MORDINE & COMPANY DANCE THEATRE
But as a choreographer Mordine is a terrible contradiction. Skilled at making sense-filling movement, she hasn’t been able to form a satisfying artistic vision. Her dances don’t reach out to the world or to other people, too often remaining locked in the orbit of her strong personality. Mordine will work on a piece for years, gradually stripping away strident elements until the dance is boiled down to pure form and movement. Her finished dances are aesthetically satisfying, though some people prefer the messier, more human dances in progress.
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This program, including a revival, a repertory dance, and a work in progress, shows both the development of Mordine’s movement style and her stripping-away process. In the revival, the 1989 Flores y Animales, the movement is fairly sedate–classroom steps with a balletic carriage are combined in well-defined sections with mimed gestures and a little tango styling. More interesting is the story the dance tells of life in a small South American town: a young man chases a young girl and falls into a swoon when he cannot catch her; a mother protects her daughter from the young man; the mother and daughter argue; the daughter pushes her mother hard across the stage with a hand to the back of her mother’s neck; the mother is jostled in a crowd, pushed from person to person; a band of carnivalgoers in masks break up the pain and tedium of domestic life. The central character is the mother, and the dance’s heart is her astonishment at how difficult and rich normal living can be.
In another ugly section, Mordine is wheeled around the stage on a cart as she talks about being lonely, saying things like, “I wonder if they’ll send anyone to look for me. Maybe they forgot.” Several of the pieces Mordine has recently performed, like Request Concert and In One Year and Out the Other, have been about lonely and forgotten older women; the impulse seems autobiographical. These works would be heartbreaking if they weren’t so heavy-handed and self-pitying. I only hope that this version of Mordine’s perennial complaint is intended as self-parody.
