Moving to the Music

DancenOw/NYC
Dance Theater Workshop
New York, New York
September 8, 2005

by Tom Phillips
copyright ©2005 by Tom Phillips

“In a provocative essay last week (9/6) in The New York Times, Gia Kourlas wrote: “New York is no longer the capital of the contemporary dance world.”  Creative energy has shifted abroad, she said, and “Europe is becoming what New York used to be.”  As a proud and provincial New Yorker, I was shocked.  So when Dance Theater Workshop presented an evening of young choreographers, on the second night of the season-opening DancenOw/NYC festival, I went looking for evidence to refute this crazy charge. Truth to tell, I found as much to support as to contradict it….
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“The comedy of instinctual movement is the running gag in Laura Peterson’s “Security,” danced by three women and a man on their hands and knees, in striped bug costumes.  But there’s more to this than watching a bunch of pests bothering each other.  It’s all recorded and displayed on multiple security cameras, in what seems like a satire on America’s fumbling obsession with surveillance.  It’s the sort of thing you see when you’re looking real hard for something else.  “Security” is a hoot, but once again the reason it’s such a pleasure to watch is because of the skill and musicality of the dancers.  They don’t just skitter around the stage, they do it at absurdly fast tempos, with sudden stops and starts, all keyed into the dreamy beat of a French pop song. 

Kourlas ended her New York Times piece with a call for a new revolution in American dance, “the more shocking the better.”  I’d settle for a few more choreographers as hip as Laura Peterson, and more dancers on the level of Nugent and Matteson, or Naoko Kikuchi.  In the end, it’s about moving to the music.”