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| Press - Village Voice, October 20, 2010 |
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by Deborah Jowitt
Hilary Easton and Amanda Loulaki Delve Into Couples
Pairs who love, fight, and stay together. Or not.
Hilary Easton and Company
Baryshnikov Arts Center
October 14 through 17
"I need some space." How often have we heard-read-said those words? Space as in a room of one's own, space in a crowded brain so we can grope toward meaning, space meaning temporary freedom from an overpowering relationship. With quiet authority and a gentle grasp, Hilary Easton’s new duet Light and Shade tackles the many facets of intimacy that the remark evokes.
Easton is a wise choreographer and one alert to civilization’s perils. Most often, she develops group pieces that involve ideas of considerable complexity, often incorporating text. Light and Shade, which she has been working on with Michael Ingle and Emily Pope-Blackman for a year, distills her sensitivity to the human condition into a study of a couple—not two people who’ve recently met through a dating service, but a man and woman who know (or think they know) everything about each other.
In the Baryshnikov Center’s Howard Gilman Performance Space, the 45-minute piece—sparingly and sensitively lit by Kathy Kaufmann, and punctuated by Mike Rugnetta’s fine, unobtrusively atmospheric score—begins with what might be a theatrical cliché: two dancers practicing moves, kibitzing as they go. Ingle and Pope-Blackman, standing side by side, begin with a “Ready?” and a minimal action of swaying, twisting, and leaning together, which gradually escalates into larger-scale dancing. They approach every move as if testing it out, all the while murmuring questions and directions to each other that are almost too quiet to be heard.
Madeleine Walach has costumed the two in outfits that bridge dance and everyday life: Pope-Blackman wears a short, sleeveless dress over a long-sleeved leotard, and Ingle is in slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. And it quickly becomes clear that this is not one of those rehearsal-life vignettes; the steps and the conferring are metaphors for the daily negotiations involved in a marriage. Sometimes a bit of irritation creeps in: “That’s too far. OK, stop.” At one point, Ingle picks up Pope-Blackman’s arm and plays with it in a strangely disagreeable way. But they keep aggression at bay, and he tends to stroke his way into a complicated collaborative move, trying to find just the right place to grasp his partner before he swings her into the air. You begin to notice when, and how easily, the two slip into unison dancing, and how they drift apart.
In one passage, Ingle pursues his own athletic course back and forth at the rear, while Pope-Blackman tests the fourth wall, inching one foot across the invisible line that divides audience from performance. Subtly, at various moments, she surveys us, flirts with us. Yet, even when they’re separated by distance, if he falls, she does too, and even though Kaufmann accords them individual pools of light, they can easily fall into unison again.
Unease and hostility vie with what we’ve come to understand as love and tolerance of differences. The two may touch puffed out-chests, but they twist away from conflict; coming nose-to-nose, they then avert their faces (while a violinist in Rugnetta’s taped score goes crazy with his bow). And, inevitably they’re together again at the end, repeating some of their earliest moves, seeing us from a distance, as if we represent the world outside the cloister of their intimacy—the world they need to explore from time to time in order to refresh the small, intense one they share.
Pope-Blackman and Ingle perform Light and Shade marvelously. Nothing seems studied or strikes a false note. Easton’s choreography makes tricky, even virtuosic moves look both unusual and like heightened forms of something we understand in our own minds and bodies very well.
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