BWW Dance Review: The Co-Op

We all know what it's like. You go to a performance that presents four different pieces, and by the end you swear that you've been seeing the same thing danced all night. It's like asking yourself: where did it start and finish, because you're in a Kafkaesque mode, and all you want is to be rescued into the realm of logic. Why exactly did the curators present this?

That's what it was like after viewing The Co-Op, a presentation by the Williamsburg Movement and Arts Center, in partnership with the Moving Beauty Series, on the evening of April 17, 2016. It wasn't that it was bad. Quite the contrary. Taken separately each dance was rather interesting: bold, dynamic, and pulsating with energy. But by stringing them together into an evening, the presenters and the choreographers did themselves no favors. It was like watching a repeated performance of the previous dance. And the music continued in exactly the same way: loud (very loud), but droning on and going nowhere but bouncing off the back wall.

Wasn't there someone watching, someone who could scream out and tell them that they were making a mistake, that their presentation was headed for disaster because no one took the time to really analyze what was being shown to an audience? I have been asking myself for years why there isn't some kind of overseer when productions like these are presented. The audience yells bravo, but I seethe inside. Logic doesn't only apply to mathematics and economics--although others these days would argue otherwise.

The four choreographers: Cameron McKinney, Laurie Taylor, Michelle Thompson and Aaron McGloin are all talented, but the language of each dance does not distinguish between repeated lunges, questioning faces, raised arms, lowered arms, lots of hip-hop, some feigned cruelty, grasping. You get the picture. And the use of six exceptional female dancers leaves us with no dramatic tension. Had a male dancer appeared in any one of the four works, it might have made me aware of a difference in approach or a different mindset that we all look for in new choreographic voices.

I'm always on the lookout for new choreographic smarts, one that will raise the dancing bar so that there will be something that others aspire to. It's just that I (I don't dare say "we") come to some mental roadblock. I want so much to like what I see, to discover someone to write about, to interview. I continue my investigation.

The dancers, Sakurako Awano, Brittni Genovese, Zui Gomez, Kerime Jessica Konour, Ta'Rajee Omar, and Caci Prichett were all excellent. With those wide-eyed beaming faces and solid techniques, they would have been a credit to any New York company.

While I may have sounded negative, I believe the Co-Op does have a future. But, like all new companies, it needs a mission statement, one that doesn't only tell us that they're presenting new works. We know that. So do funders. What we need to know is why they exist for dance, about dance, around dance, maybe even side-ways for dance. I try to look at it from all directions

I'll leave it up to them.

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