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“Virtually Richard 3”
Australia’s Expressions Dance Company
Atlas Performing Arts Center,
Washington, DC;
March 23, 2007

“De/Reconstructing Mata Hari”
Nejla Y. Yatkin.
Black Rock Center for the Arts,
Germantown, Maryland
March 24, 2007   
 
CityDance’s “Bold Steps”
Music Center at Strathmore,
North Bethesda, Maryland;
March 25, 2007

by George Jackson  
copyright ©2007, George Jackson  

Entering a theater, even an empty one, arouses feelings in me that others have on walking into a house of worship. Somehow the place seems sacrosanct. If I actually get to step onto the stage, and it is an old one, the shades of great performers who have held audiences rapt there begin to crowd into my thoughts. If the house is new, I wonder what will be happening at this site a hundred years from now.

Washington still has a few old theaters such as The National (renovated so often that it doesn’t look historic) and Ford’s (preserved even to the rake of its stage because President Lincoln was shot there). Last month I happened to be in three of the vicinity’s new theater spaces.

The Atlas, I had watched being rebuilt. It used to be a movie house in Near Northeast, on H Street, a shopping corridor pretty much demolished in the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. Together with adjacent storefronts, the Atlas complex now includes three dance studios that are semivisible (invitingly so) from the sidewalk, four theaters, a café plus support areas. The studios have been functioning since early 2006 and I’d already watched a Dana Tai Soon Burgess rehearsal in one of them. The formal opening of the entire Atlas was in November 2006, but my first performance there wasn’t until “Virtually Richard 3” by Australia’s Expressions Dance Company on the next-to-last Friday in March. Immediately likeable was the Atlas’s L shaped lobby that leads to at least two of the theaters. This conduit is a mix of old and new; brick shows, so does venerable wood whereas one wall is covered with a crepe plastic paneling of dark maroon tint. The performance was in the Lang Theater, a light filled black space, half amphitheatrical in shape, moderate in size and with a fairly spacious, unframed stage. Sight lines were excellent, seats comfortable. The performance was vigorous.

Having just seen Shakespeare’s play (“Richard the 3d” in Michael Kahn’s force-of-nature, power-of-art staging for Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company), I spent much time trying to relate the Australians’ dance theater piece to the original’s text. My mistake, because “Virtually” turned out to be a set of abstracted, refracted variations on themes from “Richard the 3d”. Its most concrete link to Shakespeare is the figure of Richard (wiry, wound-up Dan Crestani). This Richard has his roots in the historical tyrant but also shows the foliage of a modern populist dictator who agitates against foreign threats.

Crestani and a cast of 7 other dancer actors delivered with intensity Maggi Sietsma’s blend of dance and karate. When they spoke, which was judiciously seldom, they were comprehensible. At 90 minutes though, “Virtually” is too long because its choreographic vocabulary is limited. Extensions are defensive or aggressive; spiralings are used to attack or elude. Such narrow purposefulness becomes repetitious since Sietsma doesn’t really develop the movement themes. Yet the action (Jennifer Flowers functioned as dramaturg) is effectively fitted to sound (Abel Valls), set (Nahum Szumer), garb (Greg Clarke) and lights (after Mark Truebridge). In the post-performance discussion, the Australians sat on the stage floor and understanding them was difficult, which it hadn’t been in the performance when they were upright. The presenter, Washington Performing Arts Society, ought to consider using a microphone for future discussions. Interestingly, no one involved in the chat (moderated by DC’s Paul Gordon Emerson) even alluded to the production’s contemporary political stance. 

Black Rock, I’d been told more than 5 years ago, would be an arts nest in the midst of nature. My favorite little mountain to walk up, Sugarloaf, isn’t far away. However, the call of the wild seemed distant on this first visit. Black Rock turned out to be a community center in a bustling, upscale suburban shopping mall. It contains a theater that seats about 200, a black box performing space for about 100, an art gallery, studios, a conference room, etc. and there’s also an outdoor stage. The offering on March’s next-to-last Saturday night was “De/Reconstructing Mata Hari” by and with the imposing Nejla Y. Yatkin. Very favorably received at previous showings, the difference this time was a trimmed edition. The legendary dancer and accused spy was presented in a clinically dry way. Missing was not just Yatkin’s own connection to Mata Hari but crucial facets of the subject’s life and lore. I was reminded of Balanchine’s surgery on his “Apollo”, eliminating the birth scene and softening the “statuary stylization”. The result was a lesser “Apollo”. Similarly, Yatkin has diminished her own work by excess pruning; even the emotional climate has become something other. Please, Ms. Yatkin, do some restoration and apply the less-is-more aesthetic to a new piece instead.

Dance on Strathmore’s huge Concert Hall platform remains problematic because there is no proscenium to help focus the eye. Turning one of the larger studios into a black box theater hasn’t happened. However, dancing in front of the Studio 405 picture windows worked well for CityDance’s informal “Bold Steps” presentation on a late Sunday matinee in March. The panorama outside the studio enhanced without distracting. Among the strongest of the program’s 9 pieces were 3 not new works. From 1941, the pair of Sophie Maslow’s  “Dust Bowl Ballads” (in Lynn Frielinghaus reconstructions; to songs by Woody Guthrie) had more verve than when revived last fall in Baltimore - “I Ain’t Got No Home” this time had Ellen Rippon dancing and “Dusty Old Dust” had Kyra Jean Green. Florian Rouiller’s rendition of a troubled, thoughtful solo from “Galileo” (music: Marcello) made me want to see more of this Simon Dow ballet. Vladimir Angelov’s “SuitCase” has, in 5 year’s time, become a classic. Guest performer Rasta Thomas, who has danced the duo since its premiere, always shows novel facets in this modern legend about an angel made to fall by a mortal female. Alicia Canterna, new as the mortal, elegantly meshed her anger with Thomas’s physical bravura and emotional vulnerability. The way Angelov unfolds the story to agitated Vivaldi music keeps one in suspense while seeming utterly inevitable. Watching this rich program’s new works (by Susan Shields, Bruno Augusto, Paul Gordon Emerson, Kyra Jean Green and Eileen Beth Mitchell), it was Harumi Terayama’s “Contained Infinity” (music: Andrzej Przybytkowski) with its paradoxically intriguing movement and bold use of space and place that gave me premonitions about the future.        

Front page photo of Expressions Dance Company.
Photo of "Han" by Paul Gordon Emerson.

Volume 5, No. 13
April 2, 2007

copyright ©2007 by George Jackson
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