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"Anytown"

“Anytown: Stories of America”
Shapiro & Smith Dance
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
January 25, 2006
 
By Susan Reiter
copyright ©2006 by Susan Reiter
                            

The title of “Anytown,” an ambitious and intermittently moving full-evening work choreographed by Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith, suggests a generic, ”this is your life, America” approach. Over the course of 19 songs by Bruce Springsteen, Soozie Tyrell and Patti Scialfa, we are invited into a community — its family conflicts, moral quandaries, loves and losses — without any of the specificity of the Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel collaboration “Movin’ Out,” which so clearly charted a course from early 1960s upbeat innocence through the churning morass of Vietnam and the counterculture — complete with appropriate hairstyles (big afros!) and costumes (bell bottoms, loud print shirts).

What binds ”Anytown” together is an ongoing wistfulness and poignancy, a sense of life as tough and often compromised. These people, in their milieu of homespun reality,  may dream, but they seldom break free and find fulfillment, at least not for long. The songs, all well-chosen, create vivid moods, and the nine Springsteen tunes skillfully evoke working-class reality and haunting loss.  Tyrell’s seven fiddle-dominated selections blend a country-music sound with more contemporary edge, and while Scialfa’s three scores burn with an inner urgency.

The eleven dancers enter from the theater’s two aisles towards the end of Tyrell’s sprightly overture. Their casual, layered costumes — with most of the women in skirts to their knees or calf – establish three distinct groups — red, blue and green — who at the end of the amiable, somewhat rambling introductory section (to Springsteen’s “Human Touch”) assemble in three separate areas of the stage delineated by simple set pieces. Stage right, there is a comfy red sofa and a TV (with an old rabbit-ear antenna); stage left holds a kitchen table, two chairs and a hanging light, and upstage center there is a metal bed frame. As the dancers wind down their striding, swiveling, fluid moves, “Let Me Set the Scene” reads the first of the projections that appear and fade out on the backdrop, and they settle into their separate locales.

The green group seems the most clear-cut — Joanie Smith as a restlessly troubled mother, Carl Flink as a wary, reined-in dad, and two lively kids (Eddie Oroyan and Maggie Bergeron). The blue group consists of the ensemble’s three black dancers (Karine Plantadit, Germaul Barnes and Bernard Brown), but early on, we’re let in on a gently seductive encounter between Plantadit and Danial Shapiro, who belongs to the red group. As the always-remarkable Plantadit (one of the fantastic mainstays of “Movin’ Out” during its entire Broadway run) swivels her hips and climbs on and around the lanky, genial Shapiro, we know that something forbidden is taking place; a young blond girl peers through French doors behind them, and Barnes lounges on the bed, way off to the side.

Earlier, in what seemed like a childhood flashback, we’d seen Plantadit and the two girls of the “red family” playfully romping around on the bed, as tough to establish her history with this family, and to let us know these seemingly separate households allow for more overlap than might first be apparent. A few sections after the duet, Plantadit is pulled between Shapiro and Barnes, their clingy embraces accompanied by the reverberant, twangy guitar strains of Springsteen’s “The Big Muddy.” She makes her choice to remain with Barnes, walking towards the wings as Shapiro tenderly cups her foot in his hand, both sending her on her way and trying to retain a last moment of fleeting contact.

Jamie Ryan struts her stuff, and swings her hair, to a feisty Scialfa song with the refrain: “There’s nothing in the world like a city boy.” In her back-baring maroon halter top and sleek pants, she’s savvy about her allure and how she wants to use it, and Flink and Oroyan get to join in the fun. The number feels like a milder version of Tharp’s “Uptown Girl” in “Movin’ Out,” in which Brenda, liberated from her high school romance and her provincial surroundings, whoops it up with four admiring guys. Another powerful female solo is given to Laura Selle, who slashes through space and flings herself wildly with pent-up frustration at the tedium of life spent hanging out in front of the TV wit nowhere to go.

The first half of “Anytown” concludes with its strongest and most focused section — a duet for Smith and Flink set to Springsteen’s plaintive “Empty Sky.” Since seeing the performance, I’ve read that this is his post-9/11 anthem, but without that specific knowledge, the duet evoked a more general, and fervent sense of sadness and loss. The integral third partner in their dance is a rocking chair in which Smith curls up, or on which she balances inventively, so that all the movement winds seamlessly on and around it. As Flink fluidly cradles and carries her, swooping her on and off the curves of the chair, we can sense their shared loss and resignation, as well as  the inner strength that gets them through it.

In the second half of “Anytown,” a communal pull dominates, as Shapiro and Smith shape the ensemble into a pulsating, turbulent force. It opens with an artfully suggested scene of church worship, with everyone wearing pale hats and airy costumes. But within the fluent unison, here and there an individual weaves through along their own path, perhaps eager to make an escape.
  
Much of the movement in “Anytown” had a naturalistic, casual look — not that there was anything casual about the way the work was assembled or presented. The dancing had a way of drawing you in through its earnest fluency rather than any showy insistence. Shapiro and Smith, still potent performers, now many years removed from their time as rubbery dancers with Murray Louis, have assembled a cast of first-rate performers – dancers who effortlessly imbue every move with vivid individuality.

The projections that came and went throughout came across as more distracting than illuminating. They would appear and fade, often too quickly to fully register, and at times they distracted form the intensity of the human drama playing in front of them. Were they lines form the songs? It didn’t seem so.

All photos by Paul Vertucio, and courtesy of Shapiro and Smith.

Volume 4, No. 4
January 30, 2006

copyright ©2006 Susan Reiter
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last updated on January 30, 2006