The irresistible paradox of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is its gritty transcendence. It is grounded but out of body, a free-floating passage through a quotidian life with all its tedium and worries (baldness, aging, misunderstanding), as well as its elusive pleasures (flirting, art, peaches). With sad humor, it both acknowledges and resists human insignificance, futility, and mortality, and nods to the touch of magic that sets us, now and then, unexpectedly aglow.
How could one possibly capture all that in a dance?
Come to Chamber Dance Project’s magnificent concert of contemporary ballet works and music at Sidney Harman Hall and see for yourself.
Chamber Dance Project’s New Works + closes June 22, 2019 at Sidney Harman Hall. Details and tickets
Choreographed by the company’s founder and artistic director, Diane Coburn Bruning, “Prufrock” turns just five dancers (Jonathan Jordan, Francesca Dugarte, Julia Erickson, Ryan Carlough, and Daniel Roberge) into a teeming but lonely city of suited, bowler-hatted strivers (costumes by Bekah Nettekoven Tello) running, colliding, connecting like strays from a painting by Magritte or a play by Beckett. With shifting, feline lighting by Maja E. White, the dancers are here, then there, then both, winding about the stage like Eliot’s “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,” its tongue licking “into the corners of the evening.” An electronic sound collage by James Bigbee Garver incorporates ghostly whispers over fragments of Ravel’s sweet, melancholy Adagio Assai from the Piano Concerto in G Major, all riding on a synth bass throbbing like London’s pulse. And over that, still, is Matt Torney’s steady but wistful reading of the poem. A visit to the questing spirit of a churning metropolis, “Prufrock” enthralls.
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That is only one of seven superb works of dance and music packed into a performance less than two hours long. Each half begins with a stirring duet. Bruning’s 2003 “Journey,” danced Thursday by Dugarte (on point) and Jordan, is full of volatile pushes, pulls, and impulsive diagonal lifts. Accompanied by the famous adagio of Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11, it conveys the spark, ecstasy, and untimely dissolution of a fervent love.
Post-intermission is choreographer Alexjandro Cerrudo “Extremely Close” (the D.C. premiere of a 2017 work), in which Luz San Miguel and Davit Hovhannisyan Thursday, to the persistently plaintive “Metamorphosis Two” by Philip Glass, rule the stage atop a layer of white feathers like ardent fallen gods in a sensual, muscled mythology.
Choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Ronda Ma Non Troppo” pairs a string quartet by Schubert with a quartet of dancers (Dugarte, Erickson, Hovhannisyan, and Jordan) around a little mod white table. Their exuberant conjoinings and frictions in permutations around, above, and below that table feel like the romantic and intellectual subtext of a particularly intense dinner party.
Vigorously rendered musical selections also included the tense “Duel” from Chris Rogerson’s String Quartet No. 1, and the harrowing Allegro from Zoltan Kodaly’s “Duo for Violin and Cello, Opus 7.”
The evening closed with a medley of dances by Bruning to songs by Cole Porter, performed by pianist and singer Barry Gurley, bassist Scott Giambusso, and vocalist Shacara Rogers. For the most part, Bruning keeps these light, fun, and stylized, playing with amusing silhouettes and spinning the spiffy costumes by Tello. (Those included an immense, stunning diamond and stripe black and white pattern gown for the gracefully towering Dugarte). The tonal exception is “Miss Otis Regrets,” in which Erickson, partnered by Hovhannisyan, undermines the understated lyrics, exuding a bold, ill-fated passion. Bruning might consider a counterintuitive reordering of the songs to end with this one, which eerily captures the dolefulness beneath the witty delights of so many Porter tunes and sends a soul-chilling ripple through a party that, alas, cannot last forever.
Nor, unfortunately, will this exquisite production, which ends Saturday.
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Chamber Dance Project’s New Works +, at Sidney Harman Hall through Saturday, June 22. Founder and artistic director: Diane Coburn Bruning. Guest choreographers: Alejandro Cerrudo and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Claudia Chudacoff: principal musician. Luz San Miguel and Luis Torres: ballet masters. Dancers: Francesca Dugarte, Julia Erickson, Davit Hovhannisyan, Jonathan Jordan, Daniel Roberge, Luz San Miguel, Ryan Carlough. Musicians: Claudia Chudacoff, violin; Sean Neidlinger, cello; Chaerim Smith, violin; Derek Smith, viola. Guest artists: Sophia Kim Cook, piano; James Bigbee Garver, composer; Scott Giambusso, bass; Barry Gurley; piano and vocals; Shacara Rogers, vocals; Matt Torney, narrator/director; Joanna Owen, violin. Reviewed by Alexander C. Kafka.
