BWW Reviews: EVENT Astonishes at The Joyce Theater

Merce Cunningham is still one of the most challenging artists the United States has ever produced.

Resurrecting excerpts from fifty years of his iconoclastic repertoire, Robert Swinston, former Cunningham dancer and protégé, presented Event with the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine - Angers (CNDC) at The Joyce.

Under the flawless artistic arrangement and stage direction of Swinston, Event chilled and tingled the spine with an extraordinary verve.

The bannered color schemes of Jackie Matisse (granddaughter to Henri) waved in a soft, dim light, reminiscent of a long-abandoned alleyway or factory. The matchlessly original soundscapes of John King and Gelsey Bell evinced a powerful, unsettling mood.

The commingling of King's medieval instrumentation, kora (a stringed gourd traditional to West African music) and viola, manipulated by laptop electronica, mixed masterfully with the experimental vocalizing and precise vibraphone of Bell.

Spontaneity could be heard through the heart-rending aural ambiance of the two composers performing live, as eight dancers moved with such intense, choreographic exactness as to create the effect of a living sculpture.

Yet, humanism and the arts were far from the grace of this historic collaboration from Cunningham and Swinston. Most movements exhibited a seemingly inhuman tension, withheld from the emotional warmth of relationship.

The demonstrative complexity of the choreography posed concepts suggestive of the overburdening power of machines and their effect on human movement, and thus all of life.

As dancers moved, half-human, half-machine, flashes of biological animation escaped the predominant oppression of all-physical, mechanistic technique, a contemporary reflection on art as technology, technology as art.

Event ended abruptly, with the audience gasping for breath under the sheer weight of the drama, as such a direct, albeit purely artful, statement as the long night of the industrial age broke into the dawn of intelligent machines.

Photo: Patrick André

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