Equal Footing/Equal Earing
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Each of the three programs features different collaborations, but all performances begin with Love Square, an improvisation by choreographer-dancer Asimina Chremos and three musicians, in this case composer-guitarist Nathaniel Braddock, percussionist Jerome Breyerton, and vocalist Carol Genetti. This may be a useful exercise for the participants, but as performance it verges on parody. Genetti makes sounds somewhere between a yelp and a gargle, to which Chremos responds with hip-hop-inflected abandon while Braddock and Breyerton obediently pick or drum along. The main point of interest is why a dancer as thoughtful and agile as Chremos thinks this effort is worth her time. If she could communicate the source of her interest and inspiration, the rest of us might follow along; without that, all we see and hear is static. By all means defy conventions of beauty–that’s how art forms advance–but accept the task of creating something to replace them. Simple nihilism is simply a bore.
That’s what made February 14, 1929 so refreshing: the conventions it defies are those of nihilism itself. Dressed as a gangster and his moll, choreographer-performers Smith and Lisa Wymore send up film noir as they chase through the club and surrounding streets on video and in person. Though many of their movements are symbolic rather than merely functional, and though they sometimes allude to the archetypal gangster ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, I’m hard-pressed to describe them as dance, perhaps because Matthew Lux’s score offers no rhythmic or melodic matrix. It doesn’t intrude either, but if the goal is to show that music is as “important” as dance (whatever that might mean), the work disproves rather than proves the point: like every conventional movie score, Lux’s work is background.
