Brief Encounters, first performed in 2009, is set to music by Debussy (all of the music was pre-recorded). Though it’s about (insofar as it’s about something besides movement) fleeting romance, it avoids the tragic and is fairly light-hearted, as indicated by the punning title: briefs are all the dancers wear. The men are in black briefs and the women are in black bikini briefs with a black bra-top. The costumes are by Santo Loquasto, who also did the set, which is a large sepia-toned drawing streaked with darker brown of a receding arched corridor, which looks both like a Renaissance architectural drawing and a modern drawing, which adds to the overall timeless dreaminess of the piece, as does the mostly dim and twilight lighting by James Ingalls as well as the shimmering music of Debussy.
There isn’t really a storyline to the dance but anytime you have beautiful almost-naked people in movement together emotional tanglements are going to suggest themselves. Dancers chase and are chased and switch partners. There are male-male couples as well as male-female ones. There are struggles and unhappy partings, but such moments are poignant rather than tragic, given how fleet and fluid the movements are. The dancers appear curiously light and weightless, even when they are slumped downward in a lumpy line. There is the occasional use of props – a woman with a mirror, and man with a knife that is quickly knocked out of his hand – but the props felt a bit gimmicky to me and the piece seemed stronger when it was just movement.
The dance seemed a distanced, wistful yet ironic look back on love. A piece like this always makes me think of Troilus at the end of Chaucer’s poem, looking down on earth in spirit and laughing at how much he suffered there.
The dancers are listed in the program and their bios are given, but since there are no pictures to go with the names I’m really not sure who is who. Some of them I can guess based on how they’re listed in the program – the guy listed first on his own line was probably the soloist, and the second piece has a few characters with names, so by process of elimination. . . . that’s a lot of unnecessary guesswork. I wonder why they didn’t just run their pictures.
After the intermission came Three Dubious Memories. I love that as a title for a dance, but felt a little mixed about the piece itself. This is its premiere season. There are four movements: As Remembered by the Man in Blue, As Remembered by the Man in Green, As Remembered by the Woman in Red, and Threnody, each set to contrasting music (all from Peter Elyakim Taussig’s Five Enigmas; Taylor uses movements 1, 3, 4, and 5). The first movement had a driving rock-like beat of the sort I dislike with the occasional country-western inflection, I don’t remember what the second piece sounded like, the third had a sort of boppy 1950s-style jazz inflection, and the fourth was elegiac strings. A love triangle among the woman in red and the men in blue and green is enacted from a different perspective in the first three movements, which sounds a little more interesting than it is since the three stories are fairly similar.
In one, Woman in Red is with Man in Blue; Man in Green enters, clearly feels betrayed, and there is a struggle. Then the Woman in Red is with the Man in Green; Man in Blue enters, clearly feels betrayed, etc. The fights between the men are broad and cartoony, with wide swings that clearly don’t make contact and kicks to the crotch, which makes it difficult to take seriously whatever affectionate but standard emotions the initial couple has evoked. The woman looks very unhappy in both scenarios, as well as in her own, in which she comes upon the two men, who after an initial brotherly struggle are now holding hands and walking together (a movement also used in Brief Encounters to indicate two men were a couple). This time she's the one feeling betrayed. There was quite a bit of knowing laughter from the audience at this scenario, though I don’t see why it’s inherently funnier than the other two: her pain and humiliation are just as real, or unreal, and the interrupted couple is just as connected as the earlier ones. But the audience, which was filled with male-male couples, seemed to find this particular episode naughty in some titillating way.
There is a brief pause after the first two sections but the fourth, Threnody, flows right into the third. This piece belongs to the Choirmaster, a man clad in light gray and accompanied by seven choristers, also in light gray. As the section title indicates, this was a more somber follow-up to the caricatures we had just seen, and the final tableau, with the Blue, Green, and Red characters piled up and entangled and the Chorister standing over them, evoked some real emotion for the first time in the dance. The idea of different perspectives of the same event is always fascinating, and so is an exploration of the dubious nature of memory (why can’t I remember what the second piece sounded like? It was just last night! Perhaps I will remember later, sitting somewhere else, thinking of something else, when I can’t correct what I wrote), but for me the piece by and large felt a little slick.
The triumph of the evening was the third piece, 1988’s Brandenburgs (set to movements 1 and 2 of the Brandenburg #6 as well as Brandenburg #3). It opens with one man surrounded by three women on the right side of the stage, and five other men arrayed on the left (and it closes in the same tableau). The costumes are both stripped-down and modern and rich-looking and evocative of the past: the five men to the left are in deep forest green sleeveless unitards that stop at their knees, with the shoulder straps elaborately embroidered in gold; the three women are in flowing moss-green sleeveless dresses that also extend to their knees, with the gold embroidery as a thin belt (and I think also as trim in the bodice); and the solo male was bare-chested, with his lower half covered by lighter pea-green tights and a wide belt of the gold embroidery. The dancers are barefoot, which adds to the spring-like atmosphere evoked by all the green and by the elegant, burbling music.
There are virtuosic spins, and cheerfully flowing patterns; here the quick contacts between dancers are joyful rather than poignant. There are many exuberant leaps, and at the end of some movements the exiting dancer gets in a few more quick tiny leaps before disappearing behind the curtain, as if the sheer joy of leaping compelled him to cram in as many as possible while he can. Several times after a dazzling spin one of the women, a dark-haired beauty, would extend her arms to us as if asking us to join her in wondering at and delighting in what she had just done, and she would grin endearingly at us, and it was impossible not to smile back at what we had all come to see: all the beautiful young dancers fleeting by in joyful precision.
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