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(Dance Review) johannes wieland
8.22.05
JACOBS PILLOW DANCE
johannes wieland
Doris Duke Studio Theatre
August 18-21, 2005
The program of six dances by johannes wieland (that's the name both of the company and the choreographer) this week at Jacob's Pillow was both frustrating and intriguing. Glimpses of sharp movements, memorable moments, and ingenious staging vied with muddled choregraphy, repetitious gestures, and forgettable running around.
The dancers themselves also embodied this duality: on the one hand more memorably charismatic and personal than most, on the other, lacking in the extremes of virtuosity that might elevate some of the movements to a higher level.
This is not to say that the performance didn't have its terrific segments. The opening duet, "Shift," featuring Julian Barnett and Isadora Wolfe 'dancing' to music by contemporary composer Michael Gordon (the English one, not the co-founder of Bang on a Can), was a melange of hyperkinetic minimalism both in music and dance, with jumping, kicking, spinning, acrobatics, and a little mime all being engaged as part of a vocabulary that featured some truly stunning twinning of movement, before the dancers broke apart at the end.
And the trio that followed, aptly named "Trio," was a giddy and in some ways deftly erotic transcription of an old recording of music by George Gershwin, the dancers embodying the scratches and pops in the record with their own twitches and tics, as the two female dancers, Brittany Beyer-Schubert and Kristin Osler, tried to get a lifeless Barnett to dance with them. This nearly slapstick routine provoked paroxysms of laughter in the youngest member of the audience; probably the most honest response to anything taking place on stage that occurred all evening.
Other strong pieces included the evening's closer, "Tomorrow," the much written about dance for three people who come out of (and periodically return to) fish tanks, like sea creatures finding land for the first time, flopping around like fishes out of water, flapping their wet hair, spraying the stage, sometimes like zombies from the black lagoon. This piece was one of so many this summer in the Berkshires on dance stages, theater stages, and in museums, exploring the animal-human connection.
The evening's premiere, "Artificial," began with an interesting premise -- with two dancers encased in pods made of fabric that slowly were unravelled. The score of the piece, by Brooks Williams (the experimental composer, not the Pioneer Valley-based guitarist), steered the interpretation towards the animal kingdom with insect-like buzzing. So, one assumes, we were to think of these dancers as insects emerging from cocoons. I liked aliens emerging from pods better, especially combined with some of the Robert Wilson-like slow horizontal movements that some of the other dancers did as background.
The evening's only solo and only appearance by wieland himself, "Retina," stood out in several ways: Wieland is clearly the most technically accomplished of his dancers, and he almost embarrassed the rest of them by showing them up with his articulate precision. His was also a much darker, performative work, that almost seemed like it came from a different choreographer with a different aesthetic.
In sum, johannes wieland wasn't at all bad -- just not at the usual high level one expects from companies that perform at the Pillow, either on the mainstage or on the second stage.
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