The theremin is an electronic instrument, patented in 1928, which consists of a couple of antennae that the performer does not actually need to touch to make sound. Instead, the performer simply waves his hands in the air around the antennae, calling forth sounds almost as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra. The theremin has a buzzy tone and no set tuning (it slides right across pitches as the performer’s hands move, rather than stepping neatly from one note to the next), and so, while theremin virtuosi exist (and can play, you know, “Ave Maria”), I think that Justin Jones and his partner in crime, Elliott Durko Lynch, have found the true use of the theremin—as a toy for avant-garde performance.

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After the Donna Uchizono show at the Walker, I overheard a man asking a Minneapolis dancer, “So what did it mean?” She wisely ducked the question, listing instead a few elements she saw. Similarly, a friend told me that he doesn’t know what to say about a dance if he doesn’t recognize the references—the influences, the history. “I don’t normally write about that,” I said. “But then isn’t it all subjective?” he asked.

 

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Laurie Van Wieren’s “like a movie I saw once,” which graced the Bryant-Lake Bowl stage last weekend, and is definitely worth seeing if Van Wieren ever does it again, is short and sweet, forty-five minutes of Minneapolis’s most engaging performers at play. Chan Holman (new to me, but clearly on a star path) sings standards in silly ways: “Ch-Ch-Changes” becomes a sputtering aria, while Holman switches octaves on “Blue Velvet” so that her voice bottoms out. When she’s not being silly, she thrills; Holman’s real voice is a nightclub queen’s, strong and sultry. Michelle Kinney (a noted cellist) accompanies her on, of all instruments, an accordion, which she later lugs around stage as if it’s her albatross.

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Recently, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a—well a rant, really, for Slate.com titled “The Worst Pop Singer Ever”, in which he used the recent death of painter Andrew Wyeth, whose work is arguably both dreadfully sentimental crap and American genius, to account for the unfathomable popularity of the Piano Man, Billy Joel.

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There's always something "let's put on a show!" about the Ballet of the Dolls. This can be charming (as I'll explain in a moment), but if you're not in the mood--if you've come in grumpy and would just like your entertainment straight up--please, then you're apt to be painfully aware of the mere humanness of it all. More so because the Dolls traffic in Broadway-esque productions--they tell stories through Myron Johnson's flashy, stylized, musically bound, and mostly familiar choreography; through the performers' dance-acting, and through their homemade costumes. Real Broadway, with the advantage of great heaps of capital, doesn't require much of the audience, just that they sit there with their eyes open while the great entertainment steamroller flattens them--so how can the Dolls compete? 

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Dance: it's all just movement. This less-than-inspiring thought comes to me as I'm watching TU Dance's fall concert open with "Sense(ability) Sketch 1," a first step towards an eventual evening-length work on Ayurveda. Some people are wheeling around in anguished twists and shaken-free leaps, some are riding cheerfully by on bikes, the harsh modern classical music has words, and yes, apparently the whole is about Ayurveda. Yet confusing as this mélange is, my eyes track it, and something in the back of my brain registers pleasure. I feel like my cat watching his cat-sitter video: I don't know what those little shapes are up to, but I can't stop watching them!
            

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The pas de deux from George Balanchine’s Agon (1957) still startles with its transformation of the classical partnered dance. The two dancers maintain their courtly relationship (he offers, she accepts), but they are no longer characters (a man, a swan princess) acting out their love; they are ideas, compass points, architectural elements coming apart and combining, each time creating something new. Each configuration has a merciless and near-divine geometry: the man, kneeling, bridges his back towards the woman as she spans her legs perpendicular to him; he lies extended on the floor, holding her hand, while she stands above him in a vertical split. Each movement pushes to its outer limit of curve or linearity—the ballerina’s back bends until her head touches her foot, both dancers’ legs stretch into 180-degree leaps. Agon looks modern still, with its cold yet vivid world of design, thought, and desire.

This pas de deux, as performed by Kaitlyn Gilliland and Ask LaCour (both on loan from New York City Ballet; Gilliland is the daughter of Lise Houlton, MDT’s artistic director), is glorious to see. Unfortunately, it casts the rest of Minnesota Dance Theatre’s fall program in shadow. Even the Swan Lake pas de deux performed by the same two dancers can’t compete; the Lab’s modern set-up—performers level with and close to the audience—hinders Swan Lake’s blue-lit magic, but it only aids Agon.

The evening’s other three pieces (performed by MDT company dancers) are even less impressive beside Agon. Moments of sea-creature strangeness in Mathew Janczewski’s “Trebuchet,” a modern exploration set to grating nightclub sounds, don’t prevent the piece from feeling flat and a little forced, as if the dancers and the choreographer had two different understandings of momentum. After seeing the MDT dancers in nothing but leotards and trunks for their first two pieces, it was a relief to see Abdo Sayegh working a white suit at the beginning of Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “Appearances”—but the joke was on me, as “Appearances” is mostly a vehicle for the women’s costumes, which showily switch from evening dresses to skirts to culottes to red majorette leotards.

Lise Houlton’s “Point of Departure,” which opens the evening, fared best. Houlton is not a full-time choreographer, which shows in the piece’s lack of a larger structure. Still, she has a dancer’s way with movement and a quirky musicality (she finds the jazz in Haydn) that make “Point of Departure” fun to watch. What makes the piece more enjoyable is that it’s clearly designed for MDT’s dancers, and it shows off their youth, strength, and energy. Maxamillian Neubauer bounds and spins his way through a solo; Melanie Verna and Sam Feipel wind sweetly through the complex involutions of a pas de deux.

But we know MDT’s dancers; it’s no news that they danced well. I was more curious to see the guest stars from NYCB. Ask LaCour is the epitome of a leading man: handsome and tall, with an open style and long, straight lines. A pas de deux does not offer a complete display of a man’s dancing, but LaCour made everything he did look easy. (And he gets extra credit for smoothly partnering a ballerina so tall that in attitude her foot grazes the back of his head.)

Kaitlyn Gilliland is not LaCour’s opposite number. Instead, she is something far stranger: not a princess who happens to be dancing, but a being made for dance. Her first big lift in the Swan Lake pas de deux, when her legs fly suddenly into a leap, lit up the stage; it was a promise fulfilled. Her balance in arabesque was a fairy tale. With her seven-mile legs and liquid feet, Gilliland wears the steps differently than most dancers, and with her form—impeccably thin, but given curvy voluptuousness by her hyper-extended joints—she has an otherworldly appeal. (George Balanchine would certainly have wanted to set a dance or two on her.) Dancers so tall and mobile often have trouble fully inhabiting their dancing—there’s so much to take on!—and Gilliland’s Odette suggests she could go farther. But her work in Agon is already stunning: diamond-hard yet waterfall-luxuriant. Don’t miss her while she’s in town.

Minnesota Dance Theatre’s Extreme Odyssey continues at The Lab through Oct. 19.

What happens when the earth is neglected? Zorongo Flamenco Dance Co. asks this question in artistic director Susana di Palma’s new production, which is based on Federico Garcia Lorca’s play Yerma and divided into two separate shows, this month’s Romeria and October’s Marchita. This two-part structure is daring in itself, but Zorongo goes further than that: they’re presenting Romeria outside, on several stages at Minnehaha Falls Park.

When the production begins at the bandshell, it doesn’t seem that this gamble will pay off. Fellow audience members are too distracting—they talk to each other and on their cell phones, they come in, they leave, they block your view, they take pictures. It’s evident that the main characters—Yerma, the barren and abandoned wife (Adriana Meresma Fois); Juan, her careless husband (Timo Nunez; Raul Salcedo takes the part on Saturday and Sunday); and a crone, a witch of the old ways (Susana di Palma)—are all played by powerful and skilled performers, but their drama seems small and far away. The location doesn’t fit either: the bandshell awkwardly stands in for an interior.

But once the romeria (pilgrimage) begins, everything changes. The first scene over, we’re led down a long staircase (wear walking shoes!) through the woods. The green light filters through leaves, the smell of earth, the procession, the song that we’re encouraged to sing, all this changes the mood at once. By the time we arrive at the bottom of the stairs, the story of Yerma’s quest for fertility isn’t just something we’re watching; we are the romeria.

Even what you might normally consider a bother—the difficulty of seeing the dance through people and trees—becomes part of the experience. When Yerma dances her frustration, her wild-bird hands and her storm-weather shifts are given new meaning by a thin screen of branches. The disrespectful Juan’s modern attire and forceful hammer-beats seem all the more out of place, out of tune on this stage among trees.

The apex of the performance is just such a conjunction of story and nature. Yerma’s efforts to become pregnant through gentle sympathetic magic (having a pregnant woman step over her scarf) have been frustrated by her unkind husband. (Admittedly, in a modern context this element of the story is a little weak. What if the guy just doesn’t want kids? But we have to see the metaphor here: Yerma is not just a woman, she is nature herself.) So Yerma turns to darker magic: now it’s not just fertility she’s after, it’s revenge.

As the crone, di Palma beats out a spell on a stage lodged perilously in high rocks beside the stream. In this powerful moment, reality and performance blend. If di Palma were a real priestess (and in some way, artists are), we would see her this way: crowded together, straining for a view, and catching her violent incantations at last through birch leaves, the gliding stream’s sound in counterpoint to the driving flamenco beat. 
            
Romeria is a cliff-hanger—the full consequences of Yerma’s neglect and revenge will have to wait until Marchita, which happens at the Southern Theater, Oct. 16-19. But it is an experience in itself, and not just for the eyes and mind. By taking us through the park, by making us walk a romeria of our own, di Palma and company get their point across bodily. Minnehaha Falls Park, like all the nature that remains, is beautiful, and being in it calms, soothes, and strengthens us. But how often do we go into nature? How much, in our daily lives, do we care for the world that sustains us?

Romeria continues through Sept. 21, with free shows daily beginning at 6 p.m., zorongo.org

There’s too much to say about Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, copresented this weekend by Northrop, St. Benedict, and the Walker Art Center at the Rainbow Quarry—too much about Cunningham, about this production, about Ocean itself. If I went into all that, I’d have no space to tell you what it was like to be there. Suffice it to say that Ocean is BIG, big: It headed The New York Times list of this season’s dance events; it exhausted a small army of dancers, musicians, funders, technicians, organizers, and even bus drivers. I’ll refer you to my preview article in the September issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine for the rest, and get on with the work itself.
            
The music. One minute before showtime, a clarinetist at center stage tunes the four corners of the orchestra; she might be calling the four winds. When, a moment later, Andrew Culver’s music begins on all sides, it’s an army that suddenly crests the walls of a canyon, hanging for a moment at the rim before rushing in. David Tudor’s electronic score adds thunder that might shake loose the quarry walls. Or, in a quieter mood, whale-song and bird cries—while the live musicians seem almost like human voices, scattered here and there in the audience. You hear rain to your right; it takes a long time to recognize it as part of the score. Later, a heartbeat charges the last minutes of this teeming cosmos of sound.
            
The movement. It’s hard to understand how Cunningham’s 1950s audiences could have been shocked by his movement style; today, Cunningham looks more classical than most ballet. Certainly his work demands classical virtues of dancers: they need strength, discipline, and integrity to get through his one-legged landings, his arduous sequences pieced together without the help of slur-steps, his unassisted promenades and développés. These last two items—slow revolutions and extensions, performed on one foot—once featured largely in ballet, but were given up for the showier maneuvers of pas de deux. Cunningham’s steps are not pyrotechnic but planetary, giving a sense of geometrical planes that radiate out into space, slow or thick elements the dancers move through. Even in playful or witty moments, exacting precision remains. The image that sticks is a single dancer in a pose that gleams with victorious effort.
            
The dance. Famously, Cunningham pulls his steps together into larger sequences with the assistance of chance, but what does this backside-of-the-embroidery information have to do with a viewer? Nothing, really. But given this keyword chance, you might notice the randomness of your own attention—how you see a dancer’s shape in the background, think about tomorrow’s schedule, then are caught by the sudden exaltation of a leap. You might quit worrying about seeing the dance and pull back to a general attention in which the matrix of moves and dancers is a miraculous vision into a concentrated span of life, that truly narrative-less twisting and work, meeting, parting, and beauty. Here, you catch a symmetry just as it dissolves: every dancer on one foot, still, or a diagonal line advancing. Here, two dancers coincide in a tender duet, lifting, touching, and mirroring each other for a precious few minutes you are lucky to have seen.
            
The design. Light and the saturated colors of the costumes (simple unitards or, later, translucent shift dresses) act as temperature in Ocean. White lights flick on and flood you with a cold wind. Dancers in blue-black unitards have the same effect, but when new dancers enter in sun-gold and red, warmth returns. It’s an illusion of warmth, because the quarry is quite cold when the sun goes down, so cold that steam rises from the dancers’ bodies—evidence of their work. The ruggedly worked walls of the quarry go nearly invisible during the performance, but their towering presence remains—and reappears in the electrifying white light of the last few minutes. Those minutes are counted by four large television screens mounted at the four corners of the stage. This strange feature mostly makes you aware of the mercurial passage of time: how ten minutes can go by in a blink, how much intricate action can fit in sixty seconds.

But time has another resonance in Ocean. Despite the surround-sound, despite the busy dance, Ocean holds a deep silence. You are silent while this spectacle is brought to brief life; when it ends, you go on with your noisy life, while this vision vanishes into the actual silence of underwater, perhaps, or of granite. The surrounding rock walls are felt in the darkness as monuments of time and silence. It’s this that gives special urgency to the last few seconds, ticked off on the clocks, as one dancer, having held out moving as long as he can, rushes off stage just as the dark veil falls.

It’s no secret that TU Dance always puts on a good show. The company founded by former Alvin Ailey stars Uri Sands and Toni Pierce-Sands earns sold-out houses and standing ovations in response to Sands’s smart, lively choreography, and the company’s sleek, keen dancing. TU Dance offers acrobatic leaps, twisting, thinky partnering, and heartfelt emotion; no wonder audiences love them. But as the company enters its fourth year, in what direction is it going?

This concert opens with two revivals and closes with two premieres. “Lady” (from 2003, before the company was quite formed), an African-inflected work set to the soulful music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, finds Sands in an easy, theatrical mood, arranging movement frontally, for the audience, along the line of some conceit he finds in the music—a gaggle of giggling girls, say, or a trio of swaggering men. I find “Lady” on the dull and predictable side, except when the ecstatic cutting free of one company member or another raises the dance above itself, above the sequence of audience-oriented steps. But “Lady” does contain a gem: a little duet for Sands and Pierce-Sands that switches between sensual adventure and gentle kindness, between complex moves in which Pierce-Sands’s long legs act as compasses, leading the pair from one involution to the next, and soft companionate curves, one body holding up another.

In the second revival, “For You” (2007), one audience member is seated on stage and six dancers dance directly in front of and for this single viewer, aiming their looks and their forms in his or her direction. Last time I saw this, I felt mostly embarrassed for the singled-out audience member, who is the recipient of some truly treacly smiles. This time, however, I saw how the one viewer acts as an imaginary magnifying glass for the rest of us, inviting us to experience the kaleidoscopic swirl of bodies on stage. “For You” is elegant modern dance, sweeping and athletic. Sands has a bent for the arduous in partnering, which results in risky, almost combative moves as two dancers tumble over each other, catching a few impossible balances on the way to the ground. Still, overall “For You” is strikingly humanist in its close-up view of the dance’s delicate negotiations.

The first premiere, “Likedatliciousonicdindaadaa,” is easily the hit of the night. Here, Sands dives into urban dance (club dance, popping and locking, breakdance), sliding a cute duet and two brief, shadowy solos onto the stage before finishing off with a full company freak-out. Sands has featured urban dance before, but never in quite this way. Before, he seemed to assume that his academically trained dancers could handle a little groove, when in fact they often couldn’t, resulting in a secondhand account of street dance. This time, though, it looks as if Sands and company have done their research and taken a few classes. More importantly, Sands isn’t just flinging up some flat version here; he’s investigating. Where does the snap that begins breakdance come from? he seems to ask, starting his own quick solo with a tortured agitation of his hands. I’ve never seen Sands bring his intellectual muscle to bear on this type of dance; it’s a promising new direction for him.

The second premiere, “Ash and Dust,” shows Sands in his moody, quirky, this-is-a-strange-cold-world vein—neurotic gestures, weird, splayed-out bug moves, cut-off relations between dancers, and an atmosphere of high seriousness. “Ash and Dust” is his least successful foray in this direction: its invention is dulled by an unmoving pseudo-narrative and hemmed in by the repetitive music (seemingly ripped from some Merchant-Ivory film about an unfortunate clockmaker). Sands has created beautiful, evocative work in this vein before, but “Ash and Dust” falls short—perhaps because Sands aims at a more accessible “meaning” here.

So what does this evening add up to? A lot of enjoyable dancing, but also some confusion. Sands does African-modern, cool modern, urban dance, and his own ballet-modern hybrid; he makes frontal, straight-up entertainment as well as high-concept dance artifacts. Clearly he’s excited by a lot of different things in the world, and no one would want to change that. But I’m not sure his invention, plentiful as it is, stands up to his wide range. Seeing the same distinctive move used in two completely different contexts undermines its integrity in both, and gives one the feeling that Sands isn’t going quite far enough after his inspiration. A little deeper investigation would help the company’s dancers as well. Between the high turnover at TU Dance (I count at least five dancers making their TU Dance debut this fall) and the variety of dance styles, even dancers as good as these are bound to fall flat somewhere. This time, the least convincing dance came in “Lady,” where only a few dancers could let loose enough to look as if they were genuinely dancing and not just performing steps.

Don’t get me wrong, this is an excellent company and always well worth seeing. But by setting their own bar so high, TU Dance invites the question: could they do better?
            
TU Dance performs at the Southern Theater through June 29.