Performers at last weekend’s Dionysian Festival proved that even in dance, some things get better with age.
Presented at Mary Sano Studio of Duncan Dancing, the festival was held in honor of Isadora Duncan’s 126th birthday, offering an eclectic array of modern works.
Among the standouts were Junko Sodeyama, Mary Sano and G Hoffman Soto — mature artists who possess techniques so finely tuned, their dance vocabulary seems limitless.
With her thin, flat and extremely flexible body, Sodeyama transformed herself into entities that barely looked human in Encuentros. At one point, she curled into a ball and slid on the floor resembling a rock falling in slow motion. And her sinewy back! Who ever knew a body could be so artful in and of itself?
Unfortunately, Encuentros, set to music by Joan Jeanrenaud, was less than inspiring. There were plenty of interesting moments but they didn’t connect into unifying vision. The trio (Sodeyama, Sano and Beatriz Restrepo) rolled on the floor in Butoh-like style. They jumped and ran at hyper speeds. But then they dumped abstraction for a more narrative approach, with Sano being pulled between the ecstatic Restrepo and the mourning Sodeyama. With so many themes flowing forth, no ideas were left apparent for the audience to savor.
In contrast, G Hoffman Soto, in Improvisations in Movement and Sound, created a dancework so tight in concept, it mesmerized the audience. Billy Cauley provided the live music, a combination of bells, clickers, drums and shells, which sounded straight out of a rainforest.
G Hoffman Soto embodied that music, constantly re-interpreting the layers of sounds. He made the unnatural look natural, at times moving as if a bird, and even morphing into some primordial creature, one that acts by instinct rather than emotion.
On the surface, Soto looks like an aging artist past his prime, with his thick, gray hair. But nothing could be further from truth. Like a break dancer, he controls and isolates each part of his body. And like Twyla Tharpe, he nuances each movement with a myriad of composite parts. For example, he flicked his head, shifted his shoulder, bent his elbow and unfolded his fingers in the same beat.
A quarter way through Improvisations, he was joined by the beautiful Lakshmi Aysola, a woman who matched Soto in stage presence. The two moved in such mysterious ways, with complex, calculated dance steps that filled out the music, as well as time and space. It was a post-modern mating ritual set in prehistoric times.
The Dionysian Festival closed with Isadora Duncan: Five Dances and a Postcript. Actress Kim Furst provided context for the dance by reading selections from Duncan’s autobiography, My Life.
It was a mixed bag. Only Sano, who has studied Duncan for more than 20 years, had the ability to expand the Duncan vocabulary and give meaning to it. The rest of the company gave it a good shot, but they looked soft and floppy through much of the work.
The dances “postscript” was “Mirrors,” a surreal and eerie piece Sano choreographed to Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus. Here, Sano proved to be a dance dramatist. Moving along a wall covered by a mirror, she never separated from her image. For much of the dance, the audience saw more of her twin than of Sano herself. She was captivated by her image, and so were the viewers.