Word: soll
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DANCER-FRIEND of mine overheard choreographer Beth Soll remark, as she tacked up posters announcing her January concert "Clear-field," that it was about time she considered doing a more accessible piece. Funny that another Boston dance company recently has made just that decision. New England Dinosaur, which last spring gave a concert of five wonderfully inaccessible dances last month presented "The Tree of Life," the sort of piece suited for lecture demonstrations in high school gyms on "modern dance...
...Soll subtitled "Clearfield" a "silent dance opera;" avant-garde choreographer Meredith Monk, who appeared at the Loeb last year, uses the same term to describe her art. In Monk's works there seems to exist a deeply-felt controlling image beyond the shifting motifs of the dance surface. I didn't sense any single undertow of meaning in "Clearfield," though perhaps Soll intended one. Rather, it seemed as if the dance began and ended in stillness, its images like whispers heard above a soft drone...
Martha Armstrong Gray, a prolific choreographer who has shown over 25 dances in Boston during the last eight years, presented three works in this latest Dance Collective assemblage. "Passing Through" is similar to Soll's work in that it pulls together disparate elements. But whereas Soll sets incongruous images against one another, Gray brings together incongruous styles--the sports parody and the surrealist fantasy. Gray does manage to unify the two, yet connections between the styles go no deeper than the surface. Gray always seems to have a well-conceived them in mind, as is evident in "Passing Through...
...works of Dawn Kramer and Judith Chaffee Black are well-crafted, polished statements. Both choreographers steer clear of the dangerous gap between conception and realization haunting Gray's work. Yet neither compacts the poetic suggestiveness of Soll. Kramer's "Notion" is a slick dance to a slick song, picking up its title from Billie Holiday's croon, "If I should take a notion to jump into the ocean, ain't nobody's business if I do." Kramer uses her own slinky way of moving to draw the sinuous lines of Holiday's lament. At one point she cooly trails...
...third of the piece. Huddled down, Black and John Hofstetter prance in circles, teasing one another. Black cuts unexpectedly to the outside of the circle, Hofstetter surprises herwith a flip over his shoulder. Black uses the same loose athletic style Gray called on in sections of "Passing Through" and Soll in bits of "Lunch Break...