Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet: Program A
Dance review by Helen Shaw
The boom and crash of a dance company collapsing before its time can have a kind of operatic grandeur. On Wednesday, the first night of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s farewell BAM series, a besotted audience called out to the stage, desperate to show its love, applauding and cheering even the less successful pieces. Clearly, Cedar Lake hasn't worn out its welcome, but founder-funder Nancy Laurie doesn't want to run a troupe anymore, so her 12-year-old pet project has been brusquely concluded. There is one, and only one, bright side here: Cedar Lake's ensemble is taking its farewell lap at top speed. Despite the varying caliber of individual works, we find ourselves thrilled and a little breathless, watching a brace of thoroughbreds thunder to the finish line.
Program A begins with a shot of pure oxygen: Richard Siegel's violently exciting My Generation, a new work that marries club dance, voguing realness (often en pointe) and aggressive quotations from classical movement. Buzzing electronic music by Atom (Uwe Schmidt) cycles through several adrenalized numbers before grinding into a highly processed version of the Who's “My Generation,” lip-synched with abandon by Matthew Rich. The company struts and stalks through an acrobatic, stunt-filled set. A woman somersaults in the air, supported by three men who set her down walking; dancers prowl into sight center stage, emerging from the surrounding black wall as though materializing from Planet Fierce. Bernhard Willhelm's heavily fringed neon-and-khaki costumes recall powwow regalia: wide-legged pants and heavy jackets that shimmer with the spinning bodies, expanding every gesture into flaunting and display. Incredibly, My Generation accelerates through its entire 30-minute length. There's a false ending, a swift detour into a rock concert, a James Brown–style breakdown (Rich, stealing the show again), and Ebony Williams—a dancer so explosive she is basically a pyrotechnic effect—striking poses that bring down the house. “Why don't you all…f-f-f-fade away?” screams Roger Daltrey on the soundtrack, and Siegel, tailoring the piece to the dancers and the moment, answers him by burning the company into our retinas—and ensuring the afterimage will last a long time.
The rest of Program A can't sustain this level of excitement. Crystal Pite's popular 2008 Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue returns (it appears in both programs), but its brief fifteen minutes of weight-sharing, capture-and-release movement feel trite here, even a little maudlin. Still, Jim French's elegant design, a half-circle of rolling light stands, creates lovely moments, particularly when a one of the lights moves across the stage; it could be a god's glowing eye, peering down at the humans writhing below. The New York premiere of Johan Inger's 2014 Rain Dogs is an unfortunate note to end on: an incoherent and literalist tour through a suite of Tom Waits. Inger includes every quasitheatrical trick in the book, but the piece leans heavily on Waits's corrosive lyrics for its effects. I kept wondering why the program wasn't ending with Siegel's piece. Why not send us into the night on My Generation's astonishing contact high? But then I found myself grateful. Cedar Lake is going away forever. It would have been too terrible for our last thought of the evening to be, “I hope I die before I get old.”—Helen Shaw
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Running time: 2hrs. Two intermissions. Through June 6.