Yossi/Oded and Bill T. Jones

This past week at the ADF we saw:
YOSSI BERG & ODED GRAF's company perform Animal Lost (2010) in the Reynolds Theatre:

This evening-length piece was quite a spectacle. The six dancers each had their own different animal mask (a penguin, polar bear, panda bear, horse, pig, and rabbit), there was a lot of text and singing, and it closed with the group sitting upstage, past a partly-opened black traveler, on astroturf, singing a song, while someone played guitar and another kept squirting a dancer in the face with a watergun. All very imaginative and fun.

There was a sound score going almost the entire time so it was hard to hear some of the text, but what I did hear was funny! But it wasn't just funny, these dancers are technically proficient and most of the middle was beautifully choreographed duets. It progressed well and it had a clear beginning, middle, and end, which left me quite satisfied as an audience member. Seeing it once was plenty for me. While I could examine this work and how it speaks to the animal inside each of us, I'll let your imagination make of it what it will. (The ADF website has a great advertisement clip of it.)

We also saw:

BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY perform Spent Days Out Yonder (2000), Continuous Replay (1997, revised in 1991), and D-Man in the Waters (1989, revised in 1998) in DPAC.

I knew this company was, and still is, a huge deal, but I got to witness it live for the first time this past weekend. I went to Friday's and Saturday's shows, which had a post performance discussion I stuck around for on Friday. The first and last pieces were performed with live accompaniment by members of the Durham Symphony. A string quartet for Spent Days, and an octet for D-Man.

This show was so wonderful! I wasn’t the biggest fan of Spent Days the first time I saw it because the dancers face upstage and perform the same phrase but it was never quite in unison. I don't know if that was the intention, but their shapes didn't always look the same and the timing was sometimes drastically different. My favorite part of that particular piece was the music - Mozart's String Quartet No. 23 in F Major,
K. 590, Andante (1790).

Continuous Replay was unbelievable! The dancers (whole company) began nude and filtered onstage at different times, in different ways. There is only one constant throughout the piece, "the clock", who is on stage the entire time, repeating a sequence of 45 shapes over and over again and adding one shape with each repetition. The dancers slowly begin to appear with one item of black clothing, a skirt or a hat or a pair of shoes, and keeps evolving until the end of the piece has everyone except "the clock" wearing flowing white costumes. Such an intense ending! Definitely one of the memorable "I LOVE DANCE!!!" moments to be had this summer.

An audience member at the PPD asked the dancers what they thought about dancing nude. One dancer mentioned that after being nude for a while, your skin starts to feel like clothing on your bones and ripples similarly to a loose costume fabric (WOW, amazing!). Another audience member commented that after the initial shock of seeing someone not wearing anything, you just begin to appreciate the human form. The muscles, the different heights and sizes of the dancers, the way light creates shadows on skin. It's not 'being naked', "the clock" Erick Montes said, it's just nudity.

The composer of the music for this piece was there at the concert and mixed it live during the show. He commented that he keeps to mostly the same sounds, template, and progression, but does enjoy throwing little extra things into the score to play with the dancers and see how/if they react to them.

D-Man was just unstoppable! It was the entire second half of the show. I've heard so many dance teachers telling students to take more risks in class and this was the absolute perfect example of how amazing it can look. Falling off balance blindly and hoping you don't trip, hurling yourself into the air with all force and trusting your partner to catch you in crazy and different ways. So so exciting!! It was composed of four (or maybe five?) sections, all of which were intensely beautiful and moved along so quickly. This piece was a marathon.

I loved them and would recommend them to anyone. Each dancer is so unique and, while I sometimes pick a a 'favorite' to watch, every one of these dancers was my favorite for different reasons. An audience member asked how these dancers were picked for the company, and the short answer, given by the associate artistic director Janet Wong was, "They have to be FIERCE!"

(*Maybe at this point I should just make it clear that I'm in no way a professional dance critic and this is just my personal opinion about these performances at this point in my life.*)

Coming up this week: TAO DANCE THEATRE from China (their USA debut!) in Reynolds, and DAYTON CONTEMPORARY DANCE COMPANY and EVIDENCE, A DANCE COMPANY in DPAC (shared show). Stay tuned. :)