JAN ERKERT & DANCERS
It’s hard to write about this dance. I don’t know when I’ve seen another work so tightly and perfectly controlled and yet seeming to exist beyond the choreographer’s artistry, beyond the reach of language. Exactly as long as it has to be and no longer, it unfolds with an imperceptible but seemingly inevitable logic.
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The film is grainy and distorted, projected not on a flat, hard screen but on a piece of cloth with soft folds; we see primarily the hands and faces of the women in the film, and they’re beautiful. Ya Chhan’s poem reads, in part, “Three children died under the communists because they didn’t have enough to eat, or medicines to cure them. Before they died, they wanted some food to eat. They talked to me about food and what they wanted to eat. So how am I supposed to feel? . . . Now my feelings almost kill me. It hurts all the time.” The sound score, or what I remember of it, is high squeaks and watery sounds, as if the listener were eavesdropping on a dolphin.
Erkert’s 1992 quartet Between Men is another instance, though not so extreme, of her seeing beyond herself. She’s been interested for several years in gender roles, but unlike many other feminists she’s as curious about men as she is about the second sex. Between Men is danced by two men and two women to flamenco guitar and singing, and though much of it is very athletic–the dancers slicing the air with their bodies in great leaps or tumbling like bowling pins across the stage–it also manages to communicate the delicate balance between dominating and giving comfort that’s so crucial to both the relations between men and between men and women. Though it never ignores differences between the sexes, this compassionate work makes us see a continuity of feeling between the two that’s comforting in these warlike times.
