It begins with a line of women in black dresses, advancing toward us. As the tide of their bodies turns back, one more woman emerges through them. She holds our attention with both otherworldly fluidity and a flashing of claws. She points at us with casual command, then shimmies. As she walks away, she looks over her shoulder with the tiniest of smirks.
Something witchy is happening in John Jasperse’s “Tides,” which had its premiere at the start of the 20th anniversary of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Much of the magic derives from the casting. The pointing woman is Jodi Melnick, who has been bewitching audiences for decades. Later Vicky Shick, another veteran spell caster, wags a finger. But the hidden force is Jasperse, a choreographer whose compositional skill and artistry channel the talents of these exceptional performers into the special sorcery of contemporary dance.
“Tides” honors a particular lineage. Melnick, Shick and Cynthia Koppe have ties to the postmodern luminary Trisha Brown, an early Jasperse inspiration. Younger dancers in “Tides,” Maria Fleischman and Jace Weyant, have been students of Jasperse and Melnick. As the dancers combine and recombine or line up together and shield their eyes from the moon, there are suggestions of the older dancers taking the younger ones under their wings.
Some drama comes from Hahn Rowe’s oddly aerating score, which ranges from poltergeist noises to techno beats. Ben Demarest’s lighting lines the sides of the stage for sections that resemble catwalk modeling, illuminates the back wall to highlight dancers curiously conjoining body parts and partially blinds us with oncoming headlights. But the main charge of “Tides,” one of the most engrossing dance works I’ve seen this year, comes from the choreography: a strong structure kept supple and alive with little slippages and surprises.
“Tides” made for a thrilling but incongruous start to La MaMa Moves, which continues though Sunday. The festival is customarily a home to the fledgling and never-quite-arrived ends of experimental dance. A premiere by Jasperse, a major choreographer whose work has appeared at major theaters like Brooklyn Academy of Music, could be read as an anniversary treat and an act of generosity — or as a troubling symptom of a dance ecosystem in crisis.
Two shared programs this past weekend were back to festival business as usual: a lot of first-draft ideas and one undersung delight. In “dance for no ending,” Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro tried all kinds of things — entering along the walls as if playing a vertical game of Twister, hurling props onto the stage, wrestling, drawing, making ironic announcements through a bullhorn. None of the zaniness, though, was actually fun or funny.
Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a thoughtful, talented choreographer when he has multiple bodies at his disposal. But his solo “Mooncry” was vanishingly thin. After some throat-clearing business of entering and exiting the stage, he read names of audience members and threw mints at them. The work, he said while standing on a pile of books, was research into crying. But the research seemed to be in early stages, hitting on a strong idea only occasionally, as when he wittily hung a wig on a microphone stand next to a fan.
In the other shared program, Megumi Eda addressed intergenerational trauma in her solo “Please Cry.” Her grandmother was a nurse in the Japanese military during World War II but never discussed the experience. She taught Eda not to cry. We learned some of this as Eda livestreamed herself and talked to her dead grandmother on her cellphone, shared home movies, wore a nurse’s coat and thrashed against a wall. A standout dancer decades ago in the company of Karole Armitage, Eda remains striking, but the work was inchoate.
That kind of deficiency is to be expected from this festival, but so are discoveries like Nic Gareiss. A virtuoso step dancer in Irish and Appalachian traditions, Gareiss isn’t unknown in New York: He’s been presented at the Irish Arts Center and last week at the Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival. Nevertheless, he’s an underexposed treasure.
At La MaMa, Gareiss was joined by Alexis Chartrand, who plays French Canadian fiddle tunes on a Baroque violin. Gareiss scuffed and scraped the sanded floor, easing into fancy flatfooting and tucking in surprises like knocking heels and clicking toes. Much of the time, he stayed in place with his feet directly underneath him and danced, as it were, under his breath — murmuring, whispering. He spoke of his collaboration with Chartrand as a “meshing of sonic intimacies,” and so it mainly was, starting quiet and getting quieter.
At one point, Gareiss, an unassuming charmer, made a comment about being in an experimental theater and gave audience members permission to express themselves in “noises of pleasure.” He also mentioned being “a petulant queer child” who rebelled against his Irish dance teacher’s prohibition against scraping feet. In those two comments, perhaps, was an answer to how a traditional dancer like Gareiss (out and proud in a traditional field) fits into the frequently undercooked avant-gardism of La MaMa Moves and how he quietly invigorated it.
