Stomp, Sneeze, Grunt, Gasp and All That Body Language

<First published online in the New York Times on May 10, 2007>

The movement in David Parker’s new “Hour Upon the Stage,” as seen at Dance Theater Workshop on Tuesday, is on several cusps at once: between basic and virtuoso, between modern dance and ballet, between generating self-made rhythm and responding to other rhythms. The central gimmick is that the eight dancers (the Bang Group) themselves make most of the sounds: They slap, click, grunt, gasp, all in rhythmic patterns. But they don’t try to make a serious rhythmic accompaniment for one another.

Nor do they ever concentrate long on clapping, foot-tapping or vocalism, even though hands, feet, speech and song are the most efficient noninstrumental human means of creating complex aural rhythm. Instead they slap their own bodies or make “natural” but wordless noises. The effect is always too artful for comfort: willfully naïve.

Probably this is the opposite of what Mr. Parker intends. The best moments of “Hour Upon the Stage” are images of spontaneity. The dancers look like older versions of Billy Elliot, more or less grown-up ordinary folk without super-svelte bodies who have stumbled on the beauty of a ballet class, and without feeling inhibited to confine themselves to academic movements.

Some basic ballet motions — a slow port de bras standing in fourth position, for example — become events of newfound grace here. Other nonballet movements — one man landing out of the blue on another man’s neck and staying there (oddly comic), or a man running backward around the stage in decelerating and decreasing circles (an absorbing minimalist effect) — become peculiar strokes of poetry. Mr. Parker gives his most striking moments to his male dancers, not least in unsexual male duets, as when one guy supports another in ballet adagio.