Nathantrice/RITUALS, March 2008

Dance Review: Nathantrice/RITUALS

92^nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival Saturday, March 1, 2008

The work of Nathantrice/RITUALS is a composite of modern dance, music, costumes, lighting, text, live singing, gesture, emotionality, and multi-media effects. It’s a completely theatrical experience. For their 2008 New York City Series they presented three pieces at the Ailey Citygroup Theater: Bottom of a Kiss Floating, an exciting new work-in-progress, and two completed works, Tactics and Conversations.

Relationships were Trice’s theme of the night. Each work explored abstract narratives of a couple’s experience falling in love, bickering, trying to manipulate each other, or all of the above. The least abstract representation of couples occurred in Conversations where three male and female couples engaged in dynamic partnering and gesturing to suggest various ongoing conversations. In case the movement driven interactions were confusing, mid-way through Conversations the dancer’s faces were lit to reveal their telling expressions (i.e. smiling or scowling). Dancers occasionally broke away from their partners and violently shook their hands as if to show temporary frustration. Incidentally, the conversations were resolved when they ran out of energy.

Tactics was subtler and played with chance interactions between distantly focused dancers who traveled on and off stage. Both Tactics and Conversations relied on familiar choreographic devices for development. For example, Trice choreographed in ABA form for Tactics and frequently revisited two movement motifs throughout the work: one was a slow and deliberate high-kneed walk, the other, a stationary squatting position where the dancers waved their arms like seaweed.

Trice’s movement style was easy to recognize in all three works. His ensemble of dancers frequently undulated their bodies, carved the space with their arms, and carefully varied their energies. By wearing socks, the dancers smoothly slid across the space and whipped out multiple turns, pivots, and spirals. And, perhaps to remind us that we’re supposed to be watching the drama of regular people, Trice choreographed certain pedestrian accents—like simple walks used to transition dancers on and off stage in Tactics—or the particularly real moments—like an actual kiss in Bottom of a Kiss Floating.

Bottom of a Kiss Floating featured the most collaboration and media to create memorable imagery. The contemporary score featured live melodic singing, noise-making, and lip-synching from the dancers along with pieces by Christopher Lancaster and Bjork, whose passionate and exotic melodies were manifested on stage by Jacquie Dumas’ full-bodied lip-synching.

The concert opened slowly and quietly on an eerie surreal-scape. The environment appeared dank and barren with metallic submarine noises and slowly dancing lights that mingled with Marilys Ernst’s blood cell-like video projections. In the darkness, dancers were scattered across the floor, and Trice hid center stage beneath a heap of white and billowy fabric. Trice slowly stirred beneath the fabric, and then he gradually emerged to face upstage while improvising hand-conscious gestures that rippled through his bare back. Atmospheric music pulsed as Trice sang along with his slow awakening. Trice’s solo that followed featured joint articulations, slowly churning arms, gentle shifts of weight, full-body undulations, and an attention to gnarled hand shapes. When the intensity of his solo movement subsided, the lights brightened to reveal a woman, Jacquie Dumas, dressed in white and lying among four mysterious bag-headed figures.

All the dancers wore layered skirts, which created afterimages as they swished and swirled, but the most interesting costume pieces were these puffy, translucent orb-shaped bags that four dancers wore over their heads. Their faceless bag-heads, along with their jerky, robotic, and inhuman movement logic, were designed to dehumanize. The four bag-headed dancers, like a dehumanized chorus, played intriguing dual roles: one as Trice and Dumas’ emotional and narrative echo, the other as stationary aspects of the surreal landscape.

At the core of this piece was an intimate duet between Trice and Dumas. They sensually cycled their limbs and folded and unfolded their torsos, which remained connected. Their duet ended with the couple dramatically kissing as the lights cut out.

A particularly evocative sequence building to the end of Bottom of a Kiss Floating exemplified Trice’s use of multi-media effects and particular choreographic devises like stillness and accumulation. Rain sounds swelled, and projections of rain layered with flickering lights surrounded silhouettes of the four droopy bag-headed dancers. Trice was careful to establish his uniquely costumed and technology-induced scene by keeping the dancers still in their heavy-headed positions for more than a few minutes. Rain sounds and images faded out, and spotlights beamed from above onto each dancer. One at a time, each dancer slowly unfurled their arms, gestured at individual timings, and then pivoted around to vary their facings. Then each dancer audibly breathed and hissed-out “ees,” “ums,” and “haas” sounds, which accentuated their movements. The spotlights brightened, and dancers increased the speed and intensity of their gestures. The accumulation climaxed when the dancers broke into the full stage space and synchronized their movements.

In the aftermath of the accumulation, the epic “All is Full of Love” by Bjork accompanied a galaxy of stars projected on the scrim. The stars dripped and morphed into drizzling rainwater as Trice and Dumas arrived upstage center to gesture together in sustained time. These images contrasted the bag-headed dancers’ fierce unison gesturing, which ultimately gained enough momentum to break up the couple, gather up Dumas in a lift, and leave Trice on his knees below them. In her high place, Dumas seemed to taunt Trice with a self-satisfied smile and arm tossing.

The bag-headed dancers aggressively manipulated Trice, and the couple was swept up in waves of gathering and group rippling. The group deposited Dumas offstage, while Trice was left in a rigid pose with his legs hovering off the ground and his spine arched backward. A faint ball of light orbited on the scrim above him, pacifying the moment slightly. Then the piece ended with Dumas returning to Trice to revisit an intimate position from their duet where they sat on the ground and folded into each other’s arms. As the lights faded I felt like something extraordinary just happened to these two.