Cedar Lake Dance Ensemble
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has a leg up in becoming a force in New York City’s dance life. Along with a generous patron in Wal-Mart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie, a dedicated backer of classical ballet training, the company has its own newly renovated 191-seat theater on the West Side, 17 dancers and an ambitious artistic director in the French-trained, Ailey-influenced choreographer Benoit-Swan Pouffer. (The ability to dance on pointe is required of any woman Pouffer hires.)
Judging from the three works presented on a program entitled “Dream Collaborations” (January 30–February 4), however, Cedar Lake choreographers can reduce “classical ballet” to everything from a variant of break dancing to stepping out of a one-legged, stork-like pose in slow motion.
Pouffer guaranteed the program would resemble something put together by committee by deciding to limit himself and choreographers Nicolo Fonte and Emily Molnar to the concept of a dream as “an escape from reality.” (A psycho-therapist would argue that dreams are reality viewed from another angle.) “We see our works as weaving together seamlessly, related yet separate,” Pouffer said. They definitely appeared “related.”
All three dances had numbing stretches of sameness. Slow, silent sections that verged on stasis alternated with spurts of action abruptly triggered by jolting shifts in lighting and outbursts of percussive taped music. Fonte’s Lasting Imprint was set to Minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “Triple Quartet.” Molnar’s 4 Flights down was set to music by Gordon Cobb that suggested Reich with feedback. Sound designer Stefano Zazzera’s “Skomposto,” the score for Pouffer’s Between Here and Now, featured a vocalist who sounded like feedback. To add to the sameness, the costumes for Imprint and Between appeared to be in various stages of disintegration.
Although all the dances began in silence, the opening proved the most distinctive moment of each. There’s no curtain at Cedar Lake’s theater, but without the houselights being lowered the audience grew hushed watching dancer Jason Kittelberger slowly cross the exposed stage to begin Imprint. (Kittelberger’s supple, masculine presence was powerful enough to dominate all three works.)
When the lights came up on 4 Flights down, 16 dancers were discovered lined up against the bare, upstage wall. Any hope that Molnar would use them in a truly inventive fashion—as in, say, the ever shifting poses of the silhouetted women’s corps in Jerome Robbins Glass Pieces—soon vanished. They ran around a lot, but their unison maneuvers didn’t rise to the level of The Wave.
Between, which employed Rick Sordelet as “stunt coordinator,” began with Gideon Poirier slowly descending by rope from a window-like opening upstage. What really clinched its winning the prize for novelty, however, was Pouffer’s fleeting use of pointe work. Otherwise, Cedar Lake’s only connection with ballet tradition was the belated announcement that the order of the program would be changed.
Harris Green writes about dance in New York City.
