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The goat-footed baloonman whistles far and wee

"Over You "
Scott Wells and Dancers
Counterpulse
San Francisco, CA
June 26, 2006

by Paul Parish
copyright ©2006, Paul Parish

"Over you,' the clever title of Scott Wells's new concert of contact-improv-based dance, had its opening night at Counterpulse in San Francisco. Wells has become over the last fifteen years the Paul Taylor of Contact Improv-that is, the first to make dances in this idiom that are deeply musical, somehow "normal," imaginative, witty, often hilarious, sometimes fierce, but always respectful enough of the concerns of the general public so that the audience in Peoria would feel they had something at heart in common. In Wells's case, perhaps as in Taylor's, it's rooted in a profound need to reconcile deep oppositions, softened and lightened by a Zen attitude towards the impossibility of it. For Wells, it looks like to me (and I follow Wells as some movie-goers followed Kieslowski) these oppositions are between art and athleticism, the masculine and the feminine, the almost disembodied breath of music and the deeply muscular nature of movement, and the aggressive and the passive modes of being. His concert came hot on the heels of the West Coast Contact Improv Festival, in which he taught a class, "Wrestling with Affection," and probably half the audience had been his students.

Counterpulse is the hole-in-the-wall space south of Market (next door to St Vincent de Paul's) into which SF's premier experimental venue, 848 Community Space, moved when they lost their lease. It is a second-floor industrial space with its lobby in the hall downstairs and one big shoe-box-shaped arena above, with tiered (folding-chair) seating at the short end and a bank of black curtains along the left side (masking the bathrooms and changing space and a "wing" that dancers may emerge suddenly from). We were arrayed around the space in an L-shape: with about nine rows of viewers were ranked along the short wall. and two rows of spectators seated facing this black backdrop.

The evening broke into two halves, the first of which was semi-improv but I can't comment on it since I got drawn into performing in it (as has happened so often in "loft-dance" since the 60s that it should by now be considered rather traditional and even to-be-expected). My friends were not nearly interested enough in my performance, but they DID say they enjoyed the piece. I'll leave it at that, except to say that it was gamesome and started out with everyone moving blindfolded among props, moved through a stage of "Arab telephone," and ended with living statues. The real performers were first-rate dancers and most of them teachers at the Festival: their names are Stephanos Georgantis, Ralph Jaroschinski, Andrew Wass, Ilka Fanni Szilagyi, Vitali Kononov, and Rosemary Hannon.

A very short piece began the second half. Called "Good-bye, Good-bye, Good-bye," it was set to a four-minute song by the rock-group Nirvana and had a wonderful movement-quality that echoed the punk roots of the music. If you didn't know that Kurt Cobain, who led Nirvana and attained guru-status for many young people of his generation, committed suicide with consequences among the youth of our land like that when Werther killed himself at the end of Goethe's novel, the little tail-piece of the dance might not have made sense. But at the end of the song, when the lights came down on one performer, a girl lying on the floor as if dead, Wells returned to the stage roaming aimlessly, playing an electric guitar in a kind of plangent rezitativ, and walked to the end of his extension cord, which pulled itself out of the wall, whereupon he collapsed and played a few more licks unamplified as the lights came down. "The artist comes to the end of his rope" was perhaps more of a conceit than a realized effect, but, still, I felt something poignant there.

The second half, I'll say flat-out, was wonderful for the glorious, joyous, unbelievable ease and loft and personal elegance of the dancer Kegan Marling, a little small-boned twenty-something boy built like a jockey, pound-for-pound perhaps the strongest guy I've ever seen. In "Home," a piece based on the musical and emotional and cultural possibilities of teen-agers hanging out in a middle-class suburban den and changing radio stations, Marling moved like a kitten, or maybe a whippet, and sprang easily from a small crouch over the back of a sofa onto the cushions, or halfway across the room into the arms of a partner, where he melted upon arrival, almost like Lynn Seymour did as Juliet, into positions that composed ideally into the very picture of whatever the music suggested. There's moreover no music to which he didn't look right, from Funky Broadway to Rachmaninoff (wonderful Slavic melancholy!) to Jane's Addiction.

"Home" is wonderful in places - every place that features Marling, who does nothing wrong; but it is a very mixed bag, with some episodes (esp. a parody of ballet, to "Ombra mai fu," the sung version of Handel's famous "Largo") which are so uncertain in tone as to be borderline offensive. "Home" is a de-construction/reinvention of Wells's first substantial piece of choreography (née "No Place Like Home"). It dates from 1991, when he was just out of grad school, and was commissioned for the Bates Dance Festival, wherever that is. Wells was a military brat and grew up all over, and his bio doesn't say where he came to San Francisco from, but it does mention North Dakota, for which he should be daily thanking God, since that's probably where he learned the common touch.

The most effective section aside from Marling's belonged to Jesselito Bie, who wrapped himself in a crimson silk dressing gown and played the lounge lizard to the hilt, invading the space like a hunk on the prowl, and returning to his perch on a table way down-stage with silky leaps that turned into slides that reminded me how Gene Kelley liked to end a phrase. Bie is an in-your-face gay choreographer/performer (and head of his own dance company, Steamworks or Body by God or something like that; for some reason he was not credited at all in the program, but that was a minimal rag, anyway) who's been guest-performing with Wells for over a decade. Bie has lost perhaps the spring of youth but he has presence second to none; he's gained the élan of an artist who knows what he's doing onstage and never fails to make sense of his assignments.

Suzanne Lappas made excellent sense throughout, even in the balletic sections, where she struck histrionic arabesques that were simultaneously beautiful and funny. The other performers were Lindsay Gauthier and Hallie Aldrich.

Ms. Aldrich's did the costumes and Frieda Kipar the lights.

Volume 4, No. 26
July 10, 2006

copyright ©2006 Paul Parish
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