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Review of Our Times
February 7, 8, 13, 14, 1997
Ames City Auditorium
Written by Carol Prusa for Tractor Magazine
Contrast, control, and counterbalance play a large role in Valerie William's Co'Motion Dance Theater's repertoire concert, "Our Times –Life and Love and Fire Don't Happen in 4/4 Time." Wanting to put together music and movement that she likes, Williams has built this concert with a wide ranging choice of music, staging, and movement. Springing from a quote of Jeff Prater's, Associate Professor of Music at Iowa State University, Williams has put together five music selections that do not use 4/4 time. And, like the contrast between love and fire, Williams has used these irregular meters to create varied feeling tones.
The concert begins with "Tango," a social dance Williams is known for. The music is by Astor Piazolla. The backdrop is black, a single green park bench rests on the left side of the stage. Williams, in a brilliant red dress, is sitting on the bench when Hank Adams struts in. This seven minute piece emphasizes the expressive power of body movement to tell a tantalizing story with flair. The dancers move from separate to connected to self-involved and back together again. When Williams stretched her high-heeled foot to Adam's shoulder, the body's language was transparent. The audience was seduced.
The next work is composed of fifteen minutes of excerpts from "Requiem," a dance concert choreographed by Williams in 1997. It is a work I had seen in it's premier. In full concert, it left me shaken. The excerpts are exquisite and moving. Beginning with a duet of mirrored movement, Jenn Girton and Amy Snoddy, in white, loose flowing garments, move against black. Seemingly ordinary gestures build to movements – ebb and flow, crescendo, and diminish. Hand movements create expressive frames. Visions of youth, freshness, and awakening come to mind from these movements. The heady combination of music and movement intensifies when Girton sings acapella. Girton's transporting voice is echoed behind stage by Williams. The lullaby alludes to relationships between mother and child. This imagery is reinforced by the pieta-like forms woven into the subsequent movement. As Girton runs out, Lana Lyddon Hatten and Williams come in. Hatten's body slumps and is supported by Williams. This play of comfort and support cycles as Williams repeatedly catches and supports Hatton as if she is a guardian mother or angel. There is also a visual reference to Michelangelo's painting of God giving life to Adam as Hatten's and William's stretched arms touch, finger-to-finger. By the time Mozart's "Regret" began I was completely mesmerized by their potent, deliberate movement. The work expresses the beauty and necessary work of dying and as the final "amen" sounds, Hatten is left lying in silence on the ground and Williams, pulling slowly out of her grasp, walked away.
The eleven minutes of "Stravinsky Suites" begins with a fanfare. This dance was originally commissioned by the Central Iowa Symphony. Hatten, Williams, and Girton are in brilliant pollen-yellow with ruffles at the wrists and waists. The initial trio is followed by Girton who dances a solo with the exaggerated, articulated, bouncy movements of a marionette. This solo is followed by solos by Williams and Hatten. Hatten's solo uses movements that express that her body (not her mind) is in control of her body. Hands wrap around her face and she pulls herself around. Her arm raises and up goes her leg. Like Girton, she is not in control but driven–perhaps by the music. A new cycle begins–a slower paced solo by Williams followed by bouncy fast solo by Girton, then Hatten. The work finished with the dancers, like three daffodils in triangular formation, moving in parallel. This engaging work reflected a direct response and interpretation of the music.
The work I was most intrigued by was "Leanings" with music by Bartok. It is a thick work – complicated in movement, staging, and implication. Williams informed the audience before the concert began that the movement in "Leanings" "takes the time it takes–the music is not a guide but a set for the dance." She calls this "breath" rhythm. She states that the music is not "beat-like" and you "don't feel bar lines" in the dance. Movements repeat, parallel, reflect, resound, and echo with symbolic overtones. This work is danced by Williams, Girton, Hatten, Snoddy, and Kara Francis. The dancers are in neutral gray costumes. The set involves a large simple frame structure with an arched roof and a back wall of fabric. Tethered threads connected the fabric wall to the "house" frame. These threads were manipulated by the dancers, resulting in the wall moving in relation to their leanings and pullings and pluckings. I found this work difficult. There was a lot happening - too much to grasp in one visit. While dancers performed within and without of the frame, dancers behind the curtain manipulated the flexible wall to create complex shadows, silhouettes and volumes. The curtain wall changed colors over the duration of the dance, from subdued twilight blue to fleshy orange through fire-red and back evening tones. The "leanings" required connections, trust, strength, and cooperation. They relied on counter-balance. At one point Williams throws herself at Hatten and is flipped up into the air to be caught head-down. This went beyond a tendency, a leaning towards - it was a leap of faith. What constitutes a leaning versus a direction, a inclination instead of a belief? In this work William's predilection is to raise the questions and leave us to struggle with the answers.
The concert ends on a exhilarating note with Brubeck Suite. In this dance the brightly and varied hued dancers cavort and have fun. They actively engage the audience with their delight in the music. I found Girton and Williams had particular spark. While the dance steps appear light, the intricacies of the music's beat–with changing emphasis– caused me to be delightfully amazed when in "Raggy Waltz" the trio of dancers returned from a dazzling display of contrasting steps and canon movement to step together into a perfect trio. This jazzy piece bursts with energy and a subtle dose of William's humor (a trait that can be found in much of her choreography) as the five dancers wove their contrasting movement throughout the suite. The dancers so successfully express their response to the music that one can feel it through their bodies. Life doesn't get any better than this.
What makes William's work so compelling? Her work is a strange and intoxicating mix of what it feels like to be alive. It is quirky, seductive, and passionate. It has breath and spark. It is off beat, on beat, and ultimately beyond beat. It gives me pause and I find I have formed new connections–for me, this is what art (and life) is about. The human body in movement is glorious–in control of movement through the choreography of Valerie William's, sublime.
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Carol Prusa is a painter and installation artist working as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Art and Design at Iowa State University.
Valerie Williams Co'Motion Dance Theater is in residence at Iowa State University Department of Health and Human Performance