I only caught three of the four dance pieces put on by the Seán Curran Company at Bryn Mawr the other evening. The large room of Goodhart Hall is not a great place for dance – with the audience in the sort of lumpy stuffed seats one found in 1950s’ cinemas (some of them bearing handwritten warnings that the chair was broken). With no slant to the room, the sight lines are dreadful and the high cathedral ceilings swallow the sound. I’ve been to at least one reading & a couple of dance events here over the years and never seen the room more than half full. It takes a tremendous performance to rise above the sense that one has wandered into a cavern.
This is not the first time I’ve seen a choreographer and lead dancer here who is (or at least seems) discernibly older than the other dancers & who once was a lead dancer for a nationally known company, surrounded by younger participants of varying skills, but terrific bods. The college dance circuit really is cluttered with such companies – of all the things an older dancer can take on, this must be the most challenging.
Curran was once a dancer with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company & was an original cast member of the off-Broadway hit, Stomp. His p.r. material (both on the website & in the handouts at Bryn Mawr) likes to note that as recently as 1997, the dancers were paid with subway tokens for rehearsals and a meal after each public performance.
If Curran didn’t have a recognizable style, late modern dance with touches of the Judson Church scene & more than a few hand movements that are reminiscent of Steve Martin “doing the Egyptian,” I might well have felt that the three works were the product of different choreographers altogether. It may be a sign of Curran’s range, but over the course of three works, what I couldn’t find was where these works connected.
There was one piece I liked, and another I absolutely hated. The first of these was St. Petersburg Waltz, danced solo by Curran in a pork pie hat & three-piece suit sans jacket. Set to a piece of the same name by Meredith Monk, Curran is whimsical, light on his feet & effective as a dancer. The work I despised was Aria/Apology, danced by five members of the company to a track that alternated by opera arias by Georg Frederic Handel and recording from The Apology Line, a phone project that enabled people to call in anonymously and simply apologize for whatever they wanted. Five of the dancers are working through relatively somber pieces as we hear callers apologize for rape, murder and incest, literally, alternated with Handel at his most bombastic. There is literally no way to view the dance as anything other than as an act of mourning, which rendered the entire project a mawkish bit of bathos with all the subtlety of Eliot Weinberger’s What I Heard in Iraq. The one comment I can make on the third piece, Metal Garden, is that, five days after viewing it, I can recall only the music, a work by Peter Jones & Tigger Benford that centered around prepared piano & percussion that mimed gamelan.
Maybe I caught this troop on an off night, or my arriving late or the terrible room had something to do with it. Curran’s list of current and forthcoming commissions suggests that a lot of people take him seriously. Thinking about
