Company in fine, fluid form with six tour-worthy works

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MIKE.APORIUS@FREEPRESS.MB.CA WCD�s Johanna Riley, left, and Sarah Roche perform in Lesandra Dodson�s In Silence.

DANCE REVIEW

On the Road

Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers

8 p.m. today; 3 p.m. Sunday at Rachel Browne Theatre

Tickets: $25, $20 students/seniors

Three and a half stars out of five

Based on the latest show by Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers, one can't help thinking that Brent Lott's zodiac sign might be Gemini -- the twins.

With the recently revitalized company about to embark on its first tour in 15 years, the artistic director has assembled a program of six repertoire works, three of them duets for twin-like pairs.

The production, On the Road, opened Thursday and has performances tonight and Sunday afternoon at the Rachel Browne Theatre.

The current four-dancer company consists of two short, dark-haired women of similar build, and two much taller, lighter-haired women of similar build.

Lott uses the dark twins, Kristin Haight and Lise McMillan, for a strong new duet. Its title, First Walk to Available Sky, may be baffling, but the piece is clearly about a relationship.

The pair are dressed in tight black jeans and tank tops. Their bodies often make sinuous shapes as they move together and apart, "spooning" in loving embraces, expressing tension between their roles as individuals and partners, creating opposite-mirroring effects, or battling in stylized conflict.

With their skin aglow under Dean Cowieson's soft lighting, Haight and McMillan are as beautiful to watch as flowing dollops of coloured oil in a lava lamp.

Less satisfying is an excerpt from Lott's mythology-based work in progress, Between the Sycamore. It uses the tall twins, Sarah Roche and Johanna Riley, in brown dresses. Though an excerpt that Lott showed last season conveyed a moving sense of rebirth, this twitchy, quirky duet perhaps needs the context of the whole to be effective.

A third "twin" work is Lesandra Dodson's In Silence, a 2003 piece performed by Roche and Riley in black dresses. The pair recite repeated strands of a poem by Lord Byron, When We Two Parted, while making fierce gestures such as slapping their hands to their sides and thumping their chests. They breathe in gasps and hard exhalations.

While the contradiction between Romantic poetry and aggressive movement is interesting -- giving the piece a feminist flavour -- it feels mostly like an intellectual exercise.

Lott has wisely included two outstanding solos by WCD founder Rachel Browne. McMillan, who has matured remarkably as a performer in recent seasons, is compelling in a quietly eloquent solo from Edgelit (1998). Here, Browne employs two chairs to create a wealth of resonant metaphors that seem to speak about life stages -- so simple, yet so wise.

The muscular Haight is breathtaking in Mouvement (1992), a Browne solo masterpiece depicting a faun-like creature whose primal existence is destroyed by a hunter's arrow. Like a cave painting come to life, the leaping, convulsing Haight delivers a haunting tour de force

The final piece is Boxstruck, a reworked excerpt for all four dancers from Lott's recent work Struck. It showcases the quartet's tour-worthy technique and unity of style and spirit.

It's much more mysterious than the complete work, but retains the undulating movements that suggest how we're "struck" by life's currents and waves. There's duality here in movements that often whirl back the way they came, or swirl between confidence and cowering.

On the Road might have benefited from a little more diversity in its offerings. But Lott and the troupe's administration deserve twin bouquets for getting WCD back on the road in its 45th season.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 14, 2009 C13