Spectrum Dances 2002
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Choreographer Michael McStraw sets the tone with the first piece, Craving. To music by Seal featuring the lyrics “We’re never gonna survive, unless…we get a little crazy,” he has Paula Frasz dump a shirtful of flashlights onto the stage and then arrange them so that her progress in any direction is obstructed. She then proceeds to roll in them, shine them at the audience and in her own face, and dodge among them. Novelty, Frasz’s intensity, and the music’s rhythmic drive make the piece moderately interesting, but its ideas don’t bear repeating throughout the concert.
Perhaps choreographer-dancer Rachel Bunting suspected this, for she jazzed up The Afterwords with a video backdrop. As it happens, no such compensation is needed: her solo, to Beethoven’s Pathetique, ably celebrates the small gesture’s capacity for expression. Though bounded by an imagined nutshell, Bunting reigns over infinite space. Unfortunately Craig Sorensen’s video of empty rooms or of Bunting at odd angles, with its static-ridden sound track, draws focus from the dancer’s work. I’d like to see The Afterwords again without the bells and whistles, to give proper attention to Bunting’s lovely piece.
More important, Ophelia, Ophelia crystallizes the problem of using constraint as a choreographic theme: how much satisfaction can be achieved when the whole point is that the dancers are stopped in their tracks? Seen in isolation, the piece might be intriguing, but as the sixth of seven works highlighting paralysis, it’s overkill.
