From The Boston Globe

DANCE REVIEW

Seidman's 'Body Languages' tells beautiful stories

By Karen Campbell, Globe Correspondent, 10/20/2003

CAMBRIDGE -- Choreographer Susan Seidman knows how to tell a story without giving it all away. The highlight of her "Body Languages" concerts over the weekend at Green Street Studios, which also featured dances by Susan Barnard and Stefani Reitter, was a work that used as its springboard her mother's youthful reminiscences, playing lightly off the text without mimicking every narrative event.

 

Entitled "No More Than Four," Seidman's charming two-parter used dance and pre-recorded spoken text to illuminate her mother's memories, amplifying the text without belaboring it. The stories recalled a youth in Depression-era Appalachia and war-time Baltimore, tracing a journey from Sunday school lessons to conservatory auditions.

The four dancers (Rosemary Candelario, Lindsey Jackson, Megan Przygoda, and Jessica Schaffer), costumed in old-fashioned dresses, suggested a clog step here, a jitterbug there. Gestural details -- a stylized elbow to the ribs, a quick hand to the heart -- brought a delightful sense of personal connection.

Throughout, Seidman's quirky movement aesthetic, which bounds off a fluid, lyrical exchange of weight, kept the work flowing. At the end of Part II, we were left hoping for a next installment.

With its playful skips and rolls, high-energy falls and recoveries, Seidman's "Her Turn" seemed on the surface a mere playful romp. Underneath this quartet for four women, however, was the dark, subtle undercurrent of girls' quickly shifting relationships -- the power plays, the odd man out, the rumors, the alliances that form and dissolve with a disturbing capriciousness. Excerpts from Chick Corea's luminous "Children's Songs" provided a cohesive, brilliantly apt musical score.

Compared to Seidman's mature, carefully wrought choreography, Reitter's and Barnard's works seemed less disciplined, lacking in movement invention and convincing theatricality. The most successful, Barnard's "Patchwork," was the most abstract. With no special context or theatrical gimmickry, this was simply gorgeous movement impeccably performed.

In this premiere performance, Lise deLongchamp breathed a palpable sense of suspension and release into masterfully controlled off-balance contortions.

The New Hampshire-based Barnard's other solo was far less convincing, as was the duet "Tumors and Boxers," using boxing as a metaphor for combating illness. Reitter contributed a cute, if slightly forced, parody of a ballerina coming to terms with a barre exercise and a visually lovely new work involving diaphanous scarves that had real potential.

There was some striking, potent imagery -- a scarf as an alluring veil, a restrictive burka, a noose -- but it was subverted by the utter prettiness of it all.

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