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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
'GIMP' a Daring Exploration of Different Bodies, Movement
By Jennifer Noyer
For the Journal
The Out of the Ordinary Festival at VSA North Fourth Art Center continued Saturday evening with the Heidi Latsky Dance Company performing “GIMP,” expressed by dancers with both traditional skills and those with unique attributes resulting from birth anomalies. Latsky's choreography, honed by years in the Bill T. Jones company, explores ways of looking at the human body and seeing beauty within alternate ways of moving. The result was daring risk-taking movement, visually exciting and deeply emotional.
The evening began with “Aerial Piece/Performer,” set in the lobby of the theater. Nate Crawford and Jennifer Bricker moved through the air in circular patterns executed from red silk hangings that worked as a trapeze. Bricker, born without legs, is a trained acrobat who joined her strengths with Crawford's gymnastic experience to create a lyrical duet that moved from risk taking into a modern art piece. Surrounded by rose petals, the movers became involved within a womblike red cocoon, and whirled in an aerial embrace.
“GIMP,” inside the theater, opened behind an opaque screen across the front of the stage. Shifting images of rock formations, marble statuary, portraits and human limbs formed a landscape. The dancers entered behind the screen, finally coming downstage in a line to face the audience. It was a silent invitation to look at six different body shapes with mixed movement abilities. Movement patterns began with a progression from standing, sudden sideways drops to the floor, lifting up on one elbow, rolling backward to face the floor, then suddenly springing to the feet. This became a repeated motif, to persistent rhythmic beats, that evolved into an assortment of sharply struck poses.
Lawrence Carter-Long, moving crisply forward on twisted legs that challenged motion, drew the screen off stage and addressed the audience with “Did you hear the one about three cripples who walked into a bar?” He immediately began walking a rectangular pattern around the stage that became the groundwork of the choreography. Different walks introduced different movers with varying individual styles. Associate director Jeffrey Freeze entered at stage right to duplicate and expand in space Carter-Long's arm and torso moves. They came together in a strong, defiant duet as each manipulated the moves of the other.
Lezlie Frye danced a solo section to Pergolesi's “Salve Regina” with fluid arm gestures and finger patterns, manipulating her one malformed arm and hand in delicate, curving designs with her other arm and hand.
An especially beautiful section developed around the words “I like the way you move.” Couples formed and intertwined, taking sexual risks with each other's bodies. Catherine Long danced a slow and tender duet with Carter-Long as their bodies slid gently into each other's curves, to an aria by Handel.
Latsky and Freeze pushed the movement further into a wild, gyrating and sensual duet to percussive music by Marty Beller that evoked the primitive origins of human movement. Strong direct thrusts and swings of the arms, sharp high leg extensions whipping out in space, and ritualistic repetitions of hip thrusts and torso dives forward brought the dance to its climactic statement: it is the moves of all kinds of bodies that count — filling out our lives in this world.