After witnessing first-hand the works in this weekend's Oberlin Dance Company (ODC) concert, one can begin to understand all the build-up. This year especially, choreographers took initiative and stepped beyond the limits of dance, using set and lighting design to their fullest potential.
The program is laid out with the intention to ease you into the mood of the evening, starting off relatively tamely with Associate Professor of Dance Elessa Rosasco's "Glass Wings" and concluding with her very startling "The Woman Who Will Be Names," a complete polar opposite. Sandwiched in between are a full two hours of bungee cord, bubble wrap and paper doll-inspired pieces, each adding an entirely different personality to the whole of the concert.
The aforementioned "Glass Wings" explores perception and angles though the media of Rosasco's dancing between two grand pianos to Debussy's La Cathdrale Engloutie. The entire piece runs like a balancing act: Rosasco's light, flowing moves are set against the mass of the two pianos, while she hoists herself up and in between her accompanists, senior and first-year conservatory pianists Kimi Kawashima and Letitia Stancu. The music and choreography works delicately, but as the opening piece of the evening, the work is nearly forgotten as soon as its successor, the overly-showy "Come Rain or Come Shine," begins.
"Come Rain or Come Shine" is the Oberlin-based Phenix Dance Theatre's single contribution to the program, but it makes so much of a contrasting impact amongst the college-based pieces, it doesn't quite fit into the program. Not to say that the piece is unimpressive: on the contrary, artistic director/choreographer Denise Gula has created quite a different spectacle with her Billie Holiday-dance work.
"Come Rain or Come Shine" is impressive in that it proudly boasts classic ballet lifts and elements of showy traditional dance that the other ODC pieces purposefully avoid. However, it runs nearly 20 minutes in length over a musical-like set of six numbers, and doesn't really progress anywhere by the time its story line - one man's struggle with too many women and too little time - runs out. The piece doesn't add much to the dance concert, and worse still, distracts from the consistency of the rest of the program.
"Floating," Carter McAdams' odd exploration of mother-child relationships, isn't quite powerful enough to fill the gaping hole in the program that "Come Rain or Come Shine" created, but still serves as a refreshing alternative to the previous number's programmatic overload. The work, based on a short story by Ellen Bryson, is set to Associate Professor of Electronic and Computer Music Richard Povall's saxophone piece, and an ever-present narrator (Karen Nelson Moser) voices tidbits of the story in a plain conversational tone as a quartet of plain-clothed performers walk the stage.
Though its content is heavy and the overall aim of the piece is hard to grasp at first, "Floating" does provide ODC with a glimpse into The Repertory Project, McAdams' ten-year-old professional modern dance company based in Cleveland. At first, "Floating" seems almost as abstract as "Come Rain or Come Shine" in context with the rest of the program, but as the narrator's tale grows more curious and complicated, one can't help but be drawn in to this strange tale of estranged characters and the relationships that result. A particularly climatic moment of almost nauseating pink lighting, anxious musical disonances and sampled whispering effects, and a snow flurry of cut-out dolls really make the piece, heightening both its emotional content and aesthetic appeal.
The second half of ODC is dominated by Oberlin performers, and not surprisingly is much stronger than the first. In fact, it opens with a piece immediately creates an aura of strength: Nusha Martynuk's gravity-defying "Requiem." Strapped into a full-body harness, Martynuk is initially perched atop a climbing wall type of structure, complete with nets and foot ropes that she catches and releases herself on throughout the piece. Though she makes it look easy, Martynuk's cleverly choreographed work accomplishes a steady balance of grace and strength through the means of her own power, propelling her in and out of an eerie darkness amidst Arvo Prt's surreal first movement of Tabula Rasa.
Some familiar faces from recent student dance productions - double-degree fifth-year C. Neil Parsons, and college junior Caitlin Medlock -Ęliterally rise out of the shadows for Ariel Rogoff Heitler's "maya." In the most creative piece of the concert, Heitler has her dancers positioned behind matching white screens; their larger-than-life shadows are initially all that are visible to the audience. With complementing lighting by college junior Amy Weidstrom, "maya" explores the dancers' unity, separation and estrangement over the gorgeous backdrop of Ravi Shankar and Phillip Glass' Offering, and then a change of mood with live a capella from college sophomores Jena Carpenter and Zora Tucker.
At last, ODC comes to a close with Rosasco's "The Woman Who Will Be Named," strangely almost religious in its ghost-like emptiness. Clad in patchwork-constructed white transparent drapery to match the fabric they drag across stage, the performers - "ancestors and descendants," as the program dubs them - all move with viscous caution across stage, building parallel tension.
"The Woman Who Will Be Named" is very cold, both in coloring and the feeling emitted through the text that is read steadily by Kendal resident Sara Balogh. Icicle-like diamonds of bubble-wrap float over the performers, and the piano in Professor of Composition Randolph Coleman's Soundprint II adds to the chilled feeling. Closing with a frightening image of the ancestors and descendants hearts beating as The Woman Who Will Be Named, college senior Cara Perkins, silently shares a photo album with the audience.
And so ends this year's ODC. Though several guest choreographers add color to the program, the real strength of the concert lies in the performers' abilities to portray the works presented to them with grace and poise. And, minus one slightly out of place musical-like Billie Holiday montage, both the choreographed and technical aspects of ODC flow together perfectly.
Oberlin Dance Company will be performed tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. in Hall Auditorium. Tickets are $4 OCID, $6 Faculty/Staff/Alumni/Sr. citizens and $8 for others.
Chilly silence: Bec Conant portrays The Woman Who Will Be Named in Elesa Rosasco's moving ODC work by that name. Several of this year's pieces explored new pastures of creativity. (photo by John Seyfried)
Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 126, Number 23, May 1, 1998
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