Complexions Contemporary Ballet
There’s not a lot of middle ground with choreographer Dwight Rhoden. His work is ultra-fast. It’s super-charged physicality, and everything is pushed to the nth degree—jumps, turns and battements. It’s edgy and in-your-face.
Similarly, there aren’t a lot of fence-straddlers among those who watch Rhoden’s work. Either you love it for all the reasons above or you dislike it for the same.
Complexions Contemporary Ballet, the company the choreographer formed in 1994 with his muse, the virtuoso dancer Desmond Richardson, appeared at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey, in October, giving the world première of Rhoden’s Hissy Fits, commissioned for the center’s Alternate Routes series. The other highlight, the company première of Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, was excerpted because of an injured dancer.
Whether by design or chance, Rhoden’s work is more revealing than its superficial appearance suggests at first. Take Hissy Fits, for example. Rhoden’s program notes indicate this suite of dances is about out-of-control emotions and their impact on relationships. But this is not your traditional display of emotion. In Rhoden’s universe, temper tantrums bring cool impassivity, a very 21st-century attitude. Indeed, the 11 dancers moving through a series of pas de deux and solos seem determined to avoid overt emotion at all costs.
Rhoden’s Achilles’ heel—his reluctance to edit—shows up here, unfortunately muddying the waters. This time around, there’s the recurring motif in which a dancer sits, grabs his foot and opens his mouth as if to eat the foot, and then rolls over backward.
One of the more intriguing moments comes as a couple face each other and stop. We are riveted as she raises her hands to his lips, and he brushes her hands away. Unfortunately, the moment is gone in an instant.
But Rhoden’s return to the opening image of the dancers moving forward while holding hands poses another interesting question. Are they a community of suffering lovers? Is every couple caught in the same never-ending battle?
Two sections of Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven were enough to remind us of the late choreographer’s creative genius. Here, there is no such thing as a wasted or ambiguous moment. The sections on view showed a seamless fusion of the complex and dynamic with the simple and contemplative.
Rhoden’s Red/The Force groans under the weight of his effort to make a statement. Yes, this excerpt from the full-length ANTHEM is physically intense. It’s all that we associate with the color red—choose your own adjective and apply with heat. But again we’re left with extraneous bits, in this case a tango dancer placed (oddly) in the midst of other goings-on, alternating between priestess and temptress. This jumble of imagery tantalizes as much as it frustrates.
Karyn D. Collins is the dance critic for the Asbury Park Press/Gannett-NJ
