The Plain Dealer – Groundworks DanceTheater evening expands notions of what dance, staging can be (review)

By Mark Satola, The Plain Dealer

Groundworks DanceTheater launched its new season Friday night at the Allen Theatre at Playhouse Square with an ambitious program that featured the world premiere of German choreographer Johannes Wieland’s “wait. now. go now,” as well as “CoDa” by Israeli-American choreographer Ronen Koresh, and a work by former northeast Ohioan Gina Gibney, celebrating the songs of Patsy Cline.

Johannes Wieland has earned an international reputation through his efforts to expand the meta-language of modern dance well beyond its accustomed parameters, and “wait. now. go now” was a visceral example of his style.

The dance he crafted was the fruit of his collaborative residency with Groundworks this fall. In its set, light and sound design, costumes and movement, it was a challenging assault on the audience’s preconceptions about modern dance.

Wieland crafted the electronic soundtrack himself, sampling from various sound sources including industrial noise and old disco tracks, looping them in rhythmically asymmetrical ways that sometimes created an intentionally maddening effect.

“wait. now. go now” fell into four sections. On a stage completely devoid of any props, and open all the way to the back of the building, two of the five dancers (Felise Bagley, Noelle Cotler, Annika Sheaff, Damien Highfield and Troy Macklin) dragged out two other dancers by the arm, as if hauling corpses, or at least unconscious figures, to a throbbing electronic collage of scraping and pounding.
As movement began to coalesce, the score transitioned into a percolating loop partly sampled from Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby,” and the dancers began stylized interactions, characterized by an uncommon violence of movement and senses of aggression and futility.

The high point was reached when, in a lengthy interlude, the dancers changed costumes on stage, shedding their generic tops and pants for white sequined cowboy outfits, performing to a cowboy song loop that included Noelle Cotler handling a live vintage Shure 55 microphone and singing along with the fragmented vocals while an increasingly surreal line dance was evoked.

Groundworks director David Shimotakahara, in his opening remarks, had noted that Wieland sought to expand dance into other areas including theater, and this passage of what might be called “techno-dada” exemplified that idea quite well.

The lighting, designed by Dennis Dugan, was appropriately harsh and at one point confrontational, as the dancers wheeled spotlights around the stage, lighting each other and letting the spots glare directly at the audience.

The evening opened with a reprise of Gina Gibney’s “Always,” which was premiered at Cain Park in 2003. Set to seven songs recorded by country icon Patsy Cline shortly before her death in a plane crash in 1963, “Always” traces a conventional narrative among two couples in which the men and women interact romantically, pull apart and recombine, while the music and spare set (a jukebox downstage left) weave an atmosphere of nostalgia and loneliness.

The mostly languorous tempos of the Cline songs created a sultry feel that was reflected in the sexually charged movements of the dancers, though there was a certain monotony that began to set in, relieved finally by the more upbeat song “Crazy Arms.” Dugan’s lighting here was subtle, with a warm tungsten glow edged by a soft rose.

The third dance was “CoDa,” set to music by the French composer and prolific recording artist René Aubry, whose music weaves elements of New Age and world music, and who has written for both movies and modern dance.

Choreographer Ronen Koresh’s early experience with Israeli folk dance troupes infuses his later work with a certain communal sensibility most evident in “CoDa’s” outer sections, which found the five dancers performing in geometric unison, though his interest in evolving movement showed strongly in the two solo turns, by Annika Sheaff and Noelle Cotler, both of whom acquitted themselves with an extra measure of energy and expressivity.