A FIELD GATHERING
Choreographers just don’t come across as the bad boys and girls of the arts, but though what dance says may not be revolutionary, its way of saying things is often radical. Just as abstract artists challenge our culture by producing works that are nonliteral and nonrepresentational, choreographers and dancers challenge our heavily verbal culture by making art that’s nonverbal. Dance takes circuitous, underground routes; it uses a rhetoric barely worthy of the name, creating impressions as fleeting as wind on water. Then someone like me comes along, analyzes the rhetoric, and makes dance look stodgy again. Maybe I should retire.
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Hedwig Dances artistic director Jan Bartoszek and new artistic associate Sheldon B. Smith both work in this underground way. In Bartoszek’s Sweet Baby, Baby Suite the least underground sections are the humorous ones using props: dozens of dolls help us visualize Bartoszek’s ideas about being a young mother (her daughter was one year old when this dance was made, about a year ago). As bits of grandmotherly, motherly, doctorly, and neighborly advice are doled out in voice-over, dancers take turns balancing a doll on some part of the body, and often the image is quite literal: when the doctor advises “sleepy” nighttime feedings, the dancer’s head falls forward onto her own chest. And when dolls drop from above into the dancers’ arms, the point couldn’t be clearer: babies are mysterious objects that come out of nowhere and must be cared for, though their care is as mysterious as their origins.
The action is mysterious too, the pace deliberate and meditative. Two women emerge from beneath an ancient-looking patchwork quilt and slowly progress to a downstage corner (the “room” of shredded cloth). There one of them is left to spread out the crumpled quilt, pull down the walls of her dwelling, bundle them up in the quilt, and haul the whole parcel back to center stage, sometimes singing to herself. Meanwhile the other four dancers emerge from the wings to progress–often slowly–across the stage. Bartoszek’s careful, small motions for hands and feet reveal her faith in the modest gesture: the arm held high and hand opened slowly, as if dropping seeds; the patting motions for palms and fingers, as if tamping down dirt; the toes exploring the floor, like little independent creatures feeling for what’s ahead. In Bartoszek’s work the soft, lively, rhythmic motions of the hands often seem a dance in themselves. Later the dancers’ movements get bigger and faster–circling falls and leaps into a crouch–but the piece subsides quickly and abruptly into a mysterious coda, ending almost like a dream: that is, with no ending at all. It says something both good and bad about a work when it leaves you puzzled and provoked and wishing for more.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Eileen Ryan.
