by Deborah Jowitt
The 69th season of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival… gala featured some charismatic soloists. In an excerpt from Jacqulyn Buglisi's Against All Odds, the extraordinary Graham exponent Terese Capucilli swept about as the fading Sarah Bernhardt drawn like a moth to the spotlight.
The program boasted a lineage running from Ruth St. Denis and Shawn through their pupils Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey to Buglisi/Foreman Dance (both choreographers performed with Graham)…
Performing in the Duke Studio Theater during the festival's first week, Buglisi/Foreman featured a stunning roster of seasoned dancers, including many from the in-legal limbo Graham company. The Graham heritage infuses the two choreographers' work with a sense of dramatic urgency and intensity, but their scale is not heroic. No doom-eager heroines quest through mythic landscapes, however tightly strung the bodies and emotions. It's almost touching to see some of the little coiled-steel women, like founding company members Capucilli and Christine Dakin, strut to the music of Catfish Corner in Donlin Foreman's Mean Ole World. But lovely, long-limbed Rika Okamoto has a sly looseness, and in one of the best sections five women use their power to really dig into the music and steps. While Stephen Pier gets down in a solo, a lineup behind him happily attacks funky hip swings as if they were destiny to be mastered.
The high point of the beautifully danced program is Buglisi's haunting Suspended Women (2000). Eleven women in derelict ball gowns roam around to Ravels Piano Concerto in G, caught in dreams of desire, despair, madness, renunciation. In their extravagant, disordered attire, they resemble dolls that have been played with too much. Foreman, Pier, Philip Gardner, and Kevin Predmore appear, carrying women off, rampaging through, bestowing kisses. But they are transient, leaving only their jackets draped over this partner, held by that one, as the women advance toward some new arena of vision.
Performing his own work, Foreman has a direct and thoughtful quality, as if he were sizing up the situation. In a duet from his 1992 Fields of Love, while he and Capucilli swirl about-charmingly playful, suddenly quarrelsome, happy again-his aliveness to the moment makes it all seem true. And in Archaic fragment, from a work in progress, his brooding air enriches what might be just a satisfying solo study about breaking from two dimensions into three.
A particular treat: The actress Claire Bloom reads live the poetry that accompanies Songs of Experience. In Buglisi's new and sensitive that walketh by night, to music by Arvo Part, the splendid Elizabeth Roxas begins coiled on a bench, one foot stuck to it, rocking, as if grief were holding her there. In the 1996 The Kiss, set by Buglisi to Hindemith, Dakin and Predmore are uneasy lovers; despite the eponymous kiss, she wishes to get away and rolls him offstage. Miki Orihara and Pier; the couple in Foreman's From Pent-Up, Aching Rivers (to Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata in G minor), are more fulfilled; she runs her hands beneath his outstretched arms with almost secret pleasure. This duet takes its title from Walt Whitman's poem, and Whitman's words seem more united with the movement than do the excerpts by Rilke and H.D. that accompany the other two dances but didn't originally infuse their structures. I kept being drawn to Bloom's wondrous voice and eloquent reading.
