Open
House 01
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art presents Wally Cardona
Quartet
Portland State University, Lincoln Hall Auditorium, 1620 SW
Park Ave., 242-1419
8 pm Friday-Saturday, Jan. 21-22. $13-$16.
Catapult:
La Comedie Humaine
White Bird presents Diavolo Dance Theater
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 224-8499.
7:30 pm Wednesday, Jan. 26. $15.50-$29
In the modern dance galaxy, the word "experimental" encompasses
many forms. As the Portland dance season gears up, local presenters
PICA and White Bird are eschewing the conventional in favor
of two experimental--and highly divergent--architects of movement.
Wally Cardona creates dance so tense that it can resemble
kinetic rapture or the writhing of the damned. The tension
arises from paradox: In Cardona's conceptual universe, bodies
wage wars of internal friction. A dancer straining upward
is simultaneously collapsing. Heaving, spitting bodies battle
moments of sculpted, majestic grace. Tempos alternate in
discordant rhythms. Time stretches; even stillness crackles.
Cardona is a master of optical illusion: You know the movement
you're watching is internally propelled, yet the dancers
appear buffeted by external forces beyond their control.
Jacques Heim's Diavolo Dance Theater is an altogether different
spectacle. Eleven hyperkinetic performers ski down stairs
and dance like furious demons on any structure that can
hold them--cages, pipes, doors. Seemingly perilous vaults
bisect the brink of physical jeopardy.
While both companies share a vehement physicality, they
are as distinctive as their directors. Jacques Heim has
rejected the personal in his work; Wally Cardona embraces
it. Heim reconceptualizes movement in terms of external
architecture; Cardona creates movement rooted in internal
contradiction, composing irreconcilable situations for his
dancers to maneuver.
Cardona was classically trained at Juilliard and danced
for the modern iconoclast Ralph Lemon. He founded Wally
Cardona Quartet two and a half years ago.
"The initial thrust behind Open House was a reaction to
my training," the 34-year-old New Yorker told WW
recently. "My history in dance was about display. At Juilliard,
you trained in classical ballet and Graham and Limón,
two very traditional modern techniques. Even Cunningham
was too radical for them."
Cardona's early training shows in his rigor and meticulous
form, but his nonconformist sensibility is pure Cunningham:
Catalyzed by the unpredictable and devoted to a new dance
idiom.
The 35-year-old Heim earned his creds as a theater artist
on the streets of his native Paris, performing on cars and
in subways, and later in clubs.
"I was bored, so I started a street theater group called
Artichoke, experimenting with weird scenes," Heim says.
"Everywhere we could perform, we were doing it. I knew nothing
about dance. I had an opportunity to come to America, took
a movement class and fell in love with dance. It changed
my view on theater. I discovered that I could use movement
instead of words. In the streets, I was interested in structures
and architectures. I still retain those elements of improvisation
and collaboration with Diavolo. When we create, what comes
first is the set. The dancers improvise on the structures,
and I put it together like a puzzle."
Heim's latest work, Catapult: La Comedie Humaine,
is thematically oriented around a piece of furniture, the
ubiquitous couch. The "easy chairs" are transformed through
the course of the work into structures resembling ferris
wheels and trampolines. The couch becomes fodder for ambitious
bodily manipulation and a metaphor for human relationships.
As Diavolo's acrobatic dancers hurtle and clash with their
physical environment, Cardona and his dancers dig trenches
into the subconscious chasm. Ironically, Cardona's choreography
is often perceived as "natural" and Heim's as "risky." Each
insists that the opposite is true.
"Sometimes I say I'm going to make an easy piece--it always
ends up turning into some kind of monster," Cardona says.
"I tend to work within an extreme range. In one of the pieces
we're doing in Portland, Blood Variations, I create
situations which demand a great amount of willpower and
physical rigor. I'll put two people in a situation and ask
them to do movement that's big, expansive and moves all
over the place, and then ask them to only do it in close
proximity to each other. Or with a movement phrase that's
built on momentum, I'll ask a dancer to take all the momentum
out of it, which is basically unnatural. That's what I find
interesting. Dancing on an edge is built into the work.
You're not pretending. What the dancers are doing is alive."
Heim, for his part, insists that his company's acrobatics
only appear to be risky. "It's so funny when you take something
out of context, like skiing on stairs," he says. "People
will say that's really dangerous. Actually, it's less dangerous
than snowboarding. In the beginning, I was creating pieces
with an element of risk, but not because I wanted to be
dangerous. I wanted to have a group that was there for each
other, a sense of community. When I catch someone, the person
can trust me that they are going to fly and be caught."
Despite their disparate aesthetics, the two converge in
their diagnosis on the state of modern dance.
"A lot of modern dance companies do beautiful work," says
Heim. "But for me, modern dance is like Latin. It's a dead
language. I go see ballet, and it's like looking at history,
going to the museum and seeing Van Gogh. Modern dance is
like this now. Abstract movement doesn't do it anymore for
me. I needed for the human body to have a different experience.
I think that's why I have to use the element of structure,
and how it is evolving and affecting the human body."
Cardona agrees. "In dance, it very easily can become only
about the display, and there is no doing," he says. "If
you're just doing the ritual perfectly and there's no playfulness
involved, some unknown element, then it's powerless. It's
pointless. I'm not interested in showing the world as it
is. I'm showing a world that you dream of, something that
is going to shake people's lives up, stimulate them, get
them to realize there's more possible."
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Willamette Week | originally
published January 26,
2000
|
