The Seattle Dance Project is the kind of endeavor one wishes was more common in the dance world: a group of retired yet ambitious professional ballet dancers join together to form a company whose mission it is to present a series of works by choreographers who they admire and believe in. Drawing upon their loyal audience and connections in the ballet world as much as their years of experience on stage, artistic directors Julie Tobiason and Timothy Lynch and their crew appear capable of filling a niche in a vibrant local scene that includes a more contemporary dance-based Pacific Northwest Ballet under the direction of Peter Boal, an On the Boards that presents more significant national and international dance than ever before, and a series of choreographer-based companies like Zoe Scofield/Juniper Shuey’s eponymous outfit and Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater.
On Saturday night I saw the company perform four diverse works clearly chosen to demonstrate the range and depth of the company. While their verve and extensive talent made for a spirited and fulfilling evening of dance, the works themselves were not all uniformly worthy of their attention, or ours. A good repertory dance company must be judged in part upon the ability of the directors to choose works that are serious, meaningful and challenging to both the dancers and audience. And here is where the Seattle Dance Project appears a bit confused.
The evening began with choreographer Maureen Whiting’s Self and Other/Chopin Etudes, a piece that did not merit inclusion here. Whiting directs a successful dance company here in town with a loyal following, but she has always struck me as more of a self-promoter than a serious artist. As with the many other works of hers I’ve seen over the years, the movement in Self never begins to build upon itself or add up to anything. Her penchant for punctuating weak phrases with poses, gestures, and silliness (there is much sticking out of tongues and prodding cheeks with fingers) garners a few laughs at first but generally leaves the viewer confused. The work is too toneless and superficial to take us to a deeper realm of meaning or understanding and ultimately reveals no compelling purpose. Whiting may believe that she is exploring indeterminacy in her work but her choreography is what’s indeterminate.
But all was soon forgotten when the dancers reemerged to perform Edward Liang’s emotional Flight of Angels, set to John Travener’s Song of Athene. Bathed in a light reminiscent of a morning sunrise, Alexandra Dickson and Kory Perigo made the most of this anguished, exhilarating, and contemplative piece in which the angel-like impulse towards flight is subject to the powerful forces of gravity. The result is dramatic, nuanced, and satisfying, leaving us to consider its fusion of grace and melancholy.
Heidi Vierthaler’s Surfacing was a tightly wound, fully-realized piece of the avant-garde school that provided a wonderful counterpoint to the soaring and balletic Flight. Set to a spare, percussive score of plucks and harmonics by Andy Moor, it featured a quartet of dancers – Michele Curtis, Oleg Gorboulev, Dana Hanson, and Betsey Cooper – who moved about the stage bent, contorted, and swerving as if under tremendous strain. Their struggle to stand, move, and furtively come together under the weight of these unseen pressures was curious at first, but the cumulative effect was mesmerizing. There was a quality of defensiveness, denial, and sorrow in the hunched, lurching bodies and pained expressions of the cast that remained in my head long after I left the theater.
The show concluded with an upbeat, exuberant work choreographed by Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer Kiyon Gaines entitled Altogether…different which was set a series of various musical compositions and utilized the entire cast. After the constraint and darkness of Surfacing, the sight of the dancers coming on stage made me feel as if I were being swept up in a river’s current. Gaines is a young man with a mature dance sensibility who has proven very adept at working within a diverse range of musical styles and temperaments. He can navigate numerous mood and tempo changes in a single piece without losing his flow, as there is always a rhythmic, Broadway-like vigor to his movement. This too is a fine work, but at some point it seems to settle down into a groove of predictability. It may manage to challenge our minds and lift our hearts just the same, but it is not the strongest work of his still nascent career.
Staging one dud and three very good pieces is no cause for alarm; it can happen to the best of companies or presenters. But what I found tedious and a little cheesy were the documentary-style clips that played between the works showing the dancers and choreographers profusely praising one another during rehearsals. This seemed like an appropriate means of introducing the company to its audience at their debut performance last year, but last weekend it was an unnecessary distraction. Judging from the quality of the performances I’ve seen so far, the Seattle Dance Project can be comfortable letting the movement speak for itself.
