O Vertigo Danse @ Jacob’s Pillow, 8/7/13


by Tresca Weinstein

BECKET, Mass. — The relationship between music and dance can vary as subtly as flavor combinations. It can be comfortably complementary, like peanut butter and jelly, with each taste enhancing the other (the playful musicality of Mark Morris comes to mind). It can be purposely at odds, yet somehow make sense, like sweet and sour—or like Merce Cunningham’s abstract movement paired with John Cage’s dissonant sound scores.

Or, as in the case of Ginette Laurin’s choreography for O Vertigo Danse’s “La Vie Qui Bat (The Beat of Life)” and Steve Reich’s seminal 1971 composition “Drumming,” it can be like honey in hot tea—one substance dissolving completely into the other to create a perfect fusion.

Onstage through Sunday in the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow, the evening-length work features the nine dancers of the Montreal-based O Vertigo Danse, and 12 musicians from the Ensemble de la Société de Musique Contemporaine du Quebec (The Quebec Contemporary Music Society), directed by Walter Boudreau. The performers are at center stage and the musicians to the side, but they are all dancing—maintaining a virtuosic precision as they fluidly shift mood, speed and tone.

Like the ensemble in Sharon Eyal’s “House,” onstage at the Pillow two weeks ago, the dancers in “La Vie Qui Bat” are clearly a tribe. Dressed in matching gray street clothes, their hair dyed in shades of bright red, they recall clowns or toys—Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls given life. Sometimes they dance like dolls, too—floppy and flexible in one moment, all sharply angled elbows and knees the next. Their vocabulary also encompasses isolations, quirky gestures and balletic turns.

The multiple layers of sound are inextricably interwoven with the dancers’ changing compositions and style of movement. The repeated patterns of the music—played on bongos, marimbas and flute, with two female voices in one section—merge seamlessly with the nonstop, sometimes breakneck pace of the dancing as it morphs from acrobatic lifts to yoga-like floorwork to frenetic solos. Combined, they become an energetic force greater than its two elements.

Though they often seem like parts of a larger organism, moving perfectly in unison, there’s nothing cold or automaton-like about the dancers. The many duets in the work feature not only bouncy, gravity-defying moves but also quick, tender connections: shoulders kissing, a hand on a face. If the drumming is the relentless beat of the heart, or the universe, then perhaps the dancing is the warm blood—the life—that flows through it. One cannot go on without the other.

Tresca Weinstein is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday
Length: One hour, no intermission

Categories: Dance, Reviews
Tresca Weinstein

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