The most daring contemporary choreographer has nothing on Oskar Shlemmer. Shlemmer’s early 20th century work opened a diverse evening of dance from the UW Chamber Dancers at Meany Hall October 14-17th.
The six-member Chamber Dance Company was founded to present and archive significant work from the modern dance canon. Over its twenty year history, the Company has restaged more than ninety dances, from works by late 19th century choreographer Loie Fuller, to late 20th century dances by Doug Varone, Mark Dendy and Doug Elkins. This autumn’s program was put together by company founder and director Hannah Wiley to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of multi-media artist Alwin Nikolais. It featured dances that had influenced Nikolais, as well as Nikolais’ 1982 dance, Pond.
The evening kicked off with work created six decades earlier by Oskar Shlemmer, a sculptor and theater designer who joined the Bauhaus in 1920, at the invitation of its founder, Walter Gropius. Shlemmer, age 22 at the time, headed up the sculpture department at this experimental arts and design institution. He expanded his scope to dance two years later. His Bauhaus Quartet of dances, created between 1927 and 1929, are as much visual art as they are choreography. Shlemmer all but stripped away musical accompaniment. The dancers moved within proscribed boundaries, which were drawn in white tape on the stage floor.
In the first piece, a dancer clad in a white body suit, hood and face paint, literally walked the lines, occasional percussive thumps prodding him to extend his arms in echo of the tape on the floor. A trio dressed in padded space-suit like outfits, with metallic helmets obscuring their heads took the stage next. They, too, were contained with the subdivided rectangle on the floor. Reinfentanz, or The Hoop Dance, performed Saturday evening by Chirsty McNeil with a set of white hoops, was mesmerizing. Her saucy gaze out at the audience challenged us to watch what she could do. The quartet of Bauhaus Dances ended with a man totally obscurbed in black, his costume expanded by long white sticks that formed geometric patterns as he crouched or rotated his arms. He was almost unrecognizable as a human being. As the white sticks moved against the black backdrop, we could almost forget that a dancer was controlling those movements.
The program’s first half continued with newer work. Tandy Beal’s 1982 Heisenberg’s Principle, is a short duet for a man and a large white weather balloon. Dancer General McArthur Hambrick was a gently smiling partner, as he sent his balloon aloft. Gravity-bound, Hambrick spun once, twice, then patiently waited for the balloon’s descent to his waiting palm. The dance was as light as the balloon, its charm weightless and fleeting.
Llory Wilson’s 1991 Davenport Memoirs had a little more heft. A duet for a man and woman, featuring an overstuffed couch, Davenport Memoirs betrayed no sign of its age. The interplay between dancers Bliss Kohlmeyer (in ruffled white panties and bra top), and Chengxin Wei, also in white, was sprightly, feisty and fresh. As the couple leapfrogged over each other, to the couch cushions, then over the back of the couch to the floor behind it, they demonstrated not only strenght and precision, but great dramatic timing.
Honoree Alwin Nikolais’ dance Pond finally made its appearance to begin the program’s second section. Set against a huge, lotus-like image, the ten dancers in multi-colored unitards took us to the pond’s murky depths. Seated on low disks, the dancers’ arms and legs swayed like the tentacles of creatures pushed by aquatic currents. They spun around one another, then sprang from their seats, leaping through space like so many frogs surfacing for a tasty snack. Nikolais not only choreographed the movements, he composed the music, and designed the costumes, lighting and set. Pond was a brief introduction to an artist who pioneered the concept of total theater.
If Alwin Nikolais took us to an underwater world, the final dance of the evening, by Lar Lubovitch, propelled us into the heavens. North Star, set to the music of Philip Glass, was an exploration of bodies moving in space.
North Star opens with nine dancers in drapey blue tunics and shorts. Linking hands, they flow across the floor. Like a lovely version of Crack the Whip, they snap dancer General McArthur Hambrick forward to the crest of their human wave. He’s hoisted onto their shourlders, and he soars in space, long arms and legs extended in flight.
The lyricism of these astral waves gives way to a convulsive solo by Brenna Monroe-Cook. Lit from above by a diffuse white spotlight, Monroe-Cook twitches and contorts, the antithesis of what has come before her. But this solo is brief. Harmony returns to the stage with Hambrick, his long limbs smoothly reassuring as they seem to float with the breeze.
While the program notes inform us about the thematic ties between Alwin Nikolais and the other choreographers on the bill, as well as their place in the dance firmament, the UW Chamber Dance Company performance was not a dry, academic evening of dance history. Instead, it was a lively, often engrossing, celebration of an artform. From Oskar Shlemmer’s experiments with bodies in space to the small worlds that Nikolais and Lubovitch present us, the evening was a unique opportunity to see some of the best that dance has to offer.
