February 25–March 4, 1999

dance

Wondergirl

by Jonathan David Jackson

13 Heads and 7 Tales

Choreography by Nichole Canuso, New Edge Series at the Community Education Center, Sat., Feb. 20

A big, lusty audience greeted Nichole Canuso with wild clapping and stomping on her first full evening of choreography. And not a cheer was undeserved. For Canuso, battling serious problems with the Community Education Center performance space (no heat, sound equipment that broke right as the show began, forcing the use of a boombox) more than demonstrated the strange, funny, well-crafted loveliness of her dances.

Over the course of the evening, Canuso's movement style made more and more sense: She loves to play with gravity—that unseen weighted force that, if we don't resist it, will make us collapse like a rag doll into the ground. Some choreographers link one movement to another guided only by the dum-dat, dum-dat of the musical accompaniment. But Canuso allows momentum—the swing, bounce or fall of a gesture—to take the lead, making her moves look loopy and off-center.

Her style was particularly clear in T43, a short dance with no musical accompaniment for Canuso, Christy Lee and Gin MacCullum. It's hidden agenda was revealed slowly. Apparently, each of the main movements was given a number. When a dancer did the movement, she whispered the number aloud. It was a relief (at least for math-deficient spectators like me) to discover that counting up the many variations of numbers/moves was, ultimately, unnecessary. For it became clear that the point of T43 was to play with this secret numeric structure, not to belabor it.

At the end, in a moment of inspired hilarity, Christy Lee cut off the wooshy momentum of Canuso's style and suddenly inserted move #1 (a strong jump with both legs swishing to the back at the same time). It was the final blow of a painfully funny dance.

Humor gave way to serious sensual mystery in Enter: Night (a dance last seen as a work-in-progress in the '98 Fringe Festival). The new first section with Peter D'Orsaneo, Lorin Lyle and Meredith Magoon seemed out of place. It was as if this section, full of bounding, robust entrances and exits, was a fragment of a totally different dance. Without a clear transition between the first and second sections, the impact of the spellbinding moment when the ghostly trio of Canuso, Heather Murphy and Lee first take to the stage is tragically lost.

The women in the stunningly incandescent trio seem to be caught up in a secret, magical ritual. Each time they shuffle through the space, echoing each other's movements, they leave wisps of themselves behind.

Although the costumes (see-through black sarongs) suited the movement beautifully, the music simply did not heighten the action. Better to leave the dance unaccompanied so that the breath of the movement can resonate on its own. At the end, once the stage was empty, the air was thick with the trio's presence.