With ‘MOVEMEDIA: Diversity II,’ Grand Rapids Ballet shatters expectations
The second of GRB’s MOVEMEDIA productions this season has raised the bar yet again with a triple bill of choreographic gems.
For the second of its “MOVEMEDIA” productions this season celebrating diversity, Grand Rapids Ballet (GRB) presented a triple bill of choreographic gems Saturday night at the Peter Martin Wege Theatre. The company continues to polish its own diamond-in-the-rough reputation into one of a sparkling gemstone.
The annual contemporary dance series, which has included some of GRB’s brightest moments, continued that trend—raising the excellence bar once again with two memorable world premieres and a Grand Rapids premiere that, although tackling difficult subject matter, were beauty in motion personified.
Adam’s Key
The program opened with Australian choreographer Danielle Rowe’s contemporary dance work “Adam’s Key,” set to a stirring original score by San Francisco-based composer Alton San Giovanni. Rowe, in artist notes and in a short film that preceded the work, said she was inspired by “the many years my mother has dedicated to working with children with autism” to create her work on that subject.
Taken from the view of the parents of an autistic child, “Adam’s Key” masterfully encapsulated the anger, frustration, and pain all involved feel in not being able to communicate with one another.
Using a myriad of intricate hand and arm gestures that built on each other like the blocks in a Jenga game, along with a rich, flowing, contemporary ballet movement aesthetic, Rowe constructed a captivating and brutally emotional work that was as brilliantly crafted as it was expertly danced. In it, a family of three (mother, father, son) struggled to come to terms with their feelings and behavior in dealing with their family’s situation. Using the unique motif of double casting the family unit and having two dancers portray each family member onstage as well as a guardian figure, the work maintained a constantly-flowing movement landscape back and forth across the stage. Whether this motif was employed as a visual tool or perhaps to indicate the multiplicity of this type of situation in the world, the effect proved riveting.
While the entire cast was fabulous in sometimes slow-motion but always emotionally animated movement phrases filled with silent screams, raised fists and desperate embraces, the performances of dancers Matt Wenckowski as “Adam” and Micaelina Ritschel as the “Mother” were a cut above; Wenckowski for his commitment to Rowe’s physically punishing choreography and Ritschel for her silky grace amid a sea of emotional turmoil.
The work’s hopeful final section expanded on the family unit trying to deal with Adam’s autism to including the greater “village” around them and their understanding and acceptance of Adam and his differences. While the swirling and expansive choreography for this section and its 16 dancers was perhaps less sophisticated than earlier in the piece, it provided an uplifting ending to a stellar dance work.
One
Originally commissioned by Dance St. Louis and performed in 2013 by St. Louis’ Common Thread Contemporary Dance Company, “One” honors the legacy of Henrietta Lacks, the unwitting source of cancer cells that created the HeLa cell line, one of the most important in medical research. Uri Sands, the co-founder of Minneapolis’s TU Dance, says he wanted the work to not only incorporate the energy contained in Lacks’ story and in her descendants’ quest for her recognition, but to further recognize the power of women to change the world.
A former dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Philadanco, Sands’ movement vocabulary for “One” employed some of the same expressive modern dance steps those troupes are celebrated for.
Danced to portions of Henryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” the work began with dancer Connie Flachs alone onstage in a bendy solo perhaps embodying the spirit of Lacks. She was then joined by Cassidy Isaacson and the pair performed a duet filled with buoyant arm movements, the flutters of fingers on one hand, and the angelic, suspended in air poses of them on one elevated foot.
Little by little more of the all-female cast of 16 filtered onto the stage, moving as a unit: hunched over, heads bowed, with arms outstretched before them; hands moving up and down at the wrist as if imploring to be accepted by some unseen entity. Spellbinding and utterly moving, “One,” like “Adam’s Key,” was skillfully and passionately danced by GRB’s dancers.
Swing
Clever if not controversial in the eyes of some, frequent GRB collaborator Olivier Wevers’ “Swing” was inspired by his own past thoughts of suicide. Best known by Grand Rapids dance audiences for his 2014 contemporary take on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Swing,” employed the use of a modified version of the children’s game “musical chairs” as a metaphor for fate, destiny, or Murphy’s Law in life.
The group work, performed to music by Mozart, David Lang, and Jan Welmers, began with its 23 dancers en masse marching onto the stage, each carrying a chair on their backs like a backpack. Said to symbolize their own personal baggage as well as their feelings of security, the dancers randomly spread out over the stage dropped their chairs into place and protectively sat on them. Entering this scene to stalk among them, a shirtless Wenckowski loomed as the specter of doom and death aggressively forcing dancers from their chairs and leaving them to scramble desperately to find another even if that meant displacing a fellow dancer.
Wevers’ choreography created a dog-eat-dog scene where spurts of lovely dance phrases were interjected into the chaos. While the “musical chairs” metaphor on the surface seemed a bit obvious and simplistic for a work plumbing the depths of suicide, Wevers infused it with the feelings that came from his experience with it and in that sense the work rang true.
“Swing” closed with a delicate pas de deux between Wenckowski as death and dancer Isaac Aoki, whose character gives into death by suicide, stepping off a makeshift cliff created by the assembled bodies of the other dancer as his chair shoots skyward on a rope. Wevers’ tender choreography for the pair was dense with caring embraces of relief and warmth signifying not the glorification of suicide, but the earnest hope that what lies beyond the veil is relief from the horrible suffering that led one to take one’s own life.
