RIOULT Dance NY

Choreography by May O'Donnell, Martha Graham, and Pascal Rioult

Off Broadway, Dance
Closed 2.15.14
92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, 1395 Lexington Avenue

by Zahra Sadjadi on 2.16.14

RIOULT Dance NY's "Views of the Fleeting World." Photo by Sofia Negron.

BOTTOM LINE: Established name in modern dance celebrates 20 years of his company’s success paying powerful homage to his female predecessors and their influence.

“Nothing is borne of the void [….] everything comes from something.” Those were Pascal Rioult’s words when post-performance discussion moderator Celia Ipiotis asked the artistic director, choreographer, and founder of RIOULT Dance NY how Rioult, during the course of his 20 years on the modern dance scene, kept his art from being derivative. With those words, Rioult not only acknowledged the anxiety of influence; he celebrated it.

Indeed, Friday night’s performance, while a scaled down, truncated version of the program that RIOULT will eventually perform during its upcoming season at The Joyce Theater, was all things that a celebration should be: energetic, expressive, humorous, and touching. With two restaged pieces originally performed in the early 1940s and choreographed by pioneering figures of modern dance Martha Graham and May O’Donnell, Rioult makes his mothers known. Even so, Graham’s “El Penitente” and O’Donnell’s “Suspension” are not all that alike. Additionally, the thread of influence in Rioult’s original pieces, presented immediately after each parent piece, is there but it’s not always easy to catch.

In “Suspension,” the first piece of the evening, seven dancers populate the stage, arms outstretched, moving in hypnotic harmony in relation to each other. Each dancer, clad in a sleek unitard in varying shades of blue, moves in their own orbit but with greater consciousness of the organism they form as a whole. The experience is like watching an abstract painting come alive as blue lines animate in different shapes, hold, contort, and then morph into an evolving tableau. The piece is quiet and subtle. The gestures are graceful, athletic, controlled, and unemotional. The same cannot be said of “Wien” the Rioult piece that immediately follows. Where “Suspension” is akin to observing the cellular growth of a microorganism cultured in a petri dish, “Wien” is like having a bird’s eye view of human chaos on the planet earth. With six dancers in plainclothes alternately huddled together in a mass, circulating around the stage in various states of pained expression, clutching, jumping, and frenetically intertwined, it is hard not to be at turns amused, horrified, and, above all, emotionally invested.

Like “Wien,” Graham’s “El Penitente” is character-driven but with only three dancers who portray the Penitent, the Christ Figure, and Mary as Virgin/Magdalen/Mother. This piece resembles more of a passion play with its pageantry, archetypes, symbolic oversized props, and ritualistic gestures. According to Rioult, who performed the role of the Christ Figure often in his career as a Graham dancer, this was Graham’s take on “primitive.” Set against this context, Rioult’s “Views of the Fleeting World”, I suppose, is also an attempt at calling upon the simple and the primary only not through a lens informed by ancient texts and narrative as much as it is carved out by the elements in nature. In this way, “Views of the Fleeting World” is much more similar to “Suspension” only on a grander scale. Where “Suspension” seems minimalistic, “Views” is epic and expansive. Choreographed to J.S. Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” and consisting of seven distinctly nature-based vignettes, the piece is elevating and inspiring.

As someone who has been following RIOULT Dance NY since 2007, I appreciated the chance to see the newer choreography juxtaposed against the original canon of modern dance pieces, and, like Rioult himself, I found that they were less an instance of derivative art and more an instance of art transformed.

(RIOULT Dance NY played at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, 1395 Lexington Avenue, February 14 and 15 2014. For more information about the company, visit rioult.org.)