Rolling back into her embrace, he remains both husband and child while she is either mother or lover: probably asked to be both. Lindemer in her arms and throws him off repeatedly after he becomes more passionate. But instead of being the abducted maiden, she suddenly skips off with him.Īmbivalence in love relationships becomes a theme: In another vignette, Ms. Lindemer ignores Rebecca Jung while perambulating on all fours until he sidles up to her like a friendly dog. Yet the punch lines are not always clear. Wolken's adult comic strip for six dancers is a set of vignettes in which connections are rarely made as expected. Another man, Kent Lindemer, pulls her away by this train and wraps her in it to carry her off like a bundle of laundry. The sharpest sequence in this suite about relationships has a man with a flower, Sebastian Smeureanu, reaching toward a grotesque bride, Jude Woodcock, whose veil consists of knotted bedsheets. 'Bedtime Stories' had its own neurotic edge, but managed to say something more universal about romantic disillusionment.

She dangled from the ropes in the opening idyllic moments before her spins, with skirts swirling, led to the unexpected hysterical denouement. Chase's' swing was actually a trapeze attached to a wrist hold. Pilobolus has discovered harnesses in the last few years, and Ms. The dancing, in Pilobolus style, was never step-oriented, but in this instance the dynamic range was extremely limited. One could magine the old Viking chants at the root. The commissioned music had a fine-tuned haunting air, consisting of wordless vocalizing with a choral resonance by a Norwegian composer and singer, Birgitte Grimstad. Chase was actually traipsing in the woods, became increasingly abstract landscapes made way for surreal studies of nudes with masks and deliberately blurred designs that symbolized, apparently, the disintegration of a mind. John Panikar's black-and-white slides, creating the illusion that Ms. All the ingredients had an umblemished beauty but never came together. To portray a heroine's inner life takes more than surface polish. Chase, in Gibson Girl attire, whirled on a swing and in the woods: the images were redolent of Ralph Lauren meeting Martha Stewart on the same glossy ground. The crackup she suffered was suggested more by the roar of a train than through the images: live dancing and photographs projected on a scrim. Chase, in particular, seemed to be going nowhere until her sound effects announced that the character she portrayed in a narcissistic solo was a cross between a mad housewife and Anna Karenina. Although very different, 'Bedtime Stories' and 'A Portrait' each took an idea and barely developed it for an unjustified length. The two premieres were presented at the Joyce (175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street) Thursday night on the third program of the current run, along with 'Axons,' 'Clandestiny' (both from 1990) and 'Day Two' (1980).Īs Pilobolus's programs keep getting longer, so do the individual pieces. The trend continues with 'Bedtime Stories,' which is by Jonathan Wolken, who was co-founder of Pilobolus with Moses Pendleton, and 'A Portrait' by Alison Chase, who was their dance teacher at Dartmouth College and one of the original group's first female performers. Unsurprisingly, the group's original members were the first to circumvent the formula they invented and to begin to choreograph on their own. Part counterculture and part New England town meeting, Pilobolus's collaborative process, with multiple dancers and choreographers agreeing on the shape and details of each piece, understandably wears thin in terms of individual expression. Choreography by consensus has been its hallmark, with uneven results, although the original wit and freshness that shot the troupe to prominence and popularity were never in doubt. Like most of its new works in recent years, these need an editor in residence.Įvery dance troupe goes through a bad patch, but Pilobolus is in a special situation, being cursed as well as blessed with the idea of collective creativity. 'Bedtime Stories' and 'A Portrait' are the final premieres that Pilobolus Dance Theater is presenting during its current season at the Joyce Theater.

Clandestiny meaning