The body-bruising career of a performer
Apart from its narrative segments, Bradley Michaud’s exciting, hourlong “supercedure” is a movement spectacle about impact. On the black-curtained open stage of the Diavolo Dance Space near Union Station, bodies hurtling into the air and slamming onto the floor make knee pads as essential to the experience as toe shoes are to 19th century ballet.
Whether performing in silence, to percussive rock, to rumbling sound effects or, most memorably, to a snarling, James Bondian orchestral track, the five members of Michaud’s Method Contemporary Dance sustain perfect unions at the outer limits of physical control. And even if his choreography repeats itself a little too often, Michaud’s sense of spatial design imposes an elegant symmetry on all the virtuosic body-smashing on view.
Kristie Roldan’s lighting aims colored spots at the audience, making you watch the dancers through glare, but they’re so individual in look and attack that depersonalization proves impossible. Michaud is the skinniest in the company, Jay Bartley the most massive. And the women, oh the women: sinewy figures of power like the sibyls in the Sistine Chapel or the weird sisters in “Macbeth,” pumped up for combat and superbly domineering whenever the group’s leadership passes to them.
As it happens, the structure of “supercedure” assigns every dancer except Sidnie Charnaw to impersonate the cruel, capricious director of the company -- a figure defined by a trembling hand and an unexplained weakness (age? illness?) that keeps him or her isolated from the others.
Nicole Cox rules with regal contempt, Jessica Harper by sheer force, Bartley through weight and Michaud by a perversion of the work ethic. They launch or direct performances aimed at the audience, but also what seem to be rehearsals. What’s more, a number of documentary passages -- dancers whispering, cleaning up the stage, dressing the director -- culminate in a deliberately nasty depiction of everyone jockeying for position, trying in the most brutal ways to be first in line to supersede their leader.
Michaud never reveals whether he’s portraying the breakup of a former company or the tensions in this one, but his neo-dramatic episodes and reality clips eventually make the bold physicality of the pure-movement sequences seem less and less celebratory, more and more a kind of punishment: dance as penal hard labor.
It’s not quite snuff dance, but it’s on the way: an example of the dance rage so evident from so many Southland choreographers on a recent “Spectrum” program, and something that’s fast becoming a local specialty.
The fury could be directed at a community that marginalizes the art -- makes it a struggle to exist here as a dancer, choreographer, company leader.
Or it could be aimed at the body itself: ruled only for a time by, and inevitably slated to betray, the perfect control that exists at this moment on the Diavolo stage.
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Method Contemporary Dance
Where: Diavolo Dance Space, 616 Moulton Ave. (in the Brewery Arts Complex), Lincoln Heights
When: 8:30 tonight and Thursday through Saturday
Price: $20 (students) and $25
Contact: (310) 435-2901 or www.methoddance.com
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