Vintage Curtis mingles with new
If you’re a choreographer, retrospectives are the trend this season. Last fall, Twyla Tharp celebrated her 50th year of making dances. Just the other week, Sara Shelton Mann marked her 30th year at the job. And Friday evening at Gray Area Art + Technology (formerly the Grand Theater), Jess Curtis, perhaps Mann’s most fascinating acolyte, held a 15th birthday party for his Gravity company, a group devoted to making body-based art here and abroad that leaves no one immune to its energy and charm.
“International Collaborations #6” was a fine experience for true believers, since all but one work has been seen previously in local venues. But when the producer, CounterPulse, announced that their performance space would not open on time, an alternative was found in Gray
Area, a converted movie palace. For most of the evening, the audience sat on the fringes of the hall and the arrangement worked pretty well, though the intimacy you expect at CounterPulse was missing.
But the premiere, an excerpt from a new piece, “The Way You Look (at me) Tonight,” did not make much of a case for itself, when you could see it. Chairs were arranged haphazardly as Curtis and Claire Cunningham wended their way through the crowd, twisting torsos, falling into pushups. It had something to do, said Curtis, with peripheral vision, but sight lines were so poor that it made little sense to these eyes. Later, Cunningham, a disabled dancer, climbs a ladder and orates on Scottish sword dancing (she’s from Glasgow). Later there’s a contribution from philosopher Alva Noë. Perhaps one should withhold judgment until Gravity brings the complete work to town next October.
The remainder of what I saw in 2¼ hours Friday was vintage Curtis material. “Performance Research Experiment #1” finds Curtis and European colleague Jörg Müller in lab coats testing the theory that the intensity of an audience’s response to a movement hinges on the amount of virtuosity displayed. In the next 30 minutes, the pair performs 11 stunts, like rolling baseballs across the floor, balancing a broom on the head and posterior, and stripping to undies for a wrestling match. It’s funny because of its mock-scientific approach and the audience’s sense of its own power. And the pair, shedding Hawaiian shirt after shirt and undie after undie, maintain a wonderfully droll attitude toward the jest.
Müller’s circus background has generated some remarkable contributions for Gravity, and a solo, “Mobile,” finds him vertically juggling a batch of metallic tubes, suspended from the ceiling. They swing wider and wider, and when they slow, the collision creates a wonderful music.
Gravity can deliver quieter moments, too. “When I Think of You You’re Naked,” an episode from ”The Dance That Documents Itself,” finds Rachael Dichter (clothed) and Curtis (naked) in a strange conversation in which every sentence starts with “I want...”
Neither performer moves a muscle; long pauses separate their lines. Yet, the two conjure a relationship through the most austere of means.
The pair, shedding Hawaiian shirt after shirt and undie after undie, maintain a wonderfully droll attitude toward the jest.