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“O Death”
Eliza Miller Dance Company
Danspace Project
St. Mark’s Church
New York, NY
March 30, 2007

by Susan Reiter
copyright © 2007 by Susan Reiter

There was a stately dignity as well as an intriguing oddness about the modern-day requiem that Eliza Miller shaped to a powerful, often surprising score by Oscar Bettison. Blending somber ritual and fluent, grounded movement, “O Death” avoids the specific but alludes to the elemental and primal cultural touchstones marking death and loss.

Her three strong, intense female performers move with a fullness and gravitas that seems to indirectly summon up a connection to Martha Graham, and the lone male, Dylan Crossman, was a lean, deft figure costumed to resemble a Greek messenger. The women wore pieced-together leotards composed of shiny dark-hued fabric layered and criss-crossed, with some flesh-colored material inserted. For the early portion of the 70-minute piece, they wore a thin filmy over-layer, which they eventually shed. (Yukie Okuyama provided the costumes design and construction). The performers’ eyelids were shadowed in deep red.

The composer’s program note explains that he was moved to compose his stylized requiem by an Appalachian folk song in which the singer pleads with Death to spare him. Bettison’s music, performed with great flair on this occasion by the seven-member enterprising Dutch contemporary music group Ensemble Klang, reverberates with both bluesy intensity and eerie ferocity. Its terrific and unusual blend of instruments — trombones, saxophones, piano, electric guitar, banjo, jew’s harp and multiple percussion instruments including anvils and flowerpots — contributes a major portion of the evening’s persuasively unsettling power.

As the work made its calm, deliberate way through seven sections, it emphasized ceremonial touches, particularly through the use of reliquary-like boxes that were carried on with ritual emphasis, their contents arranged and displayed with care, a votive candle illuminating each. Later on, the women meticulously demarcated the front and side perimeter of the performance space with a line of these objects — animal figurines, bits of bark and other fauna, shells, and also handed some of them out to audience members; the memento I received was one of those prickly dried burrs that falls off certain trees.

“O Death” remains in the mind more for its mood than its specific movement sequences, although a recurring motif of scuttling backward on the hands and feet, as though recoiling in fear, and a slow giving-in to the pull of gravity – whether is sorrow, or perhaps relief – made a visceral impact.

Following the somber group entrance and some brief confrontational partnering, Christina Amendolia ate up space with springy, light phrases seemingly propelled by the insistent guitar pulse and eerie trombone lines of the score. Her presence had an sharp edginess that contrasted with the calmer, more expansive movement of Katie Minor Kheel, an earthy goddess whose costume featured an alluring swirl of material slicing across her thigh. She seemed like the all-knowing center of whatever ritual was being enacted, the one who presided once the reliquaries had been introduced. (Megan Flynn completed the quartet.)

Midway through, the dancers donned dark veils that added to the eerie spectral quality of the action. Too corporeal to be wilis, they nonetheless seemed in touch with darker, deeper forces. Later, when they had removed those, Crossman handed out small mask-like filmy items that featured a red gash, and for the final section additional costume pieces — pale gleaming pants or skirts with vent-like patterning — were added. While we were not privy to just hat this severe secret society was, and the nature of their mourning, Miller’s gift for focused clarity made a persuasive case for the purpose of their intentions. “O Death” made inspired use of — and was certainly enhanced by — the St. Mark’s sanctuary, a space where votive candles and somber ritual seem to belong.

Volume 5, No. 13
April 2, 2007

copyright ©2007 by Susan Reiter
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