Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Stravinsky Gets a New Edge
by Carrie Stern (edit@brooklyneagle.net), published online 05-02-2008
Complexions Contemporary Ballet has just returned from a cross-country tour and only now, in the last few weeks, is the choreography for Igor Stravinsky's opera, Pulcinella, to be performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, taking physical shape. But this does not mean that Complexions co-artistic director and choreographer, Dwight Rhoden, hasn't been thinking about it all along, making notes, plotting a synopsis, developing phrases with co-artistic director Desmond Richardson. Pulcinella's somewhat vague story centers on a faked death, an identity switch, and a love affair. Rhoden has chosen to set his version in modern times.
Updating the traditional stock Commedia della'arte characters associated with Pulcinella, Rhoden's clown/trickster (Pulcinella), magician (Furbo), femme fatale/mistress (Pimpenella), and their followers, fathers and city officials, are all patterned on high-fashion and club scene denizens. (Commedia della'arte is a 16th-century Italian, masked, improvisational theater. Its stories rely on stock figures placed in conventional situations: love, jealousy, adultery, for instance.)
Both Rhoden and Richardson were principal dancers with Alvin Ailey, but Rhoden's choreographic approach is both more eclectic, drawing on many vocabularies, and more balletic than Ailey's. He works sequentially, moving forward only when the shape of a phrase is complete. Often he uses phrases everyone has already learned, stock phrases, pulling them apart and reconstructing the elements allowing the viewer both recognition and surprise.
Rhoden loves juxtaposition; he uses quick movement against a slow musical tempo and intense energy. Playing Paparazzi, dancers slide across the floor like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, then launch into pirouettes. Folding into a side layout on the floor, dancers then immediately rise to perfect arabesques. This abandoned running and throwing oneself (with control) is a Rhoden hallmark. From a handstand, legs slightly off center, the men, still upside-down, split their legs, flip right-side up into a fast, funny creep along the ground like "a little roach,"Rhoden explains.
Nothing escapes Rhoden. In ballet, even in modern dance, arms are often left to hang or trace simple, habitual patterns that follow the legs. But Rhoden creates specific, complex patterns for the arms that carry his movement ideas upward through the body. In one sequence, the women, his unusually multi-racial company features tall women on whom the sharp, angular, puppet-like choreography for Pulcinella is particularly effective stand in a side leg extension. First they wrap their arms over their heads, then they fold in their elbows covering their faces. An arm swing follows, like throwing a ball as their legs descend. On paper this means little. But watching the phrase makes clear how Rhoden carries established shapes and contrasts throughout the body.
Desmond Richardson does not choreograph, though he helps create phrases adding elements and solving physical problems. His most important role, however, may be as the demonstrating body explaining the nuances of how a movement or phrase is/should be performed. Working on a sequence, Richardson shows the men how to throw their bodies sideways from a hip-sit, an unfolding toss that ends on the dancer's side, one arm reaching. Even for these strong dancers this is not easy, but Richardson makes it exquisite. "Dwight and I give the movement to the dancers," Richardson explains, "then I step back and he cultivates the movement on their bodies so that they own it, it becomes theirs. That's why people want to dance for Dwight. He challenges what you know, stretches you, and then helps you make the movement yours."
Richardson calls himself a dance linguist. I understand choreographers and try to stay open to their process. I try not to impede them with my technique, but go to their ideas with it. If they want me to go further, to broaden, emote, then we find that. "With Rhoden," he explains, "they've danced and worked together so long, it's a synergy, we understand each other. I can finish his movement sentences. I have ideas for choreography, but not now. For now I'm the link. I'm the conduit for the movement, but, " says Richardson, "it comes out of [Dwight's] brain. He just listens to music and it just comes."
In addition to Pulcinella Complexions will perform Hissy Fits, to music by Bach. A play on temper tantrums, the dance is a series of solos and duets interspersed with group sections. Hissy Fits includes an extended solo for Richardson who truly should not be missed. Even when marking a phrase, when many dancers literally go roughly thorough the movement, Richardson's long, flexible limbs, move nearly perfectly, as if he can't help but dance fully. Rhoden and Richardson are excited to be working with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
"The opportunity to dance to live music is," says Richardson," the most brilliant thing. You can not be devoid of expression when the music is live." Richardson hopes they'll have at least three days of rehearsal with the orchestra. After all, he says, "We have human beings playing. We have to be able to be supple in our sense of time, to change. The muscles remember a particular feeling, you get used to a CD, but it might not be the same live."
Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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