the notes for the piece described a street full of people from all parts of the world walking quickly in the cold, which was nowhere in sight. This seemed to set the pattern for most of the evening, in which many of the dances were overlong and earnest but not exceptionally well danced.

Some standout moments

However, “Positioning,” a duet to Ludovico Einaudi’s “Nuvole Bianche,” danced by Candace Jarvis and Jerard Palazo, was electric. It began with a sequence of black and white photographs depicting families in wartime. Then the dancers appeared, Palazo sitting on a red chair in black slacks and shirt with a tie and Jarvis standing behind him in a dark dress and pearls. The theme — “if there is conflict, there must be resolution” — came through as the dancers moved over and around the chair, fighting and coming back together.

I was particularly impressed when Jarvis, set down from a lift standing on one leg on the chair, kept her other leg on her partner’s shoulder and reached in an almost swimming motion, as if unable to escape a relationship that gave her balance. The piece worked because the dancing was excellent, the movement was interesting, the music helped to carry the story, and the background images by visual art director Jayanthi Moorthy all came together to make a unified whole.

Another standout moment, “Alone but Not Alone” featured a brief, colorful film of the dancers on the streets of New York while a single dancer, Patrick Piras, sat on a bench, watching. When the film ended, Piras danced in silence. His unaccompanied performance, heavily influenced by gymnastics, was sharply performed, celebrating the dancing body and, perhaps, yearning for the bustling crowd.

The Ahn Trio played for the dancers and also performed a number of solos. They use amplification, unusual for a chamber trio, but the sound mixing seemed inconsistent and at one point feedback screeched so loudly I covered my ears.

Design in the spotlight

If there was a star of this show, it was Moorthy. “Positioning” began with a backdrop of abstract birds in flight, followed by photos and ending with a silhouette of a father and two children facing a coiled-barbed-wire fence. The bright, energetic film for “Alone but Not Alone” made a stark contrast to the solitary dance in dark shorts and top on a dark stage.

In a beautiful pause in the dancing of an otherwise overlong “Concrete Stream,” the words for the poem “A Word for Freedom” by Latif Nazemi (translated by Bashir Sakhawarz) dropped falling rain, or typewriter keys, onto a light-blue backdrop to the original music of Kenji Bunch. Some lines of the poem scrambled “onstage” from the left and tumbled off again on the right — literal poetry in motion! Whether in abstract designs that evoked a forest or with photographs and film and dancing poems, the art design elevated the evening.