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IMPRESSIONS: John Jasperse’s Tides on the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
By Catherine Tharin
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Published on April 23, 2025
John Jasperse's Tides. Photo: Maria Baranova
The La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival presents
Tides
John Jasperse Projects
Choreography, Direction, Visual & Costume Design: John Jasperse
Performing collaborators: Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick, Cynthia Koppe, Maria Fleischman, and Jace Weyant
Composer: Hahn Rowe
Lighting Design: Ben Demarest
April 10-13, 2025
John Jasperse’s transcendent Tides, a work of delicacy and quiet strength, received its premiere as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, April 10-13. The work follows five luminous dancers—three with long, distinguished careers, Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick, and Cynthia Koppe, and two at the beginning of theirs, Maria Fleischman and Jace Weyant. Together they represent four generations; Jasperse speaks of transmission from one generation to the next.
The dancers climb plinths, press against the upstage wall, and express nuance through small but significant gestures. They move across the breadth of the Ellen Stewart Theatre’s white marley floor skipping lightly, taking spacious walks, and running up-tempo. They cross on diagonals, cutting swiftly into new directions. Stillness contrasts with energized movement. Through exits, entrances, and evolving partnerships, the dancers reflect an ecology shaped by unseen forces. Tides ebbs and flows like water drawn by the moon.
Elsewhere, Fleischman and Weyant resemble rolling boulders in their solid, weighted progress. They head downstage before curling into a fetal position. When they stand, their knees tremble. Their hands wrap around their heads. They create volumes with their arms. Concurrently, Melnick and Koppe, like dark creatures swimming just beneath the water’s surface, cross the stage to an increasing vocalization of “ahhhh.” At times, they push away a leg extended behind them. Drumming, plucking, and gonging intensify and subside like waves.
The kinetic warmth and generosity of the dancers’ movement lives in their flinging arms, and soft dives, and in a full-hearted momentum that feels open, even hopeful. They exit one by one, to return in shimmering, silvery costumes (also by Jasperse), as if they’ve experienced an underwater world offstage, emerging to share new knowledge.
The lighting, too, offers its own choreography. Tides seems to move through different times of day. It opens in clarity, with illumination pouring into the space. Later, a soft pink wash, like the blush of morning or the haze of sunset, spreads across the floor. At one point, a shaft of light cuts diagonally across the dancers’ eyes, creating a mysterious effect against the shadowy backdrop. These shifts in light, designed by Ben Demarest, don’t just illuminate the dancers, they shape the temporal atmosphere of the piece, which seems to unfold between states of wakefulness and dream.
The work eventually frames Shick and Melnick upstage in a semi-circle of light. Shick sits in Melnick’s lap. They roll onto their stomachs, and stretch their upper bodies Sphinx-like. They stand, and clasp their elbows wrapping their arms around their waists. Later, as they stand close together, Melnick places her hand on Shick’s back and then into her pocket, intimate gestures that point to a long-standing relationship. Changing partners, Melnick stabs her finger into Fleischman’s palm, and then points on the diagonal. Throughout Tides, Shick and Melnick are often paired. While each of the five dancers have moments of quiet radiance within a narrow but charged register, the piece orbits around the steady gravitas of these two.
Jasperse uses perspective by pulling our gaze through the full corridor-like depth of the theater. As Shick slides to the floor downstage with her back to the audience and legs extended, we look past her to see Fleischman and Weyant climb carefully onto the white pedestals upstage. There, they gesture in unison. Melnick and Koppe, lying on the upstage floor, walk their feet up the wall. The sound becomes more textured, as indistinguishable words surface above the music.
In the closing passage, all five move forward, and shield their faces from the light. They bring their hands to their stomachs. The clawing gesture returns, but it has softened. Their heads shift from side to side. Their hands rest lightly at their necks.
