In its 25 years, the Zenon Dance Company has become the premier contemporary dance company in Minnesota, if not one of the top in the U.S. Now celebrating a quarter-century’s worth of artistic achievement, the nine current dancers have brought a “best of” performance to the Southern Theater. It showcases some of the company’s finest work to date, as well as a pair of world premiere pieces choreographed by New Yorkers Janine Durning and Sean Curran, respectively. If that isn’t reason enough to go see the show, it is also Zenon matriarch Christine Maginnis’s final performance as a member of the company, a loss that will assuredly alter the Twin Cities’ Dance landscape considerably.
Curran’s A Hard Bargain is the first performance of the show. With an all male cast (Bryan Godbout, Eddie Oroyan, Stephen Schroeder and Gregory Waletski) the piece has an unmistakable masculine vibe. The dancers jostle and mock fight each other, in addition to a fair amount of strutting and prancing about. It reminded me a bit of the men I occasionally see out in the Twin Cities nightlife, affecting (much clumsier) dances of their own in the age old sport of camaraderie and one-upmanship. The men of Hard Bargain execute this idea with much more grace and virtuosity, however, than I can attribute to most of the rest of my male brethren. Music by countertenor David Daniels provides an intelligent juxtaposition for the piece, an effeminate aria rather than the tired cliché that manly must necessarily equal rugged.
Cathy Young’s The Secret Life of Walt and Kitty was resurrected for the showcase, one of the audience’s favorite’s from the 2000 season. Secret Life is a sultry tango that featured the incomparable style, poise and humor of Gregory Waletski and Amy Behm-Thompson (no relation to myself). Wynne Fricke’s Garden was given the same treatment, an incredibly beautiful structure of fluid, organic motion set to Bach’s “Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello” as performed by Yo Yo Ma. Like an Octopus by Argentinean choreographer Susana Tambutti also made for an interesting work. The piece involved Tamara Ober and Waletski utilizing large tables to perform a passionate and erotic stare down. The pair seemed much like opposing magnets, repulsed by each other at times only to be turned around and pulled close together by forces beyond their control.
Perhaps the most challenging work of the evening was the world premiere of Jeanine Durning’s Where are these Days Again? as performed by Behm-Thompson, Maginnis, Ober and Mary Ann Bradley. The piece is a collaborative effort, and an adaptation of Durning’s recent Ex-Memory: waywewere, created by and for the performers. Days Again is an exploratory piece, an all female journey through neuroses, despair and hysteria – as related by the only occasionally intelligible ramblings of the four dancers. Moving with a jerkiness and wretched series of aborted half-started maneuvers, the piece can be difficult to watch. And when dancing turns to writhing and screaming, even more so. This performance was not meant to be “nice” to watch though – I believe that it is meant to terrify and intrigue the viewer, and it accomplishes that aim in spades. While Durning’s work does not exhibit the supine grace of the dancer’s bodies, it utilizes them in an equally difficult way: to convey raw, ugly emotion through physical movement.
Zenon is no stranger to challenging dance – it is what originally put them on the map and 25 years after their inception; their anniversary show proves that they can still keep us on our toes (while keeping on their toes). Some institutions may grow sluggish with time, but much like Zenon founder Christine Maginnis, this dance company still shows very few signs of age.
