“Tragically, I won’t be dancing this evening,” Madi Tanguay tells us alone on stage. The artist invites the audience back on May 11 when she’ll dance A Couple. “No one quite does it like I do.” Evidently this is part of the piece to come. It was odd.
A Couple – U.S. Premiere
Choreography – Roy Assaf
“Perhaps you are a couple” text Ariel Freedman
Music – Johannes Brahms; Four Ballades, Opus 10 in E major, Adante. Intermezzo No.1 in E-flat major, Opus 117: Andante Moderato
Two dancers run on, arms and legs jutting out, circling. They jump apart and come together, bend back, convulse, leap with bent knees. Voice-over conversation is in another language. Like Morse Code, a succession of sharp shifts is often followed by gliding. The impression is one of playful roughhouse.
Tempo of choreography emerges in opposition to languid music. One partner zips through the other’s legs. Floor work is fluid. Together and apart, dancers roll. Expressive gestures evoke mime – his hand to forehead, her slap. They stomp. She falls back into his arms; winds around him like ivy. The vicissitudes of relationship in all their variation.
Lighting (Yair Vardi) intermittently dims seemingly without reason or rhyme. Black costuming (Roy Assaf and Victoria Bek) curiously includes her ugly, ungraceful shoes.
Dancers: Madison Goodman and Lounes Landri
Echoes of Sole and Animal
Choreography – Peter Chu
Musical Composition and Sound Design – Djeff Houle
Additional Music: Kavall, Flageolets, 2024 Neue Meister
A couple stomps onstage moving spastically. Legs are dragged, feet turned in. Except for irregular unison, dancers seem to have no affiliation. Rhythm commands; voices reverberate. Arms shoot out, reach, sway; hands open and close. Torsos hunch, then sway. A woman collapses. Another runs light over the body as if healing.
The clustered group ejects a second figure when the first again gets her sea legs. Controlled slides take some to the floor. Revolved by way of one limb, tugged by another, configurations can be awkward (though skillfully achieved.)
A series of pas de deux offers variation. A second dancer collapses. We hear a guttural chant. Step, reach, repeat; wriggle. One rolls over another’s back. Limbs give out, refusing to be controlled. Like marionettes whose strings have been severed, figures struggle for agency. Shoes are placed on hands as some move on all-fours.
Choreographer Peter Chu describes this piece as being inspired by the spirit of animals, “The need to acknowledge our inner animalistic qualities.” I didn’t “get” that. Movement and formation was nonetheless, intriguing and precise. Dynamics were arresting.
Dancers: Graham Feeny, Madison Goodman, Tiare Keeno, Lounes Landri, Andrew McShea, Jie-hung Connie Shiau, Zach Sommer, Madi Tanguay
Three Dances (Prepared Piano) by John Cage – World Premiere
Choreography – Lucinda Childs
Music – John Cage; Three Dances for Prepared Pianos: I, II, III
Set to John Cage’s 1944/45 composition, Three Dances looks mechanical, one sharp-edged component on its own axis provoking another. It’s like observing the inner works of a large clock or the action/reaction of atoms, molecules. Relationships are formal, mathematical, unlike the feel of the previous piece.
Configurations repeat. I missed an arc, some sort of from-to, progression. The piece grows static.
Dancers: Graham Feeny, Madison Goodman, Tiare Keeno, Lounes Landri, Andrew McShea, Jie-hung Connie Shiau, Zach Sommer, Madi Tanguay
Photos by Whitney Brown
Opening: Three Dances
Gibney Company
Founder/Director CEO – Gina Gibney
Company Director – Gilbert T. Small II
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue
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