Exodo turns out to be more of an Exodon’t
Exodo Choreographed by Luz Urdaneta for Danzahoy. Until Saturday at Premiere Dance Theatre. 416973-4000 Choreographer Luz Urdaneta must have had a vision for the dance she calls Exodo, meaning exodus, but she seems to have left her ideas book behind when she went to the studio. Lots of lovely dancing, strobing projections and hundreds of red flowers make for a grand spectacle in this ensemble piece from Venezuela — empty of meaning. The dancers move in bunches, pulling on jackets and gathering into formation. The music is Rodolfo Mederos and the tango master Astor Piazzolla. As the dancing begins, the men and women perform a stylized tango. Some shout, some do bicep lifts, some cover their ears with their hands as they crisscross the stage in unison, stamping their feet. Soon they will take off their jackets, revealing a variety of dresses, pants and shirts, stylishly designed and all in black. They are meant to represent thinking, feeling people, but they remain dancers, albeit attractive and spirited ones.
Soloist Jacques Broquet walks toward the band of flowers at the front of the stage, a sleeveless black shirt showing off his muscular arms as he uses them to draw breath, as if filling his mouth. Others walk behind him, making binoculars out of fists held to their eyes. As one piece of music ends and another begins, a new dance sebeing quence takes over. Broquet dances with two women. He embraces one of them; the other flips up on his back. It’s all quite swish, but evocative of nothing in particular. The dancing is mostly of the contact- improvisation variety: a lot of pulling and pushing and shifting of body weight from one person to another. When Broquet, a powerful dancer who founded Danzahoy in 1980, does a sideways handspring it seems that maybe mere prowess is the point of this dance. He is impressive without engaging.
There is a lot of talk in the program about “ exile of the soul,” “cold spaces” and “rootlessness,” but Exodo might just as easily be a homecoming. Much of the action is dramatically puzzling, as when two women dancers collapse in the bed of flowers and a few minutes later simply rise and start dancing again. Broquet gets going at a running pace and keeps shouting “ Hey!”
Finally everyone winds up where they started. This is not what an exodus is meant to do.