Jump Giant Project
at the Auditorium Theatre,
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When Gongora performs the same gestures they’re tragic or horrifying. Where Rossen’s dancing makes Bustan’s Gypsy-ish music lugubrious, Gongora’s makes it sad. This classically proportioned dancer doesn’t have the height or the limbs to go to the extremes Rossen does; his gift is his body’s integration–he moves so fluidly yet complexly he can’t help but be lyrical. With his exotic looks, in his tunic and full pants he seems some figure out of ancient mythology. Only once, running and flapping his top like wings, did he draw laughs. And he was trying really hard to get them. This is beautiful choreography breathtakingly performed, though there may be a little too much of a good thing.
Sabine Fabie and Mark Schulze collaborated on Moonbathers, which they first performed last year. Inspired by the writings of four of their favorite authors, it has a literary feel: each of the four sections is marked by its own simple but clever costumes, music, and style of movement. Clearly it’s an exercise, but these sketches are evocative and often funny. Here the two choreographers show the talents realized more fully in their individual pieces on the program.
Not so Ruth Klotzer in Highlighters: A Kinetic Puzzle. This piece for seven dancers and two artists–they paint on easels upstage, then paint two of the dancers–aims for high art (evoking Kandinsky) but remains gimmicky and uninspired. It doesn’t help that the choreographer, after pretending to be a musical conductor in the “pit,” leaps onstage in a nude body stocking and cutaway coat to cavort with her dancers–they even carry her overhead like a sacrificial goddess. Scott Silberstein’s score is uncharacteristically dull. But the dancers did a fine job, especially Michael McStraw and Brian Zacker.
