AHARONI, BOYD, HALLORAN, PUTMAN
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A path across the floor and a basic movement had been selected in advance, then the group of eight dancers asked the audience for suggestions for an emotion and a task. They huddled briefly, then started an improvised dance that moved in spasms along the chosen path like an out-of-balance washing machine. The movements were quick and graceful, and at times just silly. A man (Raven S. Wilder) picked up a woman (Boyd) and held her like a sack of laundry; when she suddenly started to flap her arms like wings, it looked for a few moments as if his laundry were about to take off. This improvisation was filled with tiny moments, lasting only a few seconds, that were dropped and then picked up in an altered form a few minutes later. Its simplicity was charming.
The best dance was Putman’s Venation, a men’s quartet performed by Krenly Guzman, Troy Knight, Putman, and Wilder. This formal work, a theme and variations, demands a great deal of skill from the dancers. Its themes are body shapes with clear forking lines–perhaps a reference to the title, which refers to a system of veins. The main pleasure of the dance is kinetic–it’s not often we get to see four male dancers so excellent, and Putman has created new lifts that require great strength from both partners. The emotion the dance creates accumulates slowly: instead of threatening violent discharge, it rises up to a sort of perch from which to see great distances. This rising curve of emotion is due in part to Chicagoan Steve Hadley’s synthesizer score, which mixes sad melodies with sirens and roars.
