28th season presented in glorious fashion
set the work’s engine in a motion with a taut, swirling pas de deux (danced with thrilling drive by Cassidy Isaacson and Brandon Alexander on Saturday). Three other couples, dressed in white, feel a little tentative and studied when they arrive on the scene and seem to mimic the initial pair, as if a cloud in the Vivaldi arrangement of “Summer” had passed overhead.
But after chastely covering their eyes for a moment, the newcomers catch fire and take on their own gyroscopic velocity and precision. The women’s long hair flies free against deep washes of background color (lighting by Michael Oesch). Everything is let loose and simultaneously, powerfully contained by the dancers’ whirling moves.
Caniparoli’s “Confessions” draws a droll dance picture nook in nine fancifully named chapters (“Sick of Fish,” “Nowhereseville,” “Dog and Frog”). Set to music by American composer Nico Muhly and lyrics by the mononominal Teitur, the piece turns
the company into frantic human pixels, all dressed in self-effacing black and charged with shimmying, futile energy. The work breaks out into riffs on sushi, Jane Fonda, coffee and pawing dogs, complete with illustrated cartoon panels (set by Douglas Schmidt). A fake surveillance camera watches it all from above.
When it opened under its “Sushi Roll” title in 2018, the piece was a caffeinated jolt of both
comic outlook and choreographic verve. Four years on, labeled a more somber “Confessions,” the work remains a technical feat, vividly performed, but lands at a different angle. In the closing “Small Spaces,” the sight of a nearly nude male (the magnetic Maxwell Simoes) squeezing himself into a tiny box feels like it has the mordant pandemic tint of a quarantine.
Seiwert’s “Renaissance” projects the look and feel of a classic. Tunic costumes, three giant textured pillars and the multivoiced singing of the Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble form the study frame. The dancers fill it with the seven potent and affecting dances Seiwert created for them.
The women lead with a communal muscularity, joining in tight yet fluid formations built of out-thrust thighs, proud shoulders and angular elbows and ankles. The men join in roles that shift from equal participants to supporting functions. There are some exquisite solo turns and gorgeous duets; in one, a departing lover is blessed by another woman’s encircling arms.
In “Cradle Song,” the men become a wave force bearing a statuelike-figure (the elegantly bestilled Tess Lane) forward and then across a human bridge. When the other women join hands with her later on, “Renaissance” expands its brightly shining circle.