Dancing With Glass Review Review
November 28, 2023 | The Joyce Theater – New York, NY, USA
Golden light pours over black and white keys, a gentle palm rests on glossy lacquer, a pianist sits at the instrument’s helm, her quiet introduction a contradictory interlude for what is to come. Maki Namekawa is one of this century’s most adept interpreters of Philip Glass’s reverberating Piano Etudes.
Initially cultivated as an exercise of piano technique, the full collection includes twenty solos ranging from Glass’s quintessential rolling repetitions to low, sparse notes. One only needs to listen to understand the guttural impact of his works but pair it with voice, film, dance, and the intensity magnifies.
Alternating from music to dance to music and so on, Dancing With Glass provides a nicely stacked, albeit straight forward, 90-minute plunge into Glass interpretations. Delivering eleven out of the twenty etudes, the program features five newly commissioned dances and six piano solos.
I had been primed to see some dance but was not prepared to be so captivated by Namekawa’s movement.
Dancing With Glass Review
The evening began with Etude #1, a more classic Glass sound, notes seemingly spilling over top of one another and Namekawa a vessel for emotion as much as she was music. Her eyebrows shifted up and down, shoulders bounced aggressively left and right, and her lips pursed into a small “o” so that the delightful trills appeared to whistle out of her.
Namekawa played for ten of the pieces, her brief exit occurring only for the first dance, a bright tap number choreographed by Leonardo Sandoval.
At times reminiscent of a 19th century quadrille, Sandoval gives his dancers patterns and architecture via do-si-dos and weaving which added dimension to the splendidly crisp footwork of the choreographer and dancers Ana Tomioshi, Orlando Hernández, and Lucas Santana.
There were initially five dancers who began on the tap board, clapping and snapping in rhythm before one broke free to dissolve the illusion by sitting at the piano – the “fifth dancer” was actually pianist Noé Kains.
Perhaps it was a comment on the line-crossing capabilities of tap between percussion and dance, sound and movement. A clever start to an evening anchored by music.
Snapping back to piano solos between dances was easy, the entire audience shifting their chins 45 degrees toward Namekawa’s post on the left side of theater. Each etude’s closing note felt like a release after holding your breath although there is always that one person in the audience who lets out a loud verbal “ahhh!”. It’s a theater thing, I guess.
And when it came time to divert attention back to the stage, viewing the dance was like opening an unmarked door in Glass’s house:
“Oh, what’s in here?”
And behind the next door was Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, a choreographing duo both formerly artists of Batsheva Dance Company. How can someone switch from electricity to liquid, precise to erratic in a split second? Smith and Schraiber accomplish both with deep commitment.
Set to Etude No. 8, the notes plunked like weights dropping in a well, deep and echoed. The music ached for them and they ached right back. They moved as if buried in conversation, a new dance language full of rich vocabulary – a soft palm to the cheek, Schraiber pointing in Smith’s face, Smith reciprocating as if a great wind rushed across her body, throwing her into a dramatic, back-bending arc.
Nearing the realm of furious, their conversation seemed to get doused with fuel as every second passed. The pair are almost supernatural: Schraiber bursting with athleticism and fiery, accusatory glances and Smith an ethereal pixie, cunning and celestial.
Smith and Schraiber's six-minute duet felt too short, I was completely enraptured.
Current Co-Artistic Director of Urban Bush Women, and also doubling up as dancer and choreographer, Chanon Judson consumed the stage in a bold and expressive solo.
Judson indulges in her abandon; limbs fly wide and the sparkle in her eye nearly lit on fire. From running frantically sideways on the ground to stirring the air with carving palms to an abrupt chest slap demanding her shoulders open and her knees buckle, her movement seemed to both build up and break down, constantly reconstructing herself.
The coziness of The Joyce allows for closer than normal viewing; her commitment visible through the distress in her furrowed brow, the wide grin as she chuckled, and the exasperated breaths between each sharp movement.
A universal symbol for waiting, a lone chair in Justin Peck’s solo for Patricia Delgado helped evoke the feeling of news on the cusp of breaking which lingered across the stage like ominous fog.
Delgado begins hunched away from us seated in the chair, arms crossed, a downward gaze. Then moving into fast twitching and elongated reaches, she fully embodies the signature Peck style of compressing and bursting. He has her shrink, contracting inward while curling her arms in scooping motions and then in the next moment she stretches to the ceiling, windmilling her legs through the air.
In between bouts of fury, she becomes dizzy, spinning in small circles or waving her arms, trying to catch her balance. The expectant air she stirs up through Peck’s pleasantly repetitious patterns only gets heavier through the piece.
Always hitting shapes with quiet exactitude and genuine emotion, Delgado delivers all of this in pure form with her heart placed delicately on her sleeve.
The program slows down for the last segments, for Namekawa’s closing Etude #20 and in the final dance number choreographed by Lucinda Childs.
Dancers Caitlin Scranton and Kyle Gerry, freelancers and artists with the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, are pristine and unembellished in Childs’s romantic, yet somehow cold, pas de deux. Donning white and cream, blousy pajama sets, the pair look like ghosts revisiting a long-lost memory.
A particularly delicious, braided partnering move had Scranton twisting under Gerry’s arm, crossing behind him, and then unfurling in front of him. Back and forth it repeated, as Childs likes to do, each time the same yet still intriguing. Like the quiet, tinny notes Glass sometimes uses to close his etudes, the piece felt like turning the final page in a book. Crisp, clear, punctuated.
The dances had no titles beyond the number of their corresponding etude and no background information in the program either.
But not really knowing what was coming next made for pleasant anticipation. And with no intermission (my favorite), we all just kind of buckled in for a grab bag type of evening.
Glass’s music is the heart of the show though; the bubbling trill of the piano, the circular spiral and steady metronome of notes working both with and against each other.
Everything pointed back at him and what he has done for music, for dance, for art.
Featured Photo for Dancing With Glass at the Joyce Theater of Bobbi Jene Smith. Photo by Steven Pisano.
