Dance Cleveland: The Jessica Lang Company

For our very last concert in this season's Dance Cleveland subscription series we went to see the Jessica Lang Company. The previous concert we saw in our series (which I did not blog about) was the final season of a company that is closing after 44 years. In contrast, this was a brand new company which began performing in 2011.

And what a contrast! The energy and dynamism, innovation and technique of this new company had the audience out of their seats. The young artistic director brought in many streams of inspiration from other media: architecture, interior design, new compositions, textiles and video. I loved the interplay of so many mediums and the way they formed a powerful, coherent interstitial experience.

 Lines Cubed (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

 The first piece, Lines Cubed, was an amazing architectural piece divided into movements by color: black, red, yellow, blue. The background is a direct quote from Mondrian's color block painting, and the dancers interact with movable sets by molo; softblock modular paper accordioned installations which can create vertical and horizontal walls. The dancers interact with these installations with geometric and architectural precision, sometimes dancing in free space, sometimes around the installations. Each movement has a different color and completely different mood, with differently cut costumes colored according to the title of the movement. The pop electronica music by John Metcalfe and Thomas Metcalf perfectly blended with the clockwork like dancing of the dancers. The audience stood up in admiration at the end of the piece. I was there with Irad and Yuval, and we felt uplifted and inspired—the work was imaginative and wholly original. It was a cross-genre pollination with every element representing the highest form of that art's expression.

Mendelssohn/Incomplete (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

Next was a single movement from a Mendelssohn piano trio. The set was minimal, the dancers wore dusky blue and grape, and the over all effect was lyrical and soothing.

Among the Stars (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

And the third dance in the first half was an astoundingly beautiful and moving couple's dance with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto ("Snowy Village & The Girl"). The dance is constructed around a long sheet of silk which begins as a train for the woman's dress, and then drops to the floor to form a river, a bridge, a cloak...as it is integrated into a breathtakingly beautiful dance set to dreamy piano and violin music.

During the intermission we had the usual DANCECleveland fun of posting our post-its on the wall with our "take-aways" (Mondrian, architectural, clockwork), eating chocolate kisses and picking up new DanceCleveland buttons.

DANCECleveland makes a new button for each performance

The second half:

The Calling (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

Irad and I couldn't imagine how they could follow such a stellar first half at the same level, but they did it. The very first dance was stunning; a woman emerges out of an enormous white dress, bare backed with an ocean of skirt surrounding her, with her back to the audience, and performs the entire dance without moving from the spot, bending and swaying, at one point sinking into the dress as if she is sinking into the ground à la wicked witch "I'm melting" to the audible oohs of the entire audience. The musical setting  "o Maria, stella maris" performed by Trio Mediaeval, to a solo woman's a capella chanting, very straight tone and haunting. The dancer herself, Kana Kimura, a beautiful Japanese woman,  embodied the silent feminine grace of the dance perfectly. We realized she was the same dancer we had seen last year in the Metropolitan Opera production of Nixon and China.

This was followed by a video created by Lang with Shinchini Maruyama (the Japanese presence in the show—composer, videographer and dancer—was indirectly explained in the Q & A following the show when Lang mentioned that her husband is a Japanese dancer). It was set to Grieg piano music (4 movements from Lyric Pieces Op. 12, nos. 1, 4, were the ones we succeeded in picking out, since they weren't credited,)  and featured sequences of dancers shown at different film speeds, sometimes doubling themselves, yet perfectly coordinated to the music, and very playful. Though not as strong an experience as seeing the live dancers, we learned afterwards in the Q & A that this passive performance component was strategic in keeping the dancers fresh and allowing them time for costume changes, since there are only 9 dancers in the entire company and it is quite taxing on a small cast to sustain an evening's show.

i.n.k. (photo from http://www.jessicalangdance.com)

With the screen still up, the finale began—another collaboration with Maruyama, his video art KUSHO as backdrop, showing blobs of ink thrown up into the air. The dancers appear in inky black costumes and themselves perform different shapes and contortions, sometimes in relation to the backdrop of liquid ink shapes, and sometimes independently. All the while an original score by Jakub Ciupinski played, with lots of watery droplet sounds, making for a complete visual and auditory rorschach fest.

Excerpts from all the dances in the show are available on Lang's website. 

As usual there was a Q & A afterwards in which we learned some of the director's story of how she got there, the thrill of seeing her own name before the Dance Company, and how she finds her ideas, dancers and collaborations. I liked how she phrased catching the "wink of an idea" here or there, and how she lays her nets to catch her collaborators. (Which is basically how she described several of her collaborations, she doesn't seem to just ask people outright to collaborate.) All the dancers knew each other from Julliard or Twyla Tharp, and I was struck by her statement that she needed dancers who could take care of themselves and their bodies so she could stick to the business of being artistic director. (As if that is not always the case in a touring company.) We noticed that many of the dancers also have staff positions.

We are lucky to have a very perspicacious and talented curator in Pam Young, Executive Director of DANCECleveland. This company was such a great find, and to have caught on to them so early in their career takes a special knowledge of the dance world and a talent for the hunt. She always gives a light, joyful and short introduction to each performance and one can tell she loves her work and the world of dance. There are pieces to the program that we do not see, which is that each dance company does workshops and masterclasses with local students, as well as performing for us. 

My reflection as I left was that we are now getting to meet the new generation of great artists and thinkers who will influence the next 50 years of culture. Life will continue after we are gone with wonderful new talent and genius continuing to build and innovate on everything that has come before them and imagining a future that we are lucky enough to glimpse. As the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote about the next generation:

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Yet we did indeed visit the house of tomorrow, and it was a dream!