BWW Reviews: Choreographer Kate Weare at the Harkness Dance Festival

A good artists' forum will raise pressing, pointed questions-and never settle for easy answers. With the last installment in its Stripped/Dressed discussion series, the Harkness Dance Festival at the 92^nd Street Y largely achieved this kind of back-and-forth. In a showcase that complemented testimony on "the process of creating a dance" with live performances, experimental choreographer Kate Weare and five of her company's dancers were invited to share their insights. And Weare's forum wasn't simply insightful; it was (a quality that's probably more valuable here) mercifully efficient.

Now, I've been to some disastrous audience-participation events in my time. Unnerving patches of silence, longwinded flattery, weird anecdotes masquerading as questions-I've seen it all. Sometimes the problem isn't that the participants are totally out of it; sometimes these things happen because a smart artist and a smart audience can't figure out how to talk to each other. But Weare and her audience figured it out. The viewers' questions were terse and perceptive, and Weare's responses-though perhaps too reliant on vaguely academical words like "analytic" and "embody"-did a lot to reveal the craftsmanship and the collaboration behind her compositions.

Weare and her dancers offered a smooth combination of dialogue, dance excerpts, and the kind of ideas that will stay with you well after you've left the 92Y. The Stripped/Dressed session began with passages from Weare's 2006 piece for two dancers, Drop Down. Or, more precisely, with three versions of the same passage. Weare's audience was given a chance to compare male-female, male-male, and female-female pairings: same movements, and fascinatingly different moods. Later, two of Weare's dancers (Leslie Kraus and Luke Murphy) performed another passage of Drop Down-initially with slow, soft motions; then with a staccato passion. The staccato version is what you'd find in the stage version of Drop Down, yet the softer take is passionate in its own way. Less virtuosic than the "official" version, but far more poignant.

Weare's dances-which the Harkness program describes as explorations of "a contemporary view of intimacy"-may be ideally suited to the unassuming, stripped-down treatment of the showcase's first half. (The outfits seemed much closer to warm-up clothes than specially-picked costumes.) Watching those extracts from Drop Down was like watching a thinking man's Rent, and I mean that in the best possible way. Weare's excerpts suggested an intimacy that combines practiced worldliness with bursts of innocence-suggested a tenderness that is threatens, moment to moment, to give way to something like sadness.

Suggestions are fine, but Weare's compositions resist programmatic storytelling. This was certainly the case with the single full piece that was performed during the second half of the showcase, Garden (2011). Though Weare explained that the four-person Garden isn't a strictly narrative work, she did acknowledge that there are suggestions of narrative behind it. Garden, after all, had its genesis in "a community dynamic that involves a charismatic figure-sometimes a leader or tyrant, but a figure who must be eliminated or sacrificed."

With a theme like this, and with a lighting job that could have been borrowed from a child's nightmare, Garden could have been all violence and sensation. With its whimsical whitish costumes and strong hints of an idyllic setting, it could also have been a piece of Midsummer Night's Dream-y preciousness. But it wasn't either. Garden isn't as seductive (or as quietly heartbreaking) as anything in Drop Down, but it is intriguingly peppered with odd, earthy gestures. There are sequences of striding and skipping across stage. There are also a few strange touches of scenery-a stump in the foreground, an upside-down tree hanging from the ceiling. Is that tree a kinsman of the lonely tree in Waiting for Godot? Sure could be, but even if it isn't, you can't question Weare's Beckett-like ability to arrange winning little details in a larger atmosphere of terror and emptiness.

Still, Garden could be improved. Some of the accompanying music was phenomenally effective, particularly the three haunting piano pieces by Goldmund. So why mix in inappropriately zippy compositions, like "Esperame en el cielo" by the Trio Los Panchos? Why not let those piano notes tunnel as far into our souls as they can? Weare, however, isn't a choreographer to shy away from improvement. As she explained, she lets her dancers perform at will while they're on tour, "but once we're back in the studio, it's my turn to be critical and really start picking their work apart." As I'd mentioned earlier, you won't find it easy to shake Dropdown or Garden out of your mind when you leave the 92Y. Neither, apparently, will Weare.

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