Hilary Easton's work has always invigorated me. I love the way the density of information in each phrase is given velocity by the savvy construction of the work as a whole. This stuff is for grown-ups. What strikes me immediately at the beginning of Easton’s newest work, The Reclamation, is the finely wrought movement. The phrases are thoroughly considered. They’re jagged and silky, elegant and chaotic, paradoxical. It takes years to develop the skill to generate movement sequences like this--so packed with detail and yet kept airborne by their own kinetic logic. It also takes the kind of mind which is truly captivated by the potential of movement. Hilary Easton has both the brain and the discipline.

She has also chosen a topic which is mysteriously suitable for dancing—the gradual, inexorable encroachment of the natural world into our fragile, cultivated society. Human nature topples economies, the planet heats up in response to human industry, vines grow around our ankles while we stand still in shock. The dancers in The Reclamation curl, twine and wriggle through the parabolic phrases and around the bodies of the two actors who embody a pair of genteel citizens helpless before their fate. There’s a wry undertone of horror-movie theatrics as the dancers, a group of efficient monsters, seize and pluck at the actors while bearing witness to their demise. The sweet propriety with which the actors maintain their dignity throughout such humiliations is part of what makes the work powerful. They are the hapless prey speaking in epigrams while patiently stalked by an agile horde. We know to whom the spoils will go.
The dancers go about their business with imperturbable purpose and agility. Easton lets the contrast speak for itself. I’m listening still.

David Parker

David Parker, choreographer, will next appear with his own company, The Bang Group, in Show Down at Joe’s Pub in June 2009.  His notorious comic/subversive version of The Nutcracker, entitled Nut/Cracked will be presented by Dance Theater Workshop in December 2009 and he will have a new full-length work presented by Symphony Space in March 2010.
www.thebanggroup.com

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