SOLI with dance:
An imperfect but intriguing collaboration
March 19, 2008Even if the results Tuesday night weren't entirely persuasive, the SOLI Chamber Ensemble's collaboration with dancer Amber Ortega-Perez pointed in a direction that is worth further exploration.
There's nothing new, of course, in having musicians accompany a dancer, or vice versa. But "(RE)ACTION" stands apart from the norm on three grounds: It was created by its performers, clarinetist Stephanie Key, guitarist Joe Reyes and Ortega-Perez, in a fully collaborative process; the piece integrated the musicians into the dance; and the music was semi-improvised, planned in some of its features but meant to be worked out on the spot for each performance. The repeat, Thursday at 7:30 in the Blue Star Contemporary Arts Center, is likely to be different in many of its details from Tuesday's premiere performance in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall.
In a conversation with the audience after the performance, the collaborators explained that the piece was about the threat of global warming. Hmm. I'd thought it had to do with either the liquidity crisis in the investment banking industry or Teresa of Avila. Suffice to say the very abstract nature of the piece was ill-suited to polemic -- that's a great advantage of abstraction. One aspect threw me off the scent: It was hard not to think of the most famous scene from Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" during the last of the three movements ("Glo-ball"), when the musicians played a silly, parodistically out-of-tune waltz while Ortega-Perez toyed with a big blue balloon, which ultimately popped. The first movement ("Fuel") was the strongest: Ortega's partner here was a chair. Its seat sometimes supported her horizontally as she appeared to swim, or she danced standing while holding its back, or she she writhed on the floor while holding a chair leg -- almost never losing physical contact. This was supposed to indicate the world's addiction to oil, but it could just as easily have symbolized dependency or unfreedom in general. The music for this movement (with Key on bass clarinet) sounded the most improvised -- angular, harsh, fragmented, but always closely responsive to the dancer. The middle movement ("Conduit"), starting with all three performers running in a circle and ending with Ortega-Perez weaving through the musicians, had lyrical music that was pretty but slight.
The program also held four strictly musical pieces featuring Key. Yehudi Wyner's "Commedia" for clarinet and piano (Carolyn True) was interesting for its ebb and flow of mercurial and relaxed tempi and its generally severe harmonic atmosphere that sometimes broke to allow a glint of Romantic radiance. The structure rather sprawled, however. Elliott Carter's brief "Gra," for clarinet alone, deployed wide melodic leaps and played with the pace of time. Libby Larsen's "Song Without Words" evoked gliding through water in its sustain-pedal atmospherics, but the lyrical clarinet line, though often lovely, didn't rise much above noodling.
The musical apex was Steve Reich's delightful "New York Counterpoint, " for live clarinet and 10 prerecorded clarinet and bass clarinet parts on tape. Opening with fast pulses on single pitches, the piece moves into brilliant byplay that alters the listener's perception of time and comes to a swinging close with music that recalls Gershwin's "Fascinating Rhythm."
The performances were all zesty and finely crafted.
Mike
Greenberg
