Frank Fishella and Paula Frasz
Frasz appears committed to challenging our perception of traditional dance harmony. In her five pieces–the first half of the concert–an observer would be hard-pressed to identify a single recognizably traditional pattern of movement. Her goal seems to be to introduce her audience to a new awareness of beauty by engineering an aesthetic of awkwardness abounding in constrained lateral steps, hyperextended angular arm movements, and stop-action interruptions. At times I felt I was watching the evolution of an anti-dance style rejecting all previous alignments of convention and contemporary taste.
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Frasz was most successful at this task in Eater of Hearts, in which Kim Neal Nofsinger–naked to the waist and wearing a luminous, parachutelike skirt–executes with precision and grace a series of small, angular lateral steps combined with sweeping arm motions and slow, tortuous rolls on the ground. Intermittently he enacts the devouring of a human heart and pulls his skirt over his face, eerily outlining his features through the silk while stepping slowly across the stage like an apparition.
While Frasz addresses personal relationships from a societal or cultural perspective, Fishella is more centered on the dynamics of individual desire. He’s also more inclined than Frasz to use humor, though her lightheartedness is apparent in the concert’s opening piece, a satirical social dance for herself and Fishella using a table as a springboard for angular, stop-action leaps and spins. Delighting in abandoning and reconciling with each other, they playfully evade each other’s grasp or fling each other good-naturedly into energetic but elegant rolls on the ground. Bailes Mal Criados is a strangely whimsical and moving depiction of the well-worn intimacy born of affection and mutual trust.
