DANCE: The Promise of “Dancin’ with ETHEL”
Performance critic Lightsey Darst offers a glimpse into ARENA Dances' eagerly anticipated collaborative performance with acclaimed string quartet ETHEL and newly commissioned music by local composer Michael Croswell.
IN MATHEW JANCZEWSKIS WORK, DANCERS SPILL across the stage. They tumble and riot, or theyre suddenly still; they nerve and twitch, or suddenly splay a limb like a spread bird wingvulnerable anatomy. Sometimes, all together flying across space, theyre like silk shaken; other times, more like pick-up sticks. Everywhere is texture: this shape against that shape, a windmill lift backdrop to a woman running, the push/pull-tussle/kiss of a tricky partnership. Watching, you track the swirl as you might weather, a particularly spectacular summer storm; then one shape flares out from the mass like lightning, one image you hold.
Mathew Janczewskis ARENA Dances, now in its thirteenth season, is rehearsing for their upcoming show at the Southern. ARENA has several tours coming upin fact, right after the Southern show ends, theyre flying out to New York for a run at the Joyceand Twin Cities audiences wont catch ARENA again until May 2009.
Its not just ARENAs firefly presence that should interest you in this concert, though: New York string quartet ETHEL will accompany ARENA. The rock-jazz-classical-everything quartet will play several new pieces, including one by local composer Michael Croswell. This musical extravaganza wasnt exactly planned. Janczewski had choreographed almost a whole ETHEL album, liking their throaty, dynamic sound, when he got the idea to bring them to the Twin Cities. Meanwhile, the Composers Forum approached Janczewski, asking him to commission a score. He chose Croswell (with whom hes worked before), and the pieces fell into place.
Still, if the musical element isnt some grand scheme of Janczewskis, it might as well be. Hes a choreographer driven by music, and a choreographer who drives music: an earlier concert explored Bjorks quirky sound, while his 2007 show Ugly featured a new score from electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnik. He tends to describe his pieces by the number of people involvedthis is an octet, this is a quartetinformation that he says he gets from the music. This doesnt mean he practices one-to-one music visualization, though. Instead, Janczewski adds the texture of his dance to the texture of the music.
Everything, Everything, his new duet for Amy Thomson and Erin Thompson (no blood relation, but a great dance relation exists between these women), shows Janczewskis way of working with and against the music. The dance is outwardly simple: two women, doing mostly the same movements, often walking, mostly in unison, mostly staying on their own sides of the stage. The music is outwardly complex: snatches of voices, snatches of opera mix with the articulate strings. But as Thomson and Thompson shift in and out of phase with each other, as one holds a step a count longer than the other, or simply as their different forms cut slightly different echoes of the same shape, the dance discloses a dazzling complexity that cuts into, and in some way explains, the dense system of the music.
So responsive to music, Janczewskis also responsive to nearly anything else that collides with his orbit while hes creating work. He likes to go into the studio blank, without any prepared phrases, and just start. I dont create things until Im in the studio, he says. I might have a movement thought, but I really enjoy making things up on the spot. What he finds in the space, in the moment, goes into the work. He describes how he originally created one of the Dancin’ with ETHEL pieces, Spiral Shift, on undergraduates during a residency. The college dancers seemed to him to lack torso movement, so he worked with that. But when a dancer asked him about her intention, Janczewski surprised himself by coming up with a story. I created that piece out of movement, he says, and then I discovered the meaning. But hes quick to add that there is no real meaningit is just a movement piece. When Janczewski does have specific ideas they can be quite odd, and they often get buried as hes choreographing: a pair of red high heels were the starting place for one piece, which now contains nothing remotely high-heeled. It doesnt matter. The idea is that little twist that, for me, has all these open, abstract ideas. Audiences can have their own thoughts on what it means, Janczewski says; pinning down the audiences experience is not a priority. Ultimately, I tend to follow energy lines. Now that hes revisiting Spiral Shift with his own dancers, hes opening up the movement, not the story: a short trio is now whip! and schoom! and throw! while the partnering is more touchyoure feeling every hair on your partners arm.
Given Janczewskis sponge-like imagination, its natural that his dancers are vital to his composition process. This isnt just my thing, he says. Im only as good as my dancers. Janczewski is a be-mused choreographer: when he talks about his dancers, he gets starry-eyed, as if he were seeing them dance in his mind. Amy Thomson, his longtime collaborator, occupies almost angelic status, and Stephen Schroeder, another ARENA veteran, also is high in Janczewskis heart. Still, hes open to new muses, too. He has to be: ARENA isnt a steady company with contracts for the dancers. But this seasons busy schedule shows that ARENA is ready to take that next step.
ARENAs future is crucial to the development of Janczewskis choreography. He knows he does his best work when he can just play with the dancers, give them movement and have them explore it, try out this, try out that, all in an open, fun atmosphere. Right now, hes especially excited about his new quartet run with me, created with Schroeder, Eddie Oroyan, Sarah Baumert, and Julie McBride, a relative newcomer to the Twin Cities. It was just magical to create, he says. The magic comes across: run with me is a vivid whirl, densely layered and evocative rather than narrative, but with moments of crystalline clarity. Creating it, Janczewski felt he always knew what was next. The piece feels eerily familiar to the audience, toonot predictable, but more like a half-remembered dream. Melancholy, romantic, dramatic, and lovely, its work Im looking forward to seeing.
What: Dancin’ with ETHEL by ARENA Dances, with music by local composer Michael Croswell as performed by the string quartet, ETHEL.
Where: The Southern Theater, Minneapolis, MN
When: October 23-26, 2008
Tickets: $29 (pay-as-able, Saturday at 5 pm)
Watch a short video clip of ARENA Dances in a 2004 performance of Hold On, one of the pieces on stage in Dancin’ with ETHEL:
About the writer: Lightsey Darst writes on dance for Mpls/St Paul magazine and is also a poet and editor of mnartists.orgs What Light: This Weeks Poem publication project.