Tom's Life Bits

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ICCP July 19, 2006

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Review from Independant

//JULY 19, 2006//

**The shock of the new Tatiana Baganova triumphs again at the ICCP**

BY BYRON WOODS

Takuya Muramatsu's Mark of the Sun, commissioned for the ADF's
ICCP program Photo by Isaac Sandlin The concerts of the
International Choreographers Commissioning Program are an annual
favorite of the parents of students enrolled in the American
Dance Festival's intensive six-week school. Still, I don't think
the folks are always ready to see exactly how their children are
transformed upon the stage.

One's a shrieking harridan in a clingy red dress who's
apparently gone missing from a Quentin Tarantino film. She offs
an unsuitable guitarist before terrorizing the corps of
performers, shoving a small, meek Asian boy across the set with
a kick in the rump.

There's the chorus line of coffee-drinking maniacs, mincing
their way in a caffeinated kewpie-doll column across the boards.
And we haven't begun to talk about the semi-dressed ghosts and
grotesques coated in rice powder, convulsively reanimated by
ankoku butoh--literally translated, the "dark soul dance."

Hi, mom. What's wrong?

But even if the visuals in the three works making up this year's
ICCP concert have been a bit, um, intense at times, for the most
part they reaffirmed the core values of this unusual project:
Artistic vision remains the coin of the realm--and the great
equalizer. That's how hungry choreographers with an agenda can
create a work in less time (and with a lot less money) than
their professional counterparts--and still walk away with some
of the most thought-provoking mainstage works of the season.
Untried works with amateur casts can still transport us to
different worlds. Sometimes they even bring us back.

It happened--again--on Monday night.

At first, Tatiana Baganova's Post Engagement seemed to be a
satire on present and recent ADF touchstones. After the groans,
yelps and moves of a dimly lit dance class briefly seemed to ape
the sights and sounds from Takuya Muramatsu's just performed
Mark of the Sun, the women and men in Baganova's piece
segregated into two different groups with differing agendas.

Gender considerations are never very far away in Baganova's
worlds; here, a funhouse mirror seems to be erected in front of
our tribal sex roles. Men spin women like dials, manipulating
and moving them across the stage. But for all this, no genuine
supremacy seems apparent. Groups of men and women appear to be
going through long-established motions--vividly executed at
times--pre-determined paths linking the two communities.

Boring? Not with visuals as surreal as Baganova produces. When
the dancers aren't climbing a big red wall across the back of
the stage, they're walking across it horizontally instead.
Elsewhere, they're dusted with white powder from shakers held
above as they transverse a diagonal paper aisle across stage.

Like the work of the Dadaists, these images elude literal
interpretation. But like Baganova's best, they take us into a
world where the metaphors of our gender rules are made most
literal, and laughable. That is, when they do not give us pause.

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