PICTURED FROM RIGHT TO LEFT
But young choreographers Peter Carpenter, Marianne Kim, and Cynthia Reid use dance to explore something more than just dance: in “Pictured From Right to Left” their subjects range from 24-hour supermarkets to the writing on bathroom walls to gay love. Their styles and interests vary, but they share a strong sense of theatricality and a talent for noticing the unusual amid the ordinary. All three judiciously employ props, text, and color to provide a rich, meaningful context for their movement. And for the most part they succeed in communicating ideas that an audience might actually find interesting.
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Of the three, collectively called Off Your Center, Carpenter seems the most focused. Not only does he have a keen eye for body language, he develops his perceptions into highly emotional psychological dances supporting a strong personal vision, often delicately exploring sexual identity.
Like Carpenter, Kim fills her dances with emotion and has a talent for observing human nature. Her aesthetic, however, is quite different, based as it is in the minimalist Japanese dance form of butoh, known as the “dark soul dance.” This is most evident in Circling Red Nights, a slow-moving solo in which she crawls on all fours toward a bright red parasol suspended from the ceiling. Long black hair hanging over her face, she languidly lifts an arm, and her hands seem to hang, exhausted, from her wrists. As she lowers the arm just as slowly, she seems to be human but in an inhuman world. After much time, she stands. Her face is pale, almost gray. With mesmerizing delicacy, she balances the parasol on top of one hand. It seems all her soul has been captured in her hands as they alternately twitch and float around her body.
Unfortunately, the evening’s a long one, and the nine dances dont flow well. The program jumps from one choreographer to another, which undermines the cohesiveness of each one’s vision. Some dances–such as Reid’s Free Fall and Kim’s Directions: Loose Dogs Will Bite–are overshadowed by the dances that precede them; perhaps Reid and Kim need to beef them up a bit. But fortunately these three choreographers have a vision–a rather compelling vision. Which speaks well for dance, which has lost audiences over the years because of its seeming lack of desire to communicate.
