Happy Feet

KIDS AND TEACHERS at East Somerville Community School performed an extraordinary dance last Saturday night. "May Day," choreographed by Toby Armour, artistic director of New England Dinosaur, a company which just finished two weeks as artists-in-residence at the school, is a rare achievement. First, for the company to have given inexperienced children and adults the sense of what makes dance, and second, for the choreography of the work to be recognizable as Armour's style.

To a Vivaldi concerto, the dance begins with a group of nine teachers walking with measured steps around center stage. They gesture, a hand to their forehead or cheek, as if perhaps they had lost something and did not know where to find it. A gang of kids in red T-shirts race through, and two boys execute a run and fall as if it were a Little League slide into home plate. After three sections of the kids, just as energetic, and the teachers, acting just as oddly as in this opening section, the work ends with the same boys' action. Interesting to watch at every moment, "May Day" exhibits Armour's style in its unusual gesturing, in the way one dancer carts around or molds another, and in the way two unrelated images are slammed together on stage.

"Black Breakfast" and "March," two of the four pieces danced by the company alone, are like "May Day" in that they exhibit two groups of dancers on stage who take no note of one another. In "Black Breakfast" Michael Mao and Elizabeth Mallinckrodt cavort on and off, first mindlessly motioning like rock dancers, then dressing up to parade as nobility. They end dumping their pile of costumes on the head of Sally Lewiecki, who throughout lies inertly on a black coffin-like box, showing us only her chalk-white face and her hands gesturing like non-human flesh.

In "March" two men in blue jeans and white T-shirts take turns manipulating one another into poses as two women in red-striped T-shirts and white pants prance through ignoring the men. The women dance in the funny upright way Armour often choreographs movement. It's as if she wants to keep her dancers from noticing whether they're doing ballet or jazz.

The dancers put on this same quality of obliviousness in "HUP," a work to a taped score by Ezra Sims, a member of Dinosaur Annex which is associated with the dance company. The quartet grinds through quick bouncy jumps, erotic hip gyrations and military marching with equal indifference. A girl bouncing a ball begins the work; a lone ball bounding across stage ends the dance. A lady behind me aptly remarked, as one dancer laid her head on the shoulder of another, "I'd be tired too, if I'd been jumpin' around like that."

AS PART of the River Arts Festival, DANCEWORKS, a modern dance studio in Boston run by Susan Rose and Joy Kellman, performed "Sequenza" during afternoons last week on the Cambridge Common. Designed for two to two hundred people, and in this version with around fifteen, the work uses an easy, loppy movement style. From a distance, I thought it was a baseball game and not the dance I had come to see. It is a lot like a game, and makes you laugh without being humorous. Interesting to watch is how the simplest actions, like running and forming lines, are the most exciting in open space, and how absurd gestures look even funnier when windswept.

Conclusion: spring dance fever exists in places other than New York.