Instinct on Parade

Laura Peterson Choreography
Chris Elam’s Misnomer Dance Theater
Nicole Berger Performance Group
Baruch Performing Arts Center, New York
April 21 and 22, 2005

by Tom Phillips
copyright ©2005 by Tom Phillips

Choreographers of the 21st century may be looking down the evolutionary scale for inspiration. That was the message from three young New York artists, who put their newest work on display in a marathon triple-feature at the Baruch Performing Arts Center last week. Laura Peterson, Chris Elam and Nicole Berger all played in some way with the likeness of human and animal behavior.

Peterson’s new work, “Security,” explores the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, somewhere around the dust mites. The whole piece is done with the dancers on all fours, scurrying about in buglike bursts of motion, in striped tights and black hoods. The action is accompanied by a surveillance camera video: it seems our friends have emerged from a subterranean tunnel, and are being monitored by the guardians of some bleak industrial property. The bugs themselves are industrious, and totally harmless, interested mostly in each others’ rear ends, which are decorated in frilly lace. If from the title one expects a satire on homeland security, or social security, it’s not there. Peterson’s irony is deeper than that: it might be a satire on all human fears and phobias, in particular our trepidation about our true nature, about how much we have in common with the lower orders. Still, the piece is broadly comic and audience-friendly, thanks to two highly visible and gifted muggers. Adele Berne and Christopher Hutchings play a creature couple who are alternately attracted, repelled and indifferent to each other’s seductive butt-twitchings. Their funniest scene is on the surveillance video, where Hutchings stands up and furiously shakes his booty to a French pop tune, knocking a top hat off Berne’s head and drawing a look of disdain and mock incomprehension worthy of W.C. Fields. The finale is also a hoot: in an evolutionary breakthrough, Berne discovers how to use a roller skate, first trying it on her head, then her rear, then—eureka!—strapping it to her knee. (These are special quadruped-friendly skates, constructed by Jon Pope.) Soon the entire cast is careening across the stage on their hot new wheels.