REVIEW

AXIS Dance Company, Mixed Bill, Against Endings
By Allan Ulrich
Published November 21, 2003

This weekend, Oakland's Axis Dance Company, a troupe consisting of dancers with and without disabilities, is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary with four performances at San Francisco's Yerba Buena for the Arts Forum, where the group, with Victoria Marks, a Los Angeles-based choreographer, are sharing an oddly proportioned program as Wattis-Artist-in-Residence. If one is patient through a long and specialized evening, there are a few genuine rewards to be had.

Axis, like England's CandoCo, has extended one's idea of who should dance and why; and if there was an emblematic moment in Thursday's (Nov. 20) program, it came near the end, during the only big company Axis piece, Dust, made for this troupe by Marks and given its premiere here. Half way through this high energy number, Stephanie Bastos, who has been dancing and tumbling fearlessly, steps downstage, and in a stunning theatrical moment, removes her prosthetic right leg from the knee down, props it up, knocks it over playfully and then goes right back to turning somersaults. So, take that, she seems to say. Who needs Inspirational? you might think. But Dust brims with so many moments of derring-do it doesn't have any time to play on your sympathies. These six dancers, two in wheelchairs, traverse the stage like a force of nature, often altering direction as if guided by a higher force, Eve Beglarian contributed an exceptional score, which starts with barely perceptible burbles, and evolves into rich, electronic textures, festooned with aggressive pizzicatos and spiced by the composer's live vocals. One encounters tender moments here: supplicatory gestures and gentle lifts, and the deceptive opening, with a couple of dancers bathed in squares of light (a device Marks can overuse). But it's the unceasing flow and the voluptuous use of space that gets to you. The other dancers were Katie Faulkner, Bonnie Lewkowicz, Sean McMahon, Alisa Rasera and Judith Smith, who is the artistic director of Axis.

Marks's other work, Against Endings (2002), assembled three members of her own company - Maria Gillespie, Stephanie Nugent and Karen Schupp - for an eccentrically phrased, 22-minute abstraction that would have been far more persuasive at one-third the length. Perhaps that was the point of these unisons, repositionings and simulations of sprinters ready to run the 100-yard dash. Perhaps, too, the extreme length is meant to be a parody of some of the worst aspects of postmodernism. But Against Endings, with its pounding taped score by Amy Denio, simply wears you down, with an accumulation of artfully wrought material much too enamored of itself. Satire is a dish best consumed sparingly.

Guest choreographers June Watanabe and Remy Charlip, offered typical works, all in their premieres. Watanabe's into/in, too (premiere) united Faulkner and Smith in a modest series of partnering situations developed through improvisation and inspired, says the choreographer, by the paintings of Marc Chagall. Charlip furnished four of his famously aphoristic Air Mail Dances, accompanied by the live fiddling of Katrina Wreede. In Faces, Rasera pursed her lips, stuck out her tongue, rolled her eyes and swung her arms. In the diverting Instructions to New York (as it were), a little girl read from Charlip's book, Fortunately, while Shelley Senter and Isabel Cristo delivered a physical essay on the capriciousness of fate. In Dance with Three Steps, Bastos and Stephanie McGlynn engage with two sawed-off staircases (three designers are named in the program). And in Dance in a Winged Chair, David McCauley attempts to seduce the book-devouring Megan Schirle, both sitting in an armchair. This was the subtlest and wittiest of Charlip's vignettes; every flicker of a limb spoke volumes.

For heroic performances, the prize was taken by Homer Avila, who lost a leg and hip to cancer, but still dances with a febrile intensity that dares you to look away. Miguel Frasconi juxtaposes dissonant outbursts with sinuous string passages, while Avila balances on his leg, descends, recovers, hops defiantly and descends again, only to roll about the floor with arms chugging like pistons.