Gay Dance Now

Gay City News
By BRIAN McCORMICK
Published:  06/05/2008

Memory and the other ephemeral residue of lived experience are at the heart of the work of choreographer Neil Greenberg. An esteemed teacher and dance-maker with a Cunningham legacy infused with his own specific artistic vision, Greenberg’s two-week season at Dance Theater Workshop features the premiere of “Really Queer Dance with Harps.” The dance “refrains from censoring repressed movement material” and also “revels in choreographic choices both queer and Queer.”

The new work expands on the choreographer’s process, in which material for the dance is derived from videotaped improvisations. Whereas in the past, this centered on the maker himself, this time Greenberg collected material from videos of each of the dancers improvising. The piece also builds on the ideas and structures explored in the 2006 piece “Quartet with Three Gay Men,” which complements “Really Queer Dance” for the DTW performances.

“Is there some movement convention regarding the way gender and sex exist in choreography?” asked Greenberg. “It’s something that I have wanted to do for years, but haven’t until now. I didn’t know what extent I’d hold to it, but held to it for purposes of seeing those differences.”

Indeed, the gesture vocabulary of the work is replete with images of “the fairy” as represented by limp wrists, hands-on-hips, vogue-like sequences, and thrown-back shoulders. Watching these actions performed in turn by women and by men stirs up notions of representation, despite the work clearly being non-representational. It’s a fascinating experience for the viewer, to ask the same questions the choreographer is, as the various cogs wheel into place over the course of this intelligent dance.

The cast of four men and four women dressed in styled rehearsal clothes, move about the wingless stage, where the incomparable composer Zeena Parkins and two other harpists will be providing live accompaniment - a score filled with percussive rhythms, silence, sentiment, spirituality, and suspense.

In alternating and overlapping groups, dancers Ellen Barnaby, Nicholas Duran, Johnni Durango, Christine Elmo, Paige Martin, Luke Miller, Antonio Ramos, and Colin Stillwell lope, pose, prance, and hop about the space in formal patterns. They flap their arms with drooping elbows, plopping across the stage with heavy feet looking slightly dopey, but with a countenance devoid of expression, or any emotional connection with the movement.

The loosest interpretations of ballet portabras appear throughout, as do galloping arabesque hops with traveling half-turns. Dancers bounce, sliding side to side with hunched up shoulders like a boxer in action; next they’re flitting around, twisting their stiff torsos like Egyptian glyphs.

There’s always a lot going on, and different things will emerge to each viewer. “It’s much more diffuse, peripheral, and ambient in terms of the audience,” said Greenberg. “The eye is less directed than in what I have done before.” Regardless of the individual point of view, the structure of the piece makes connections that will be hard to miss.

Ramos introduces a motif, thrusting back one shoulder dramatically as he steps forward into a deep plié, throwing a great deal of shade and attitude with the best downtown face - that is, a body that tells you everything and a look that says nothing. Later, Martin dances the same phrase, and the meaning suddenly has much less cultural specificity.

Within another quartet, Martin rolls her wrists as she lifts her head up, and then spins, kicking a leg around. She galumphs with limp wrists, beats her loose-ankle foot against the calf of her standing leg in a grotesque equivocation of ballet - and then stamps off with fortune-teller flourishes of her fingers.

Stillwell punches, thrusting fists in front of him in beats, stamping toward the outer edge; his energy says anger, essentially male. Not so, when repeated by the women. Duran later adapts this idea, stamping and jamming his fists downward repeatedly, gradually phasing violence out of the movement and into the iconic gesticulations of a music conductor - a notoriously male profession. Stilwell joins him at the end of his phrase for a brief duet, moving together slowly through poses reminiscent of Isadora Duncan - that is to say quintessentially feminine.

It’s these moments of coming together and other surprises of unison and connection that make this piece stand out. Over the course of time, the way of moving, the body language has become shared, common, and, as the players slip into each other’s roles, and into unison, in arrangements from duets to the full octet, the choreographic resolutions are a wonder to behold.