Dance Review: Hindu Mythology Comes to Life on the Streets of New York
This year’s weather, however, has also been unusually unequal; the performances on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were rained out. As if this were not blight enough, the Battery Dance Company itself — the festival’s host troupe — was halfway through its offering on Thursday when a power failure stopped its taped music and, thereby, the piece itself. After a long pause, it proved impossible to start the music again. And the two companies that followed were of <a href="http://aaaajerseys.com"><strong>NFL Caps</strong></a> very different calibers. I was keen to see Silesian Dance Theater simply because I know little of dance in Poland. This troupe, founded in 1991, is that country’s oldest professional contemporary dance company. But its “Formosa Olivares (Near the top of a mountain one can’t get lost),” created by the founder-choreographer and artistic director Jacek Luminski, looked dully amateurish: a harmless depiction of sport and boogying for seven dancers that lacked any precision of movement and that never took wing. Although there are real drawbacks to “Visions of Forever,” the program’s 75-minute-long closer, presented by Sutra Dance Theater, from Malaysia, it has an abundance of color and dance detail — and one superlative performer. In the Odissi style (which is the specialty of Orissa on the east coast of India), it depicts aspects of Hindu mythology with marvelous costumes. One big problem was a voiceover, introducing each section of the work, delivered <a href="http://aaaajerseys.com/"><strong>nfl jerseys</strong></a> in the pretentiously mystical tones that I associate with a son-et-lumière accompaniment for tourists (“Once upon an abandoned temple, ...my reverie is intensified by a whiff of sandalwood perfume, brought by the cool of the evening breeze. ... I hear the tintinnabulations of ankle bells as the ancient sculptures come to life”). A smaller problem was that Ramli Ibrahim, the company’s artistic director and one of its two male dancers, indicates the drama of his scenes with a certain arch preciosity, whereas his partner, Rathimalar Govindarajoo, delivers it with marvelous focus and intensity. The elaborate facial maquillage, with white pearl drops painted above each dancer’s brows, also tip toward pretty-prettiness. Much of the work’s opening and closing scenes are centered on the company’s younger male dancer, the slender, handsome and wide-eyed Harenthiran Pulingam, who certainly lends himself to all its picturesque aspects. Four other women deliver the many tableaus and dramatic ensembles with verve. But once my eye lingered on Ms. Govindarajoo, it kept singling her out, even when she took a supporting role in groups. Just an advancing phrase <a href="http://aaaajerseys.com/"><strong>cheap jerseys</strong></a> of footwork with alternating in/out arm gestures became captivating with her. In extremes, either of vivid rhythm or sculptural positions, she is spellbinding, with sharply percussive feet, wonderful plasticity and stillness, and a riveting facial beauty. Tiny inflections of the shoulders and head made her movement more complete than that of others. This is a dancer who casts the spell of the Odissi form by the fullness with which she performs it.
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