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In and Out of Bounds Douglas Dunn has built low, slanting red walls and encircled the stage of BAM’s opera house. So his Rille is to take place in an arena, a bullring, a dam to contain the dancing. But, as it happens, this dancing defines its own boundaries. Unlike Dunn’s indeterminate Lazy Madge – a sprawling, impulsive thing that gives the illusion of spontaneous decision-making and sociability among dancers – Rille is formal, slightly dry in tone. In only a few parts of the evening-long work do people touch each other. The phrases Dunn has made are performed in prescribed sequence and patterns, although in the silence, four dancers never catch quite the same tone, are never in exact unison. Individual meditations on given material. Rille is the German for a streambed, a groove or furrow. I think of it as one into which the dancing must be fitted. In the opening unison sequence, Dunn, Graham Conley, Deborah Riley, and Diane Frank (all dressed in black and cream) move quietly around the perimeters of the space. At the very end of the dance, the same four again gird the area while Kyle de Camp, Marta Renzi, and Christopher Crawford slip pieces of dancing into the center. After the initial dance, the four leave and Marta Renzi begins to cut across the area with traveling steps – and slicing leg gestures. Dunn streaks through in a new outfit, mostly green. And Renzi and de Camp wear green and blue as they work together – speculatively adjusting each others’ positions, helping supporting. Crawford, a very blocky dancer, slowly wends his way on stage with an obscure task of his own; it seems to involve raising and lowering himself while standing on one leg and making minute, barely visible shifts of weight. “How far can I bend this way without losing control?” seems to be what it’s about. The second half begins with a duet for Riley and Frank (not wearing black and cream now). Each owns half of the stage. They run through the same phrase of big, novel, in-place moves; but Riley does maybe six times what Frank only does twice so the choreography moves them in and out of phase. Then everyone else takes the right half of the stage, while Riley sits on a stool in the left half tending a notebook and stopwatch, occasionally rushing out to inspect Frank, who’s lying on the floor. The other dance (the stage-right one) is like a motiveless board game. The dancers have a common vocabulary of very short phrases that can be done in different directions or happen in different spots. One of them involves a soft rising-and-sinking embrace for two; the rest are solo trips. One moves. Pause. Two moves. Pause. Knight to Queen’s Pawn 4. There’s more. A black cloth is brought in and some dancers stand on i9t for a minute (“like a reference to Merce’s Winterbranch,” someone noted, “only they don’t fall.”) At some point, I lost my place in the dance. I had been utterly absorbed by the sinewy delicacy of the structure, by the quality of the dancers’ concentration, by the surprising changes in momentum and weight that always characterize Dunn’s choreography, by the air of casualness and good breeding that dancers acquire when doing his movement. But I lost my place near the end and became almost impatient with the people coming back in other outfits and going and coming. Beverly Emmons’s beautiful lighting edged in and out of dusk. I don’t know why the dance turned difficult, or what cycle Dunn had to play out. With Dunn I find, though, that even the boredom or difficulty you may occasionally experience are of a high order.
The Village Voice |
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