Dance Concert

Ugliness, deliberate, sustained ugliness is surely a sin, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Concert at the Loeb last weekend was just that. Every now and then--when the dancers stopped running straight across the stage, jerking like epileptics, teetering on the verge of toppling, then toppling (whether purposely or not)--the evening did provide some fleeting moments of pleasure. But there were few.

The Concert was a pastiche of compositions from Harvard, Radcliffe, Wheaton, and Brandeis--eleven numbers by as many composers. A concert so structured could lose in coherence and theatricality what it had to offer in variety. This problem was avoided by presenting works so similar in conception, style, movements, music (non-music or no music) and even costumes and lighting, that they could well have been created by only one person. This left the rather depressing impression that all young choreographers around here are thinking and producing the same dreary stuff.

The most ambitions presentations of the evening were Untitled Dance by Radcliffe's Donna Brooks, Declension by Rima Wolff, Nina Adolph's Changes 1--both graduate students at Harvard, and Imagine this Dance to Harp Music from Brandeis. All these choreographers do create some very fine tableaus, especially in the last three dances. But they shatter these moments of beauty as soon as they regroup the performers. Changes 1 probably illustrates best what is wrong with the choreography. To a quite unmemorable sound collage by David Maxwell, the dancers as a tightly interwoven group walk diagonally across the stage while a film projects closeups of the maze of heads and necks onto the screen behind (mixing media is apparently an irrestible temptation these days). The patterns are admittedly beautiful, but with the static beauty of a painting. The result is a series of movements, mostly unaesthetic, leading up to and away from a few more or less aesthetic tableaus. That is not dance.

The performers were undistinguished, even faltering, some of the men dangerously close to losing their balance in the arabesques. However, Rima Wolff did not stand out for her liquid and sinuous performance in Maeve Kinkead's Times Three.

The evening's gloom was somewhat relieved by Molly Maddox (Wheaton) with two numbers--Scarecrow and Subway. While amusing, the choreography was cliched and the whole not so much a ballet as a mediocre pantomime. Also amusing, though unoriginal were Phoebe Barnes and Christina Starobin in Miss Starobin's Phoebe and Christina Pal on Stage or, America Remembers Mary Heavtline. Unfortunately, the number was as over-long as is the title.

The most exciting presentation proved to be the sacrilegious, frivoulous, ridiculous Trio of Susan Golod and Peter Mansbach from Brandeis. The two prance about the stage with a desk chair (the third in the trio) to some very fine Scarlatti. Squirming under the chair, carrying it, carrying each other, stomping heartily to the music, the bespecatcled Miss Golod (whoever heard of a ballerina wearing glasses?) and the scruffy, blue-jeaned Mr. Mansbach made flagrant nonsense of both the old Master and the art of dance. It was a daring, enjoyable piece, summarizing the evening's offerings with appealing honesty and not a little sarcasm.