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Dance Review | Da-Da-Dance Project
Duets Intimate and Separate, Sometimes in Post-it Notes
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By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: August 3, 2009
Calling their program of duets “Butter and Fly,” the dancers Eun Jung Choi-Gonzalez and Guillermo Ortega Tanus don’t claim that one of them is “butter” or the other “fly.” The performances, which ended Saturday at the Joyce SoHo, were subtitled “Intends to Walk” and included four pieces interleaved with brief films. The films were a good way to fill the time needed to recover and change costumes; too bad they were campily absurdist.
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Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times
Guillermo Ortega Tanus and Eun Jung Choi-Gonzalez.
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Although Ms. Choi-Gonzalez and Mr. Ortega Tanus, who make up the repertory company Da-Da-Dance Project, often touched on both camp and absurdism at Friday’s performance, they weren’t trivial. As yet they aren’t mature (their company was founded last year), and I can imagine them becoming both more funny and more serious. They keep showing, in different ways, how a couple may be intimate and separate.
“Ploy” (2009) and an excerpt from “Blueprint (2008), the starting and closing duets, are the works of Ms. Choi-Gonzalez. “Ploy” (to music by Andrew Drury) is almost the story of Adam and Eve in reverse: the nearer to nakedness they go, the less shame they express. They entered with their torsos covered in innumerable Post-it notes (ranging across a spectrum of color), and their body language — to us and to each other — suggested embarrassment and privacy. When those Post-it notes started to fall, the performers at first tried to replace them. But then the two danced more, achieving a new openness. It was to their credit that this didn’t feel schematic.
In “Blueprint,” with original music by Alban Bailly, they wore plastic rainwear throughout. It’s a thin sketch, but like every item here it showed, intermittently at least, that Ms. Choi-Gonzalez and Mr. Ortega Tanus have some pronounced dancerly instincts: even when they moved like robots, the articulation of lower and upper body had its own vehemence.
Mr. Ortega Tanus’s choreographic contribution was “Blood Orange” (2008). He began as Pygmalion singing “Love Me Tender” while he shaped Ms. Choi-Gonzalez into his Galatea. But she eluded him, and soon he was singing anxiously at top speed as he tried to keep track of her. The scene, with original music by Valentina González, went through several stages (they talk as well as dance), and at times the situation was reversed: she started to invade his privacy and to try to exert some control over him.
The duet “Tiny Voices” (2008), to original music by Jukka Rintamaki, is by the guest choreographer Helena Franzen. This was the most formal work of the program, and the two dancers rose to its challenge. First they moved, back and forth, on close paths that sometimes bisected, sometimes ran parallel: near neighbors who don’t quite meet. Later they overlapped and interlocked (memorably), though also pulling apart and establishing independence. Small details of footwork (low jumps) and upper body movement (each brings one shoulder back very precisely) became telling parts of the dance fabric.
Like everything Ms. Choi-Gonzalez and Mr. Ortega Tanus do, “Tiny Voices” is a miniature. It would be good to see them moving more often at full force and with full rigor. But they already have some eloquence and some range.
Dance Review | Da-Da-Dance Project
Duets Intimate and Separate, Sometimes in Post-it Notes
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: August 3, 2009
Calling their program of duets “Butter and Fly,” the dancers Eun Jung Choi-Gonzalez and Guillermo Ortega Tanus don’t claim that one of them is “butter” or the other “fly.” The performances, which ended Saturday at the Joyce SoHo, were subtitled “Intends to Walk” and included four pieces interleaved with brief films. The films were a good way to fill the time needed to recover and change costumes; too bad they were campily absurdist.
Although Ms. Choi-Gonzalez and Mr. Ortega Tanus, who make up the repertory company Da-Da-Dance Project, often touched on both camp and absurdism at Friday’s performance, they weren’t trivial. As yet they aren’t mature (their company was founded last year), and I can imagine them becoming both more funny and more serious. They keep showing, in different ways, how a couple may be intimate and separate.
“Ploy” (2009) and an excerpt from “Blueprint (2008), the starting and closing duets, are the works of Ms. Choi-Gonzalez. “Ploy” (to music by Andrew Drury) is almost the story of Adam and Eve in reverse: the nearer to nakedness they go, the less shame they express. They entered with their torsos covered in innumerable Post-it notes (ranging across a spectrum of color), and their body language — to us and to each other — suggested embarrassment and privacy. When those Post-it notes started to fall, the performers at first tried to replace them. But then the two danced more, achieving a new openness. It was to their credit that this didn’t feel schematic.
In “Blueprint,” with original music by Alban Bailly, they wore plastic rainwear throughout. It’s a thin sketch, but like every item here it showed, intermittently at least, that Ms. Choi-Gonzalez and Mr. Ortega Tanus have some pronounced dancerly instincts: even when they moved like robots, the articulation of lower and upper body had its own vehemence.
Mr. Ortega Tanus’s choreographic contribution was “Blood Orange” (2008). He began as Pygmalion singing “Love Me Tender” while he shaped Ms. Choi-Gonzalez into his Galatea. But she eluded him, and soon he was singing anxiously at top speed as he tried to keep track of her. The scene, with original music by Valentina González, went through several stages (they talk as well as dance), and at times the situation was reversed: she started to invade his privacy and to try to exert some control over him.
The duet “Tiny Voices” (2008), to original music by Jukka Rintamaki, is by the guest choreographer Helena Franzen. This was the most formal work of the program, and the two dancers rose to its challenge. First they moved, back and forth, on close paths that sometimes bisected, sometimes ran parallel: near neighbors who don’t quite meet. Later they overlapped and interlocked (memorably), though also pulling apart and establishing independence. Small details of footwork (low jumps) and upper body movement (each brings one shoulder back very precisely) became telling parts of the dance fabric.
Like everything Ms. Choi-Gonzalez and Mr. Ortega Tanus do, “Tiny Voices” is a miniature. It would be good to see them moving more often at full force and with full rigor. But they already have some eloquence and some range.