April 5, 2007

Fusilli at Dance Salad

By Molly Glentzer, Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Mama mia. Whew! I'm still humming those Italian songs, and my legs -- heck, torso and arms and head and feet and hands, too -- want to bust loose.

I hate to resort to food analogies when reviewing Dance Salad Festival shows, but Compagnia Alterballetto's Cantata is like a big ol' bowl of fusilli pasta swimming in garlic, onions and tomatoes -- twisted, squiggly and saucy.

"Extracts" from Cantata brought Thursday's festival opener to a rousing end. By far the most fun night I can remember in many years of watching Nancy Henderek's annual international dance showcase.

Imagine a folk dance-swing fest-sock hop-hoedown by 10 amazing dancers who personify the spirit of traditional Southern Italian music performed live by a female quartet called Gruppo Musicale Assurd.

Download music by this group if you can find a recording. Armed with an organetto (a small accordion), a tammora (a huge tamborine), castanets and tamborines -- not to mention voices that rumble from the center of the earth, Gruppo Musicale Assurd is like a hearty female Italian version of the Buena Vista Social Club.

Choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti, the director of Italy's premier dance touring company, has a quirky style that uses every sinew in his dancers' bodies. (Houston's Dominic Walsh Dance Theater will present more work by Bigonzetti in May.)

There's a WHOLE lot going on from head to toe, but early on, Cantata involves a lot of hilariously grotesque hand gestures. In the equally-amusing WAM, set to Mozart -- Bigonzetti puts the attention on his dancers' amazing feet, which hold onto their high arches even when they're seriously flexed. The footwork also includes some Trocadero-inspired, stylized tap and stomping -- referencing court dance posturing, of course -- when the men wear Louis XIV-style heels (what better to go with tailcoats and fanny-exposing thongs?).

Bigonzetti's dancers pull off heart-stopping projectile-like lifts and tosses that are unorthodox and funny. The women also spend a lot of time with their ankles wrapped around the men's necks, backs or thighs, while their torsos snake around.

Two spectacular dancers from Russia's Bolshoi Ballet got wound up and unwound, too -- in Alexei Ratmansky's Middle Duet, a contemporary ballet so inventive I wanted to cry. Why can't all choreographers be this original?

Middle Ground offers an enticing glimpse of the new Bolshoi, capable of speedy and sharp abstraction in a confined space. The young Ratmansky, director of ballet at the Bolshoi Theater since 2004, could be the Balanchine that won't slip away from his home country. Expect to hear a lot more about soloist Natalia Osipova and her partner, Andrey Merkuriev.

Middle Duet takes off from the winding gear sound in its Yuri Khanin music, offering delightful movement surprises with each measure. (What about those "time lapse" lowerings -- I can't think of any other way to describe them -- as Merkuriev brought Osipova to the floor from high lifts, pausing at several levels before letting her touch ground again?)

The dancers (mainly Osipova, supported by Merkuriev) never does anything that looks so obvious as a wind-up toy or even a corkscrew -- she's tightly-wound mentally and physically. And the ending is a revelation: after both dancers have exhausted themselves and collapsed like tossed fabric, they pull themselves up with Herculean effort and start the choreography over again. Here, suddenly, the "wind-up" metaphor becomes intriguingly concrete.

Son Yea-Ran and Lee Jae-Jun of Korea's Kim Eun-Hee Dance Company were mesmerizing in Burying Together, an intense dance that seemed like a hybrid of traditional Oriental dance and hard-core spasmodic modernism. It suggested a ritual involving surrender, domination and some mysterious state of union. Although maybe it was a funeral, given the altarlike set. The dancers wore elaborately slit white robes with pointed hoods. Early on, when the movement was enigmatic and minimal, they held small wooden blocks in the palms of their hands, making clacking sounds. When they finally touched -- for a split second -- something electric ignited, and the tension became intoxicating.

Then there were the effortless northern Europeans, in slick duets that celebrated bodies and form. Annebelle Lopez' La Pluie, featuring Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve's beautiful Celine Cassone and Bruno Roy, was a super follow to the Koreans. It, too, began with religious overtones -- something medieval by Hildegard von Bingen -- as Cassone evoked a figure both vulnerable and powerful.

Natasa Novotna and Vaclav Kunes, dancing for the Kylian Foundation, breezed through a duet from Jiri Kylian's now-classic Petite Mort.

Mexico's Compania Nacional de Danza rounded out the evening with Nellie Happee's Merejada, a seaside reverie en pointe, and a duet from Alberto Alonso's Carmen Suite.

The Dance Salad Festival continues at 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday at the Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. The program is slightly different each night, and will feature additional companies. Tickets are $19-$47, available at www.dancesalad.org or 877-772-5425.

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