It begins with a line of women in black dresses, advancing toward us. As the tide of their bodies turns back, one more woman emerges through them. She holds our attention with both otherworldly fluidity and a flashing of claws. She points at us with casual command, then shimmies. As she walks away, she looks over her shoulder with the tiniest of smirks.
Something witchy is happening in John Jasperse’s “Tides,” which had its premiere at the start of the 20th anniversary of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Much of the magic derives from the casting. The pointing woman is Jodi Melnick, who has been bewitching audiences for decades. Later Vicky Shick, another veteran spell caster, wags a finger. But the hidden force is Jasperse, a choreographer whose compositional skill and artistry channel the talents of these exceptional performers into the special sorcery of contemporary dance.
“Tides” honors a particular lineage. Melnick, Shick and Cynthia Koppe have ties to the postmodern luminary Trisha Brown, an early Jasperse inspiration. Younger dancers in “Tides,” Maria Fleischman and Jace Weyant, have been students of Jasperse and Melnick. As the dancers combine and recombine or line up together and shield their eyes from the moon, there are suggestions of the older dancers taking the younger ones under their wings.
Some drama comes from Hahn Rowe’s oddly aerating score, which ranges from poltergeist noises to techno beats. Ben Demarest’s lighting lines the sides of the stage for sections that resemble catwalk modeling, illuminates the back wall to highlight dancers curiously conjoining body parts and partially blinds us with oncoming headlights. But the main charge of “Tides,” one of the most engrossing dance works I’ve seen this year, comes from the choreography: a strong structure kept supple and alive with little slippages and surprises.
“Tides” made for a thrilling but incongruous start to La MaMa Moves, which continues though Sunday. The festival is customarily a home to the fledgling and never-quite-arrived ends of experimental dance. A premiere by Jasperse, a major choreographer whose work has appeared at major theaters like Brooklyn Academy of Music, could be read as an anniversary treat and an act of generosity — or as a troubling symptom of a dance ecosystem in crisis.
Two shared programs this past weekend were back to festival business as usual: a lot of first-draft ideas and one undersung delight. In “dance for no ending,” Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro tried all kinds of things — entering along the walls as if playing a vertical game of Twister, hurling props onto the stage, wrestling, drawing, making ironic announcements through a bullhorn. None of the zaniness, though, was actually fun or funny.
