Word: solling
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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's second work, "Lunch Break," also uses the principle of juxtaposition. Images jumble together at such a fast pace that the eight performers are pushed almost to the point of becoming characters--yet the tempo is so quick that they never quite have time to become anyone. On one level the work parodies dance: Soll dressed in baggy pants and a sweatshirt punches her way through arabesques and pirouettes; one group (construction workers?) breathlessly executes Graham floor exercises; another trio plods in a circle as in many a minimalist dance. Even sections not broadly satiric take on a quality...
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...