Rebecca Rossen and Keith Carollo
at the Dance Center of Columbia College, June 7 and 8
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Rossen is far more experienced, especially in the world of experimental dance. Her lanky body is suitable for ballet. But her experience and choreography are the antithesis of classical dance. She sticks her arms and legs out at quirky angles, folding and unfolding her long body and interrupting the movement’s natural flow and rhythm. Her choreography seems to say, “I know the rules, but I’m not going to follow them.” At times she’s like a little girl performing in the living room for all her aunts and uncles. To dance and be watched–that’s her simple pleasure.
Rossen’s strength is her playfulness and ability to break molds. Her weakness is a lack of editorial skills. Fugue: Concord/Discord is a trio for violin, dancer, and black-and-white film. Rossen plays with the violin and violin case, as if she were trying to find every possible perspective on them: air violin, violin as passionate instrument, violin as golf club, violin case as machine gun, bow as conductor’s baton, bow as rapier. She then layers her choreography with a live performance by violinist Katherine Hughes and two black-and-white films of images from the performance projected onto the back wall. Most of the sections are repetitive and too long. It’s interesting enough to watch a violinist onstage, but it’s boring to watch her play air violin in a long film immediately afterward. Furthermore Rossen rarely sheds light on violins, and when she does, her insights are buried in redundancies.
Like Rossen and Carollo, choreographers Margi Cole and Scott Putman are relatively new to their craft. Both left the cozy confines of university training within the past five years, and both are still trying out their wings. In “Looking Through, Looking On,” a joint alumni concert presented by the Dance Center of Columbia College, sometimes the wind caught their wings and they soared a bit, and sometimes they wobbled valiantly toward their ideas. Each choreographer created some interesting moments, some emotionally clear and insightful moments, and some beautiful moments. But neither managed to string these into a meaningful whole.
