dance, review

Review: Paired Spectacular

How do you deal with the weight of breakthroughs made by your aesthetic forebears? Linda Austin meets them head on in the great Paired Spectacular: a performance diptych in honor of Deborah Hay & Yvonne Rainer, her two-and-a-half part dance work that opened last night at Performance Works NorthWest (4625 SE 67th).

In “Part One: Universe,” Austin, Richard Decker and Linda K. Johnson improvise movement, responding to one another and to the everyday objects that litter the stage before moving into a sophisticated game of follow the leader. Things are awkward, things are oddball. Movement is frenetic or low-key, comic and always done with the utmost sincerity sans wink or nudge. Austin has worked with Deborah Hay, to whom this section is dedicated, and many of the hallmarks of a Hay performance are here. Whatever the Hay-inspired internal process of the dancer, the viewer notes goofy vocalization, unusual use of unusual body parts (like tongues, say), undancerly movement, and use of props. One would be hard pressed to find three performers more unlike, and their choices in improvisation highlight their differences which can be distracting. But ultimately these differences in style create both dynamic displacements and subtle balance.

Throughout, the small moments of recognition (when a sound becomes another sound) or cohesion as when movements by Austin and Decker, say, briefly dovetail before phasing again are the hinges that hold Paired together as it unfolds.

As my partner in crime noted, Austin is probably the best sound artist in Portland, her sensitivity to the sounds of the everyday (one section is performed to the sound corn being popped in an electric popper) allowing her to mine simple sounds a body makes when it comes in contact with common objects to surprising and sometimes refreshingly comic effect. With a couple of contact microphones, Austin turns a length of dental floss into a wonderful 20 foot long single-string instrument.

“Part Two: Mutt,” the title referring to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal-as-art that blew the doors off what visual art could be, is Austin’s take on the readymade of Rainer’s “Trio A,” her well-known work (performed last year at MoMA) that turned most conventions of choreography and movement upside down. Following Rainer’s self-imposed rules for composing “Trio A”—beads on a string (no repetition), even pacing, don’t look at the audience—Austin composed her own sequence of movements, or what she called an “ersatz” version of “Trio A.” This sequence is performed thrice, the third time by an ever increasing number of dancers who enter at intervals, joining the movement at whatever point it is in the sequence, eventually dropping out to lean head-first on the back wall. In this clown car moment, the only sound is the swish of clothing or sound of foot or body on floor…with the occasional owl hoot from the back wall. It’s like watching a brush stroke executed again and again; it’s familiar and different every time, and it is spectacular.

Paired Spectacular continues tonight, Saturday, with performances at 7 and 9 PM, and one more on Sunday at 7 PM. Tickets: $12 – $15 sliding scale.

POSTED: June 19th, 2010 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: dance, review | 4 Comments »

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