Moving evening with dazzling dancers
Talented troupe, guest musicians remarkably agile
The five Garrett + Moulton Productions dancers and assorted guest artists got in their 10,000 steps and then some in “Four Acts of Light & Wonder” at the Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Leaping, turning, sprinting, spinning and shimmying their way through a full evening of four works, they zipped on and off the stage as if determined to prove that perpetual motion was actually possible.
Dazzling as all that whirring about could be, the performers worked some of their more memorable effects when the pace let up enough for the audience to savor the expansive range and exquisite detail of these bodies in motion and stillness. That was true first and perhaps foremost in CoArtistic Directors Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton’s “The Mozart” (2017), a magnetically beguiling work that opened the evening.
As pianist Allegra Chapman scrolled through a series of extracts from Mozart sonatas and variations, six elegantly blackclad dancers worked out their own seemingly boundless possibilities. They did it predominantly with their arms. Both in solos and everchanging combinations with each other, they carved out mighty blocks of space, snaked their arms through tiny virtual openings, angled their elbows out in the hunched posture of the ancient and came blooming back to nimble youth at the lightest touch of another dancer.
Some of it bordered on mime — a pair of birds (or were they insects?) frantically feeding, the hand blur of tiny wings. Other passages were surpassingly gentle, visual whispers confided back and forth. There were burly bits and sudden effusions of formalish court dances. In sum, “The Mozart” offered a fluid and delightful master class in port de bras, the art of a dancer’s upper limbs.
Seen on Friday, Aug. 9, the world premiere of Garrett’s solemn and affecting “Hunting Gathering” posed a different kind of stasis at the outset. Each of the fine and physically distinctive company dancers — Carolina Czechowska, Gretchen LaWall, Nol Simonse, Haiou Wang and Miche Wong — took their separate places in a disc of white light (design by Allen Willner). There, as if unaware of their comrades, they labored both together and alone, reaching for something high above, stooping to pluck up something else from the earth. Here was the titular hunting and gathering in elemental form, the repetitive movements reinforced and dignified by the Philip Glassian tread of Jonathan Russell’s arpeggiated score. An orchestra of nine performed live under the composer’s direction.
The discs dissolved for the center section of the piece, which featured some mobile, longlimbed solos, fleeting connections and deeper intertwinings, all of it at once graceful and effortful. At one point, the dancers all gathered in the center, arms upraised and very slowly swaying. They might have been a modernday WPA mural in tribute to the working class.
Near the end, a single disc reappeared on the stage floor. The dancers entered it one by one, alone again until another arrived to carry that first one away. And so it went for a while, a recurring cycle of courage and consolation, isolation and community. All five dancers, back in their own discs at the end, seemed harmoniously conjoined. It’s worth noting that an essay by the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired the piece.
The most exuberant, if finally exhausting, work was the U.S. premiere of Garrett’s “Gojubi,” first mounted in London in 2012. Dressed in bright solids and stripes, their slit pant legs fluttering in the breeze of their own momentum (costumes by Julienne Weston), an ensemble of 12 took a wild nonstop ride. It was like a day at some highspeed amusement park. The dancers ran about, hoisted each other up, capered across a virtual precipice. Russell’s music played along, with the brass moaning and mocking and woodwinds frantically trilling.
“Gojubi” invoked the playful spirit of the Shrovetide Fair from Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrouchka.” But what went missing in all the action was an enlivening sense of humor and joy. Garrett may have intended a certain grimly determined sense of purpose, but the high velocity choreography finally ran in too many tight circles.
Moulton’s “Ball Passing” rounded out the bill, performed by a group of 18 volunteers. If this signature company work lacked the absorbing complexity it does when more practiced players are involved, the amateurs gave it their all. Dressed in identical blue Tshirts and aligned in bleacherseating rows, they embodied the cooperative ethos of the piece.
Now, more than ever, we need to pitch in and pay close attention to our neighbors. Steven Winn is The San Francisco Chronicle’s former arts and culture critic.