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Language Incarnate
Bill Young & Dancers defy gravity and take body language to new heights in the premiere of "Rein, Bellow" presented at The Duke on 42nd Street.
By ALEXANDRA BELLER
Offoffoff.com
Seeing a Bill Young & Dancers concert makes me want to
choreograph a dance, write a novel or finally try rock
climbing because Mr. Young and his dancers are so artistically committed, so driven, so bent on drinking their own juices.
And juicy they are. Ê
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| | | REIN, BELLOW | Choreography by: Bill Young & Colleen Thomas, with the dancers.
Dancers: Emira Goro, Heather McArdle, Hamilton Monteiro, Pedro Osorio, Colleen Thomas, Bill Young.
Music by: Philip Hamilton & Mio Morales.
Related links: Official site |
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First there is the dancing: sensual, athletic, and full of flight in the way that only the most grounded movers can be. They are the type of dancers who seem to have made a pact with gravity. The seven
articulate, tremorous dancers (including Young and Colleen Thomas, his collaborator for this evening of dances) were Tzeni Argyriou, Ermira Goro, Heather McCardle, Pedro Osario, Hamilton Monteiro, and Marc Mann. Ê
Then there are the ideas: dysfunctional habits butting up against the simple desire for love, divine intervention revealing complex patterns of connection between strangers. The minimal text worked like the sound of breath in an opera; it heightened our
anticipation and allowed us to see these creatures as human, despite their otherworldliness.Ê
The New York premiere, "Rein, Bellow", offered a series of perfectly honed and variegated vignettes which, when laid next to each other, formed a fractured mosaic picture of a world both tragic and sublime. Young and Thomas have a knack for using architectural relationships to create emotional narrative and context. In one particularly eloquent section, McCardle's duet with a passive Osario affects his mirror image (Monteiro) movement for movement. An accumulation of partners and a splintering of the duet reminds us of the intimate effect we have on one another, even from a distance.Ê
In "Bent", created last season, there is less character, no text, and so much dancing that you find yourself lost in a wilderness of moving limbs. But you re not really lost; the terrain seems familiar. What really happens is that you are taken. The velocity and
mercurial shifting of bodies takes you to a kind of kinesthetic purgatory, possibly heaven. I was tempted to marginalize it as dance-for-the-sake-of-dance, but the commitment of the dancers to getting somewhere, be it on or offstage, or into or out of someone's arms, was affecting on a visceral level. It was such a
relief to remember that the body need no translation to write it's novel.Ê
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APRIL 23, 2003
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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