DARDI MCGINLEY AND PAM MCNEIL
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At a recent concert at Link’s Hall, Dardi McGinley’s and Pam McNeil’s dances were unmistakably the products of their own movement styles. McGinley’s oldest work on this program, Tigerbutter, a solo she danced herself, seemed most characteristic. She’s very young and strong and springy, with an explosive style that can give her dancing a stop-start quality, one burst of movement–cartwheel, jump, or turning leap–after another. In this dance she plummets sideways to the floor, then springs to her feet so quickly you’re not quite sure she fell at all. But the concept that apparently underlies Tigerbutter’s frenetic movement is weak. A TV at the center of the stage plays a video (by Rick Dascher) that alludes to the Little Black Sambo story of the tigers that were turned into butter by racing around a tree. Video images of tornados and dancers whirling like dervishes hammer home the idea of the force of circular movement, and McGinley does circle the TV, but the idea doesn’t seem to go much beyond that.
The same forceful movement informs McGinley’s Davy Jones’s Locker, a solo danced by Jenny Stang. Seagulls on a tape and Stang’s oldfashioned bathing costume establish the watery setting, and the initial movement–Stang lies flat out, then skitters forward and scoots back several times–suggests being washed by waves across the ocean floor. Here McGinley varies the energy level more, reining it in for phrases that are slower and quieter: a slow-motion stepping back with legs flung out to the side, for example, while the dancer gazes hollowly at the audience. But at other times Stang’s intense, dramatic movement–she tosses herself to the floor, suddenly drawn into a fetal curl like a pill bug that’s been touched, or runs, stamping–seems dictated more by McGinley’s style than by the concept of the dance.
McNeil’s delicate sense of drama and her flowing movement are perhaps better suited to a trio called Cold, Quiet Sky, a moody piece set to a Kurt Weill song. Here Julie Hopkins, McNeil, and Catherine Oster interact gently, with quiet pushes, arms around each other’s waists, and subdued lifts. Much about the dance suggests introversion–a dancer retreats to stand facing the rear wall, or a seated dancer curls into herself, head on her knees. Formal contrasts–McNeil often sets one dancer off against the other two–give the occasional inwardness some drama and texture. The music, which shifts from time to time into agitated keening, also helps provide a structure and emotional progression, which McNeil exploits in a sudden, sharp image at the end in which two of the dancers embrace and the third hovers over them.
