Altogether Different Festival - Brief Article - Review

ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT FESTIVAL THE JOYCE THEATER NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK JANUARY 11-30, 2000

A solid marriage of drama and dance graced the stage of the Joyce Theater during the Altogether Different Festival this year. While some of the dances stressed literal dramatizations, others took a more abstract path. With seven companies presenting their best work, plenty of variety was on hand.

The expressionistic style of 33 Fainting Spells, a female troupe from Seattle, made it appear European in origin. The company is named for the number of vertiginous attacks that occur in Anton Chekhov's plays. Its full-evening work, Sorrow's Sister, tells of three women (not unlike Chekhov's three sisters, but living in a modern wartime setting), trying to survive in their home while their city is under siege. Performed to a collage of composers ranging from Kurt Weill to Bela Bartok, Sorrow's Sister reveals women bent on survival, even finding a few laughs in the worst of times. Dayna Hanson, Gaelen Hanson, and Peggy Piacenza dance playfully with a birthday cake, share their last rotten potatoes, and nurture each other when hope is scarce, but ultimately tragedy wins out.

Unfortunately the more anguished the piece grows, the thinner the choreography becomes. The promise of this piece could perhaps be achieved with some editing.

Watching Lula Washington's high-spirited company brings back memories of the old Alvin Ailey company, full of fearless kicks and unafraid to let the seams show. In what was, incredibly, the first appearance by the 20-year-old Lula Washington Dance Theatre in a theater in Manhattan, the company has capped its own success story. Already honored by California's governor, Washington has taken kids off the streets and into her "I Do Dance, Not Drugs" program, placed them in the studio with her professional dancers, and introduced them to works like Donald McKayle's 1972 classic Songs of the Disinherited. The grittiness of the streets rubs off in both directions; Nabachwa Ssensalo, for example, caught the special passion of the Angelitos Negros, in which a woman queries heaven as to why there are no black angels painted in church frescoes.

In Washington's Tasting Muddy Waters, her daughter Tamica Washington takes on the colorful character of a Gullah woman who holds on to African memories, despite the complexities of contemporary life (see photo on page 72).

The duet 01997-8, deliciously danced by Kim Borgaro and Jeremy Tatum, allowed the dancers to tease each other with flirtatious solos. While Tatum wowed the audience with his physical facility (see photo on page 10), Borgaro made it clear that she was holding the tromp card in a post-feminist world.

And the unapologetically street-inspired Mahal Dances, also choreographed by Lula Washington, could intoxicate any child into loving and appreciating dance as an art form, as it did this audience.

Far into another dramatic universe is Neil Greenberg's fascination with film noir thrillers, as exhibited in his companion pieces This Is What Happened and Sequel. Greenberg uses the scores of composer Bernard Herrmann from films such as Vertigo and Psycho to build and subsequently deconstruct psychological landscapes associated with adrenalinized whodunits. Paige Martin and Justine Lynch are perfect as abstractions of Alfred Hitchcock's placidly complex film heroines, who meander through the mysterious life of sleuth/criminal/fall guy Greenberg.

"Don't believe her, she's lying," flashes a caption in the distance, as the dancers gaze into surveillance mirrors at the rear of the stage. Despite the feeling that Greenberg may still be using only half of his rich resources (holding the stage with three or four dancers to the climactic Hermann music is tough), when the stage is suddenly flooded with a pool of blood-red light brilliantly designed by Michael Stiller and the dancing merges into the music, the audience immediately grasps Greenberg's intent. Witty as Greenberg is, he doesn't snag the drollness of Hitchcock's humor as well as he might. Nonetheless, these are dances that have a haunting effect on the audience days after the event.

Humor is never lacking in Lawrence Goldhuber and Heidi Latsky's unconventionally ingenious partnership: he of the fifty-inch girth and standing six feet tall, she a foot shorter and weighing barely one hundred pounds. Their sardonically titled piece, I Hate Modern Dance, takes a swipe at downtown dance, but more notably it shares what they love--in this case, their own indisputably individual talents. In the Hate section, Latsky undulates in a dress whose long sleeves are connected upwards into the fly space of the theater; her arms form an elastic V-shape as Goldhuber rolls around in a sumo-sized fat suit. She is bound to the heavens; he is beholden to gravity. When liberated from the confines of her costume, Latsky launches into a frenzied dance that would prove dizzying to a dervish. In the Dance section, both dancers cavort with foam-stuffed doppelganger dummies that allow them to dance with themselves or drag and pitch their partners into the wings with no regrets, providing plenty of laughs for the audience. And despite the threatening title of the work, Latsky at one point strides across the length of the stage with committed grandeur in a stunningly embroidered gown with a ten-foot train that would have made Martha Graham more envious than Medea.

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