Artery

• Photo by Sam Trull
• Skyscrapers

I know there is supposed to be a first time for everything—but a disappointing Pilobolus performance? Before last night I hadn’t thought it possible. Life constantly assures us that everything changes and that is all that can be depended upon, and after 40 years, surely Pilobolus’ current members must be interested in experimenting outside their well-known style. But, but, but … it is a shame that the company is messing around with simulacra when they have those electrifying bodies.

American Dance Festival hosts Pilobolus each year, making happy audiences and making money at the same time. However, the audience in the Durham Performing Arts Center for Thursday night’s opening, although large, wasn’t so happy. The concert included five works—two were ADF-commissioned premieres—and all but one of them began with video on a small screen lowered from the grid.

The first one, which preceded the dance in Azimuth, wasn’t so bad. At the time, I thought it was a kind of prologue for the whole evening, signaling that the work would be about systems of movement, patterns of growth and organization, rather than about the kind of kinetic sculpture-building that Pilobolus has done so well for so long.

• Photo by Sam Trull
• Azimuth

Curtain down, curtain up for Skyscrapers (2012)—and here comes the video screen again. This time, the video was of a very long, fast, motorcycle ride through early-morning Paris. We didn’t see the bike, only the onrushing scenery. But we heard its high whining engine as it worked up and down the gears. At the end, the engine switches off (hallelujah), the rider jumps off and rushes toward a young woman approaching the meeting place on foot. They embrace just as the sun touches her bright blond hair. Yuck.

• Photo by Grant Halverson
• The opening of "Luster," which premiered this weekend at ADF

There’s no other way to put it: Barnes bedazzled Reynolds Industries Theater Sunday night at the American Dance Festival. They brought glitz; they brought glam. Batons twirled and confetti fluttered. The dancers gripped chairs in their teeth. If you need your corporeal form recharged, get to their show tonight or Tuesday.

Sounds like a lot of fluff? It wasn’t. The fab costumes, hip-shaking moves and spectacular theatricality added up to one of the most substantial and sincere commentaries I’ve seen on performance and identity.

The program listed three pieces but it was really an evening-length triptych. There were no intermissions between the world-premiere duet Luster, a trio to Nina Simone's music titled mostly fanfare and the full-company quartet Everything is getting better all the time set to a rousing Otis Redding soundtrack.

The tech changes between the pieces were incorporated into the performance and the black-garbed crew interacted with the four company dancers onstage throughout the pieces. These weren’t, however, mere meta-dances or philosophical musings about the fourth wall, a point unambiguously made in the opening minute of the show.

In Luster, atop the opening monologue of Ike and Tina Turner’s cover of “Proud Mary” (“We're gonna take the beginning of this song and do it easy; then we're gonna do the finish rough”), Barnes and Anna Bass carried a puppet-show proscenium down the aisle and clambered onstage. Garbed in down trench coats that just allowed glimpses of lamé beneath at the ankles, Barnes and Bass tried to affix the proscenium to a frame onstage. They needed a third pair of hands, though, so they pulled a man from the audience to hold it in position while they fastened it properly. As the music began to ramp up, he moved his hips to the beat, drawing hoots.

Fourth wall torn down? Check. Performance about performance? Check. Now that that was taken care of, Barnes and Bass could move on.

Through slapstick-infused chair dances and stage dances that brought them out onto the stairs of the aisle again at one point, the women amplified the enthusiasm of Turner’s performance and whipped the crowd into a frenzy. I’ve never heard an ADF audience laugh so freely.

You’ve seen almost all of this choreography before—in ice dances, showgirl and cheerleader routines, parades and circuses, music videos and biopics of musicians, cabarets and glitzy musicals throughout the year over at ADF’s other stage at the Durham Performing Arts Center. The hand jive even made a brief appearance.

But Barnes’ movement is actually an imitation of all of that movement. It’s those lip-synch productions you made to rock songs after you locked your adolescent bedroom door, crooning and belting lyrics into your hairbrush. And the slumber party routines in pajamas on a pullout couch stage that became so elaborate that cranky parents had to shout from upstairs “Don’t make me come down there!” And the headbanging you and your friends did at red lights to freak out the drivers in the car stopped next to you.

As Luster moved through sections of varying intensity keyed to the musical changes, Barnes and Bass helped each other through moments of hesitation and exhaustion, drawing energy from the audience’s reaction to small points of humor, such as a tap dance rendered silly by the basketball-court squeaks of their sneakers.

After running in twin circles for a long time to a morose piano and cello duet, they began pumping their fists to try to get their spirits up. It worked: the crew entered en masse to reward them with bouquets, and the piece ended with a high-energy finale.

Before applause subsided, mostly fanfare began. Christina Robson joined Barnes and Bass onstage, all garbed in white spaghetti strap tops and black skirts, with white pouf feather headdresses like circus horse performers wear. The audience wanted to laugh at the feathers but hesitated because this piece immediately had a different tone.

Nina Simone’s cover of the desperate ballad “For All We Know” (can anyone sustain a song at a slower pace than Simone?) cast a half-pall on the room. The trio’s balletic movements were restrained. The empty stage was twilit. In unison, they moved diagonally from a back corner to the opposite front corner and returned, seemingly unaware of the audience. They all looked to the rear wings and held their arms out as if to present the entrance of a fourth dancer. But no one entered.

It was a lonely moment, a possible retraction of the lust and luster of Luster. Barnes and her dancers were suddenly exposed to the power of the audience’s desire for the show. I have to admit to feeling a pang of guilt in my seat. I saw not three dancers, but three women, facing the expectations of hundreds of strangers in the gaping dark.

Ideally, singing into our hairbrushes, we want to be stars but we also still want to be us. We want to be us, as stars. Ecstatically loved by the audience, but genuine. Resolving that is the trick, isn’t it? That’s why we have tabloid newspapers and the Betty Ford Clinic.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago : Quintett - Images by Independent Weekly

DURHAM/ DPAC—Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performed a long program in the Durham Performing Arts Center last night for the American Dance Festival: three pieces and two full intermissions, which they’ll reprise tonight. Each of the dances—created by 2012 Scripps/ADF Awardee William Forsythe, Hubbard Street resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo and Israeli choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gaï Behar—could have stood alone on its own. Each certainly contains an evening’s worth of content, but the evening doesn’t suffer in the least from that. Rather, it demonstrates the central characteristic of this repertory company that’s kept Hubbard Street relevant into its fourth decade of existence: versatility.

The program opens with the rare opportunity to see William Forsythe’s coolly elegiac Quintett (1993), created shortly after the death of his first wife. Known for edgy, energetic movement, Forsythe is constrained here—but not restrained. Five dancers cycle through solos and duets marked by high, sweeping, overhead reaches and kicks that succumb to small backwards stumbles. Often this main action is watched by one dancer loitering contemplatively from a dim corner of the stage. Sometimes the watcher springs into a solo, which provides a visual foil for the duet without undermining its almost wistful emotion.

A film projector occupies the right front of the stage, pointing its beam diagonally across the space but projecting onto a convex mirror (the kind that’s mounted where a garage enters onto a street, so pedestrians and motorists can see each other coming) rather than a screen. As the piece develops, and dancers pass through the beam, you can see that it contains an image but you can’t see what the image is until a dancer repositions the projector just before the ending. A grainy, slow-moving cloudscape appears on the backdrop.

You’re watching memory, remembered movement, in Quintett. The projector’s immaterial image, shining invisibly through space, speaks to the emptiness of reminiscence without judging it futile. The mirror, set up as a rear-view mirror might be, acknowledges memory’s distortion.

But the impotent machinery of memory doesn’t matter compared to the fact of an event’s occurrence in time. Sweet, intimate details in the duets shine through to provide genuine emotional connections to the past.

Facing each other at the end of a complicated phrase, one dancer tilts her head down to rest its top on her partner’s chest. Later, a tall, male dancer stretches his arm straight up to hold his hand horizontally flat; his partner glances up at it and leaps to bop the top of her head against his palm. You feel the pleasure of togetherness in these moments. Forsythe’s frank choreography sometimes looks like a pantomime of unselfconscious child-play. He does not wallow in the loss of these moments, even while acknowledging that they’re in the past.

Part of watching Quintett is dealing with Gavin Bryars’ mercilessly repetitive score Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet in which a looped, quavering vocal and a stayed orchestral passage meander around each other, neither exactly in unison nor rhythmically contrary. It’s lonely-sounding music but the looping contains the emotion within the same analytical frame as the action.

Quintett is all about Forsythe resolving the fallibility and power of the past with the fact of the present, and Hubbard Street’s dancers bring the right objectivist approach to the movement. Forsythe will be part of a panel discussion in White Auditorium on Duke’s East Campus on Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.