Zaccho Dance Theatre: Suspending Disbelief
One leaps, another catches, both share responsibility for maintaining balance: Interdependence is a dance basic that takes on new meaning in the companies performing Remy Charlip’s choreography at Montalvo April 4. In these troops wires and wheels are honored collaborators, offering access to new dimensions.
A three-part doorframe suspended more than head-high over the Garden Theatre was the first thing arriving audiences saw. It was a dangling invitation to leave customary eye- level perceptions behind. Zaccho Dance Theatre’s use of cables, hoops, and other aerial devices regularly persuades viewers –along with the boys and girls in its neighborhood studio classes—that dance can be vigorous and exciting. For director Joanna Haigood, though, the circus hardware is one means among many of liberating movement from the confines and expectations of a traditional stage.
Haigood’s site-specific compositions—set on street corners, along forest paths, on the walls, or from the rafters of public buildings—mix history and social commentary and blur the distinction between performer and passer-by. What fills the space around us, Haigood suggests, is not only our bodies, but our minds, not only the unpredictable present, but our collective past and dreamed-of futures.
Charlip, too, is longtime believer in siting art in the midst of life, and Haigood began her opening solo at Montalvo—Charlip’s Dance in a Doorway—by strolling along the front row to embrace the choreographer where he sat. As she turned to the stage her movements transformed gradually from intimate and casual to public and performed, so that when she reached the doorframe, the crowd’s attention was fully gathered for her electric leap to what was in effect a tri-level trapeze.
Charlip’s original drawings for each of the dances were reproduced on large cards beside the stage, offering audiences a kind of treasure hunt: try to match the sketch of a pose with its translation by a particular dancer. Being able to trace the artistic process did not entirely demystify it. José Navarrette and Debby Kajiyama, who joined Zaccho in this performance, told Charlip that they had used every one of his sketched positions for Alone Some and Twosome, but their interpretation, a send-up of a romantic tango, was so witty that it was hard for a viewer to remember to look over at the pad.
In the final piece, Garden Lilacs, the score—Welsh composer Ivor Novello’s achingly adult World War Two ballad of desire and loss—gained even more poignancy from Zaccho Youth Company’s performance. Dressed in filmy blues and purples, the pairs of dancers suspended in hoops or mirroring each other’s movements on the stage, recalled a world of idealized childhood, full of enchantment and perfect bliss—a world by definition ephemeral. But near the end, when two of the girls danced off the stage presented their prop flowers to Charlip, and nestled at his feet, everything came full circle. All that had been lost was, for a perfect moment, magically restored.
