SOVER SCENE: Everyday themes and esoteric artistry

January 24, 2008
By ANNE LAWRENCE GUYON

“A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.”

I was about 5 minutes into watching a sparsely eloquent piece being performed by eight members of Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance when this line by Francis Bacon came to mind.

Two couples in casual clothing moved methodically through a simply lit performance space, intersecting and parting, hoisting, shoving, cradling and spinning each other, sometimes splitting into protective pairs or solemn solitary figures, then merging again to resume what evolved into a mesmerizing physical dialogue.

With its glimpses of human connectivity and emotive heft woven into swaths of abstruse exploration, the dance, entitled “Snapshots,” had the cadence of a postmodern poem, though the phrase “poetry in motion” seems too glib, and perhaps overused, to sufficiently explicate the depth and impact of Lavagnino’s dynamic choreography.

Nevertheless, the measured pace in her work is, like good poetry, evocative and riveting.

And while the lines, energy and aesthetics may appear to fit under the aegis of modern dance sensibilities, it soon becomes evident that the foundation of every leap, crouch, angle and extension is, in fact, ballet at its rigorous best. Then there’s the fact that in nearly each case the women — whether attired in tailored tops with ruffled collars or denim hot pants, rhinestone belts and T-shirts — are on pointe. What they do with those pointes challenges everything we know about ballet, not simply pushing the envelope but shredding it, with intrepid grace and unapologetic verve.

It’s an incongruous but arresting dichotomy that serves to propel Lavagnino’s visionary reconstruction of a dance form that’s been around for more than half a millennium, in all its meticulous, romantic, tulle-tutued glory.

Lavagnino brings her reverent revisions of ballet to the Horowitz Performing Hall in Saxtons River on Friday at 8 p.m., with an evening of strenuously salient movement that is certain to have audience members enrapt, and probably debating gestural meaning long after the show’s over.

This is my kind of ballet. Not that I don’t venerate the classics and appreciate the immeasurable gifts that this core discipline has given to so many other forms of creative movement. Every chassé, jeté and grand plié I ever did made me a far better tap dancer than I would have been otherwise but, having felt like a caged lion whenever I donned pointe shoes, I find Lavagnino’s defiant dedication to and exploration of ballet’s illustrious footwear to be yet more compelling.

In a lush and lyrical full ensemble piece called “Suite,” men and women clad in wispy silk shifts, shorts and trousers surge around the stage in groupings that disperse, dart and gather, amoeba-like, into varying formations. Trios divide into duos, then the entire group gathers en masse, only to split again into three kinetic tableaux. All the while, the women thwart the limits of function — and to some, no doubt, decorum — that one usually associates with toe shoes.

While still relying on recognizable balletic vocabulary, with delicate pirouettes, arabesques and relevés regularly peppering her choreography, Lavagnino invents a fresh glossary of positions, footwork and moves, investing her dancers with license to thump, slap, slide, angle and maneuver their feet in virtually blasphemous ways. Because the interior box encasing each woman’s toes is made of hardened linen, the pointe shoes inadvertently, and marvelously, become percussive elements as well, whether accompanied by vociferous violin or a rock anthem by Queen.

The dancers bound, collapse, lean, sway, swagger, kneel and mince, all on pointe, sometimes sustaining an impossibly wide stance or odd ankle twist for lengthy durations that render viewers uncomfortable yet transfixed. Toe shoes are mystifying enough to the average dance-lover but in this brash, pioneering context they become enthralling devices that effectively help illustrate everything from fury and elation to rejection and fear.

Lavagnino not only shifts the paradigm when it comes to the historical lexicon of ballet but she also tweaks the roles that have been traditionally assigned to each gender. In “Snapshots,” men blithely carry each other then fold down gently to the floor together, women display athleticism and bravado on fully extended toes and both partners support, lift, spin and guide. The great divide between the sexes exquisitely blurs with poignant and powerful results.

August choreographer George Balanchine once said, “In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts,” but Lavagnino — an erudite and ebullient woman whose life has been steeped in dance since she was 6 years old — has been respectfully reexamining and discarding that tenet since founding Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance in 2000.

Having been with Pennsylvania Ballet in the late ’70s when it was one of the top three companies in the country and the first to perform Balanchine’s repertoire, Lavagnino honors his legendary genius while venturing forth into a strikingly inventive landscape all her own. That impulse to question the typical provinces of each gender was a central theme when we spoke last week.

“I look at the dancer as an individual,” she explained. “It’s about relationships and people, not making the woman look ethereal, as if she’s about to ascend to heaven.”

This daring sensibility grew out of Lavagnino’s experience in graduate school at NYU’s Tisch School of Dance, where she studied with distinguished ballet master Lawrence Rhodes after an extensive career that also included performances with the San Diego Ballet, Arizona Ballet Theatre and Ballet Teatro del Espacio in Mexico City.

“Rhodes’ way of approaching ballet was very healthy to the body — a more honest, simple way of dancing so that the individual was seen, instead of a more idealized picture of ballet.”

“We’re grounded,” she added. “Some of it is aggressive, some tender, some sad. There is a modern influence because of weight, rhythm and ease in the body.”

As to the distinct contemporary aesthetic of her work — which involves unobtrusive yet potent costuming and minimalist lighting — her perspective is an expansive and holistic one, in which all elements come into play. “It’s also about visual beauty. I consciously paint the space, so composition is always present … how is the stage being shaped, where is the energy, what is the design?”

Working closely with the Mosaic String Quartet as well, whose original compositions are scored specifically for dancers, Lavagnino’s inclusive, multimedia methodology reveals the origins of her artistry. It all began with the learned influence of her mother, herself a student of major dance icons such as Martha Graham. Now in her eighties, Lavagnino’s mom still drives herself to class through Southern Cal traffic, with decided admiration and gratitude from her daughter.

“My mother wanted me to be well informed and not just an isolated dancer,” Lavagnino reflects. “She would pick me up after school and we’d drive 30-45 minutes. My first formative teacher was Carmelita Morachi, who had her students study an instrument so I played flute for three years. Music is at the core of my choreography, it springs from that and I work repeatedly with Bartók, Beethoven and Stravinski.”

“Then Stanley Holden from Royal Ballet opened a company at Dorothy Chandler pavilion in L.A.,” she enthused, “and he invited me to join. He was an inspiring man, whose classes and choreography were about musicality and movement.”

Though that veneration for classical roots informs her visual principles, Lavagnino leverages her training into an exploration of both narrative and physical possibilities that venture far outside the norm. “I use pointe work not just to elevate the woman and make her look weightless but to create something gritty, fragile and tentative.”

This juxtaposition of tradition and innovation, economy and complexity, adds dimensions to Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance within both partner work and individual expression, all of which are anchored by a deep well of creative wisdom and the courage to boldly go beyond the parameters of conventional ballet.

Verse in motion … that’s it.

Online: www.cherylynlavagnino-dance.com

Annie: annieguyoncommunications.com

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