After many travels and travails and almost a year of preparation, premiere and performances, the Repertory Dance Theatre brings its major collaborative piece, "Maid of the Mist and the Thunderbeings," home to Salt Lake City.
The work of many talented artists and recipient of prestigious grants, the piece is elaborate, ambitious and high-minded in its philosophy. But it runs into difficulty in conveying that philosophy through motion.It's always risky to expound via art, because it usually results only in conveying a message in explicit, obvious ways that make it two-dimensional, rather than subtly involving the senses and imagination, which are the dance's most powerful means of communication.
And though you sense that good rapport marked the production of this heavily subsidized project, it does have a few of the awkward earmarks of art by committee.
An explanation of "The Maid" is made before it is danced, and you see the dancers go through the motions; but you don't become emotionally involved in what they are doing in any more than a ritualistic, rote way. You are told what to see, and you see it, but you don't really get the connections. The program notes report far more than the stage communicates.
A young man is shot in a native American-police confrontation, and in the split second before his death he traverses a dream world where the Thunderbeings save the Maid of the Mist from evil, presumably at the same time making clear to the young man the importance of resisting evil and living for the good of the community.
There is little more than narrative dance in this piece. They go through the motions like characters in a freize, rather than exploring in movement the depths of emotion that might be felt by the young man, the Maid or the old woman, who represents crass humanity, which stands by, seeing evil and saying nothing.
Compounding the difficulties are the stiff, representational scenery and over-produced costumes. The Thunderbeings may be traditionally correct in their heavy masks, headdresses and feathered robes but can never make more than caricatured gestures, weighted down by all that baggage. When all of them come on stage at once, waving and weaving, it looks like a pageant. And even the mythical Indians' costumes are so over-painted and heavily headdressed as to get in the way of their message.
Suggestion is usually much more effective than exact reproduction, and there is a whole dimension of dusky, wraithlike fantasy that this piece is missing.
The dance does have dignity, and sincerity, and a certain welcome naivete. Guest artist Alejandro Ronceria dances the young man powerfully and often poignantly, in his tortured poses on a platform overlooking the action. Tina Misaka is arresting as the Maid, and Louis Ballard's score is vital and exciting with its authentic instrumental sounds, drums and percussion.
Laura Dean's "Sky Light" makes a welcome return, opening this program on a sunny, golden note. This piece is so clean, so balanced and so beautifully structured that its clarity seems almost to be reconstructed from a blueprint.
The movement is bold and joyous as six dancers enter one by one, each giving his vibrant interpretation of a patterned movement of arms, torso and feet.
The dance is charged with a kind of body electricity, a power source that the dancers plug into, drawing from the synergy of the mass the energy needed for each individual variation. Dean's compulsive drum beats vary, leading into a section of slow leaps and more powerful control, then into a virtuoso display of spinning without spotting, with mounting, dervishlike intensity.
Indeed, much of the movement has a near-Eastern flavor; too fast and furious to be hypnotic, it is rather compulsive, as it ebbs and flows, then climaxes in a breathtaking display of mass spinning as the curtain descends.
"Night Spell" by Doris Humphrey ages hardly at all. Set to evocative, driving string quartet music, it shows a young man (Jim Moreno) restless at night, apprehensive, even fearful. Creatures (perhaps night thoughts and apprehensions) accost him, plucking at his courage and trying to separate him from his desire. Yet, through it all he holds firm, fights off his fears and clings to his resolve.
Tina Misaka, Anthony Roberts and Kimberly Strunk make good ghostly antagonists for Moreno's strength and humanity.