by Diplomacy without gravity said the “New York Times”.
Article from the New York Times
8CHO in the United States
DanceMottion a State Department program produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, sends American companies to perform abroad for cultural diplomacy but also arranges collaborations between American troupes and foreign ones.
At the BAM Fishman Space on Thursday, Doug Varone and Dancers, from New York, and the Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company, from Argentina, each presented a work before unveiling a joint project, “Bilingua.” The evening was less about English meeting Spanish than about ground meeting air.
Mr. Varone’s “Boats Leaving” (2006), a moving evocation of refugees, was an apt choice. Much of its eloquence is floorbound: the dancers crawl on their bellies and seem to be sucked back, as if by a tide. Not without cloying moments, the work adapted well to a three-sided audience configuration. Its circles and its desperately formed queues on diagonals gained meaning and force.
It’s tango on the moon.
Ms. Angiel’s “8cho” (2010), a suite of tango numbers in which some dancers are assisted by elastic ropes and pulleys, began promisingly with one couple. The ropes alter the tango’s drama of shared weight, but in expanding into floating, springing and hanging upside down, Ms. Angiel’s choreography doesn’t abandon the form’s finesse and musicality. It’s tango on the moon.
A lonely solo for a man with one hand tied to a dangling rope maintained the magic by tracing sad pendular circles, but later numbers in “8cho” fizzled into cuteness or dull variations. (Kudos to the hidden partners, the riggers.)
“Bilingua,” fittingly set to Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, started weakly, with the Varone dancers doing boilerplate Varone and three Angiel women hanging like chandeliers. But then the Argentines began to swing. As they walked the back wall and Varone dancers swarmed below, there was a heady illusion of two perpendicular floor planes. The Angiel women, oscillating past their standing men, were the work’s tender core.
And when the groups merged, it seemed a natural extension of Mr. Varone’s trademark tableaus, cantilevered compositions in which someone is always straining upward. Now, with ropes, that straining someone could stretch farther, into the air. The conclusion, with Americans swirling and Argentines swinging in huge arcs, was thrilling. How’s that for friendship between nations?
Doug Varone and Dancers and Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company perform through Sunday at Fishman Space in BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place, near Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100, bam.org.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2013, Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Diplomacy, Free of Gravity.
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