Evening Music

Rockwell Matters

May 5, 2008
 
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Anyone who follows dance must be struck by its dizzying internationalism. Especially in the borderless European Community, dancers from everywhere crop up everywhere. Even in the relatively provincial, isolated United States, dancers from every part of the world flock here to study and work. Sometimes they adapt to prevailing local styles.
 
Fang-Yi Sheu comes from Taiwan but studied Graham technique there and in New York. For some years she was the prima donna assoluta of the Martha Graham Dance Company, whenever it managed to perform. That troupe, with its storied history, complex legal problems, rich repertory, leadership instability and financial woes, was unable to hold onto to her. This spring she cropped up at the Joyce Theater with a solo called “Isis in Transit” that Eliot Feld made for her as part of his annual Mandance Project.
 
Sheu is no man. She is quintessentially female, immortalized with some 30 other dancers as part of David Michalek’s monumental “Slow Dancing” film installation at last summer’s Lincoln Center Festival. Feld’s series of mythological tableaux, with Sheu progressing gamely from set to elaborate set, made a less convincing showcase. One hopes while she’s still in her prime — she was born in 1971 — that she finds choreographic outlets worthy of her talent.
 
Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui have found those choreographers — themselves, and each other. I hadn’t quite “got” Khan up to now, despite his wonderfully exotic background and evident dance skills. Born in London of Bangladeshi descent and a student of contemporary modern and Indian kathak dance, his movement vocabulary and choreographic concepts seemed stereotypical to me. But his duet with Cherkaoui, “zero degrees,” seen at City Center, was a revelation about both men. They mirrored each other for an hour, interacting closely and with two weirdly anthropomorphic mannequins by the sculptor Antony Gormley, all accompanied by Nitin Sawhney’s pungent Indo-Moroccan trance music.
 
Who choreographed what remains a tantalizing mystery. But Cherkaoui, who’s a Belgian born of a Flemish mother and a Moroccan father, certainly played a leading role, given the echoes of his “Loin,” seen last summer at Jacob’s Pillow. Both works involve a kind of floppy bodily fluidity mixed with secret gestures and simultaneous speech. Both men move in similar patterns, but where Cherkaoui is supple and soft, Khan is all coiled masculine energy. Just kidding, but maybe they should make a piece that also includes Sheu. That would be an even more pungent multicultural brew!
 
— John Rockwell
 
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