AISLE SAY Jacob's Pillow
DORRANCE DANCE
Artistic Director: Michelle Dorrance
Jacob’s Pillow/Doris Duke Theatre, July 16-27
Becket MA – jacobspillow.org//(413) 243-0745
Dorrance Dance is tap dance and percussive improvisation incarnate. The company, led by
Michelle Dorrance, is an ensemble of dancers, musicians and vocalists that
share the joy and indefatigable love of jazz-like spontaneity. They do not look
like other companies that at Jacob’s
Pillow this season. They don’t conform to any
preconceptions that one might have about dancers: they look just right as they
are, and as a group together, because they know why they are on the stage and
they appreciate the work that is going on around them. In the best
improvisational sense, they couldn’t mange what they do without the full
commitment of everyone else around them. And while this is also true of any
performing company – dance, theatre, music – it’s especially moving
in this context because we feel that they are creating the work, making it up,
moment to moment without the safety net of carefully structured choreography.
And not to in any way suggest that Dorrance and her collaborators haven’t
shaped and supported the spontaneity of the dancers, but the energy that
transmits itself from the stage to the audience is thanks to the quality of
being ‘in the moment’. This is a palpable reaction that electrifies an
audience.
The programme is comprised of a series of scenes and
by the end of the 80+ minutes, we have had the opportunity to see each dancer
exhibit a staggering range of skills and riffs on what we might have thought
would be precision tapping. The dancing is augmented by musical instruments and
sounding boards that Dorrance and Nicholas Van Young have created.
Tempi are established only to be reset, to be challenged. And the variety of sounds
is made the more impressive as the dancers’ footwear is complemented by remote
devices that complicate the soundscape already in play. Found materials, too,
like links of heavy chain, transform their utilitarian function into a
percussionist’s newest plaything.
Most of the company plays right to the audience,
clearly feeding off of the energy that we are trying to send back to the
stage. The sole exception, and not a
negative, is Warren Craft, a tall man whose internal responses seem to set his
apart from much else that is happening onstage. He is never disconnected from
the others, but he rarely, if ever, plays out to us and, in the process, draws
us more closely to his idiosyncratic interpretations. His duet with Michelle
Dorrance is a highlight, among many highlights.
“ETM: The Initial Approach”, as the programme is
entitled, could benefit from careful editing. At about the sixty or sixty-five
minute mark, the dances and the variations felt familiar and repetitive.
The audience in the Doris Duke Theatre cheered at
many points and gave the company a richly deserved and sustained ovation. As
they have done so often, and with such remarkable consistency, the Pillow
folks, with Ella
Baff leading the way, have taken us to new places
that we couldn’t have found without their expert guidance.
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