Impressive array of new Axis talent
Axis Dance, the differently abled Oakland company, is back for a new season with an entirely new roster of performers and a couple of premieres, too. Any authoritative report on the five fresh dancers would be premature. Of all the choreographers featured Friday evening at the Malonga Casquelord Center for the Arts, only Joe Goode seemed to tap the dancers’ vein of talent and stylistic individuality.
Axis artistic director Judith Smith offers no reason for the turnover, but as for the newer crowd, so far, they’re all respectable, rather than charismatic. Goode’s new “to go again,” a 30- minute movement-talk piece about the impact of war on veterans and their families, derived from a project that Goode undertook in Kansas a couple of years ago.
The stage becomes a square with a standing microphone in every corner. The tales, collected and written by Goode, concern lives shattered in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are heartbreaking, All of the four performers — Nick Brently, Julie Crothers, Dwayne Scheuneman, Sophie Stanley — prove top- notch orators ( rare among dancers), as well as movers guided by Goode’s sure theatrical instincts.
Self- pity plays little part here as the dancers, mostly in pairs, perform a series of cool clean combinations. One team goes for sweeping arm unisons, another stretches on the floor, and someone jumps onto Scheuneman’s wheelchair. There’s talk of an Abrams tank, but the movement accompanying it is playful.
“To go again” benefits enormously from Ben Juodvalkis’ score, which is full of arresting sonorities ( are those clockworks I’m hearing?) and pronounced rhythmic cells which propel the action. You come away from Goode’s work feeling that dancing is the most therapeutic way of combatting the sorrows of the world. The piece is structured as a series of short episodes cadenced by blackouts ( Jack Carpenter did the fine lighting) and you find yourself eager to hear more of these sad tales. In modern dance, that’s a rarity.
The first half of the program was a rather dour, unrevealing affair. Since the new “In Defense of Regret” was signed by three choreographers — Alex Ketley, Maurya Kerr, Bobbi Jean Smith — it’s best not to look for any singularity of vision in this painfully earnest quintet; it all seems to lumber from moment to moment.
The dancers confront each other and repeat the movement if you didn’t get it the first time. Some performers lean motionless. Brentley repeatedly saves Stanley from falling, an episode that should have been a lot funnier. Emily Adams and Matan Daskal composed the overlapping scores.
The evening opened with the Bay Area premiere of Sonya Delwaide’s “Dix minutes plus tard.” The 10 minutes of the title are about as long it takes to play the accompanying music, the Andante from Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15. Crothers and Stanley etched a fine portrait of mutual need.