IMPRESSIONS: Dances We Dance Presents "Acqua"

A slide projection on the white sheet that serves as a backdrop features a woman looking at the sea, and includes close-ups of droplets falling into liquid. It leaves no doubt about the evening’s theme: WATER!

This corny opener proves to be one of only a few missteps in Acqua, an otherwise engaging program honoring the harmonious confluence of body, mind and spirit, as exemplified in the works of modern dance’s pioneers and founders. Dances We Dance performed these pieces on November 22, 2024, at the Martha Graham Studio theater.

Photo by Alex Gramma
 

While Isadora Duncan's Water Study, from 1905, presents a challenge to the large cast of mostly young dancers, their flowing fabrics in shades of blue and turquoise convey the intent. 

Another Water Study proves to be a masterwork. Created by Doris Humphrey in 1928, the exact year she left Denishawn to create her own company with her dance partner, Charles Weidman, in New York City, the piece owes much to her studies with mentors Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. 

The audience looks at the left side of eleven dancers who kneel bearing weight on their knees, shins, and on top of their feet. They face the floor in a low position, exactly as in Shawn’s Floor Plastique from 1916.

Photo by Steven Pisano
 

Waves ripple from right to left and left to right, as the dancers straighten and bend their bodies and arms initiating the movement with an audible breath. The playful pattern of waves travels across the space from one dancer to another, until two or three dancers moving together make the size of the waves swell. By the time five and six dancers toss the wave back and forth, the cast of eleven have risen to their feet. While most of the action continues to move side to side, Humphrey allows for a diagonal and even creates a landscape setting. Five dancers build a half circle stage right which swirls and spirals in such a way that the person at the downstage end of this moon-shaped configuration finds herself lowest to the ground. This effect suggests a lakeshore with the remaining dancers undulating as the lake itself. For a moment, Humphrey’s imagery is as clear and defined as a photograph, but it dissolves and morphs into another scene much like a watercolor painting. The dancers return to the floor, and after just a few ebbing waves, this wet dream comes to an end.  

Photo by Steven Pisano
 

A program note explicates that both distinct interpretations of water studies are the culmination of a ten-session workshop. Artistic director Francesca Todesco set the Duncan work beginning with an improvisation developed in collaboration with the dancers, while the Humphrey water study was ‘meticulously’ recreated by Gail Corbin.  The critic in me wished for more spatial awareness and a lower center of gravity in the Duncan piece and more freedom in the Humphrey work, but, after a couple of breaths, I was just grateful to see the intrinsic beauty of early modern dance. 

Choreographer Catherine Gallant must have taken Humphrey’s quote “all dances are too long” to heart. Her beautiful trio Wave, from 2001, in which dancers Kathleen Caragine, Colleen Edwards, and Rosy Gentle always find new ways of supporting one another, wafts off far too soon. What a lovely interlude this is, evoking three Isadorables dancing to a Chopin mazurka. 

Photo by Alex Gramma
 

Do the beige tunics over brown skirts and brown socks in Hannah Howell’s Crosscurrents signify contamination? Four women look out at the audience before dancing with one another until they end in a final tableau with three of them looking out again. The program states that the work is informed and inspired by passages from Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley.

Photo by Steven Pisano
 

Rae Ballard’s 2024 Tidal Pool unites the Wave trio with guest dancers Lauren Naslund and Lana Hankinson. I let myself get lost in the pull of tides. It’s a mesmerizing work that connects the channels of Duncan, Humphrey, and Gallant, yet manages to be its own body of water. The quintet of dancers, finely attuned to one another, bask in the flow and weight of their movement and make me feel I am in experienced hands. Just as I question if Ballard could vary the timing, the piece ends. She plays it well. 

After intermission, Todesco’s new trio, Cherchez La Femme, opens a new chapter. Although the whole evening is titled Acqua, the second part of the program is presented under the header 'Women’s Stories & Empowerment.' An “Intro’’ and an “Ending” by a trio of women in white frame three distinct solos. Edwards portrays Simonetta Vespucci, and Caragine is the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, but the centerpiece and the heart of Tedesco’s vision honors the sculptor Camille Claudel. Gentle’s dress differs for the solo. She enters in red, and starts her section lying down while facing the upstage wall with her back to the audience. Her focus stays on her gestures and occasionally drifts off into space before returning to a specific task again. It is a fascinating journey. The audience is not addressed, but gets to witness moments of self-possession, insecurity, hesitation, fragility, and determination. It is a psychological study without a solution or outcome. It leaves me pondering Claudel’s tragic life and her genius. 

Photo by Steven Pisano

The evening ends with two works by guest artist Annmaria Mazzini. The first, Moondew, a solo for herself from 1997 to Maurice Ravel’s song “L’Indifference,” sports a beautiful black dress. She is a strong performer, yet here as in her new quartet, Haunted Echoes, which features music by Meow Meow, Fleetwood Mac, and more, the outward focus directed at the audience does not fit with the aesthetic harmony as presented by Duncan, Humphrey, Gallant, Ballard, and Todesco. 

I was happy to see that the rain that evening did not deter people from coming to see this inspired program centered around women and water.