As a fan of Hilary Easton’s company for many years, I have watched her work take shape, change shape and change shape again.   In a world where artists too often present photocopies of their previous works, Ms. Easton’s work doesn’t rest on her past accomplishments.  She is a risk taker and an adventurer who challenges herself and takes on new responsibilities.  As choreographer, director and writer of “The Reclamation,” Ms. Easton pays no attention to her own words of caution that haunt us throughout the piece: “Walk carefully.”  “Watch your step.”   With this piece, Easton takes brave steps toward redefining herself as an artist.
The fluid undulations and seamless patterns and the sharing and transferring of organic shapes and staccato movements from dancer to dancer are still at the core of Easton’s work, and that’s a good thing.  This is the movement Easton is known for:  elegant, rooted, uplifting, simultaneously simple and complex.  De Kooning and Stella had (have) their lines and Ms. Easton has hers, which, to me, remind me of those two artists in combination.  It’s not easy to find movement that expresses both the free-form expressiveness of DeKooning and the hard-edged directness of Stella.  Easton does this fluidly, and she leaves me believing that these two artists have every right to be discussed in the same sentence.
It is from this solidly defined movement that Ms. Easton steps out, trying her hand as both the writer of the text and the director of the multi-media event.  This is relatively new territory for Easton, but there is plenty there that makes it clear that she will continue to develop her talents in these areas.  In her writing Easton is at once thoughtful, curious, poetic and quite humorous.  Listening to Stephen Ratazzi deadpan “Keep your trousers tucked in your boots,” while dancers twist behind him is simply funny, even if he seems desperate to save a life or two while speaking.  Just hearing somebody in a New York theater say the word “trousers” is funny.  Easton’s appreciation for oddities like this are laced throughout the script, and Rattazzi and his oratory partner, Jean Taylor, excel at giving the proper downtown quirkiness to her words.
Finding the right balance between narrative and abstraction is a most difficult task.  We come to a performance wanting so many things: story, non-linear movement, poetry, color and shape.  We want to know what we’re watching and also to be surprised at what we see.  We want to be able to understand and yet we demand abstraction and idiosyncrasy.  Ms. Easton understands this and is working hard to develop her art form so that it can deliver all of it.

Bill Liebeskind

Bill Liebeskind is a visual artist and teaches art in a public school in Harlem.

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