Performers crisp, yet all-Bach program is uneven
Fifteen years ago, Pascal Rioult’s dance company, then unknown here, made its local debut, thanks to visionary Cal Performances director Robert Cole. The word got around. Over the weekend, Rioult Dance NY returned to the campus for the fourth time, on this occasion to the more intimate Zellerbach Playhouse, where two performances were added to the original, sold-out pair. That is audience building for you.
Rioult often favors singlecomposer programs. “Bach Dances,” seen in the afternoon Saturday, May 6, collected four works of unequal quality made over a seven-year period, all set to recorded Johann Sebastian Bach and all accompanied by fussy decor. Yet, the program did not lack for interest, especially in the execution.
French-born Rioult was a leading dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company for more than a decade, and that experience has shaped his style. Seeing pure American modern dance is not always so easy, but Rioult’s company, like Paul Taylor’s wonderful troupe last week, provides a stylistic gateway to a pedigreed past. Saturday’s performers have the Graham look. The men are brawny, the women move with temperamental flair. Stretched arms aren’t willowy and disembodied; they seem organically connected to the torso. There’s plenty of floor work, too, handled well by this crisp, cunning ensemble.
I wish Rioult had brought one of his mixed programs; true, the four Bach pieces
shuttled between orchestral and chamber forces, but continuity and a trajectory were lacking. Instead of building to a climax, Rioult opens with a full-company piece, “Visions of the Fleeting World,” and it looks like a series of animated greeting cards. Divided into seven sections, with titles like “Orchard,” “Gathering Storm” and “Summer Wind,” the piece also features interludes of wind and thunder sounds. The music, excerpts from “The Art of Fugue,” barely has a chance.
Rioult is sensitive to Bach’s chromatic world. He can mirror the entry of new material in the score with new assignments for the dancers, and there’s a grand, swooping ensemble in red skirts. The very busy abstract projections (by Harry Feiner and Brian Clifford Beasley) simply overpower the choreography. There may be a great humanistic message here, but it’s not in the dancing. Performed here on an earlier visit, “City” (2010) suggests that a dose of Bach can cure urban angst. Choreographed to the piano-violin Sonata No. 6, this work sends Catherine Cooch, Corinna Lee Nicholson, Michael Spencer Phillips and Sabatino A. Verlezza cavorting and squiggling in front of urban crowds and deteriorating buildings. Bach doesn’t help. In “Polymorphous,” preludes and fugues from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” accompany the valiant Brian Flynn, Charis Haines, Jere Hunt and Sara Elizabeth Seger, all in black and white, competing with the projections flashing on their costumes.
Despite the rather flaccid reading of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, “Celestial Tides” emerged as the least pretentious and most rewarding piece on the bill, especially in the adagio. Here, a terrific, floor-bound quartet (Seger, Flynn, Hunt, Haines) flirts and insouciantly changes partners and rechanges them. Bach might have smiled.