Garrett + Moulton + Russell at YBCA

Poster design for the performance being discussed (design by Jack Orsulak, photograph by RJ Muna, from the Garret + Moulton Productions home page)

Through my early years of writing about dance, I developed an appreciation for small companies that had the resources to work with “live” music, rather than building a repertoire based on what was available on recordings. My very first encounter with Garrett + Moulton Productions took place in October of 2013, when they were joined by the Friction Quartet in a performance of “A Show of Hands.” Since that time, when writing previews about the company and its choreographic offerings, I have always made it a point to note the musicians performing along with the dancers and/or the composers whose works are being presented.

Last night my visit to the Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) was my first opportunity to revisit a Garrett + Mouton Productions performance since 2013. I was delighted to see that the performance of music had the same priority. Three of the four works on the program were composed by Jonathan Russell, who also led an ensemble of two trombones (Matt Carr and Andy Strain), two trumpets (Ian Cochran and Ari Micich), two clarinets (Russell and Jonathan Szin), two cellos (Lucas Chen and Natalie Raney), flute (Victoria Hauk), and piano (Allegra Chapman). All three of Russell’s scores were high-energy compositions with their own unique approaches to repetitive structures (none of which showed any signs of trying to imitate Philip Glass).

That energy level was reflected in the premiere performances of choreography created by Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton. Two of the pieces, “Ball Passing Plus” and “Hunting Gathering” were world premieres created, respectively by Moulton and Garrett. Garrett’s “Gojubi” was being given its first performance in the United States, and she also added her own “choreographic flourishes” to “Ball Passing Plus.” Both choreographers collaborated on the opening selection, “The Mozart,” with solo piano accompaniment by Chapman.

“Ball Passing Plus” was the latest incarnation of “Ball Passing,” which was first created in 1978. Moulton conceived the work as an exercise in cooperative movement that would not necessarily involve professionally trained dancers. Rather, it is executed by a relatively large group of individuals passing balls among each other, often embellishing the activity with additional physical movement. All performers are seated and are usually arrayed in a rectangular grid, which is raked to allow everyone to be easily visible to the audience.

This is a creation that is best enjoyed through both micro level and macro level viewing. At the micro level one can follow the paths traced by the balls as they migrate from one performer to another. However, the passing activities themselves often follow several different strategies, meaning that different forms of movements are being executed in different portions of the grid. Thus, at the macro level the entire effort comes across almost like an animated computer graphics display. All this proceeds following a lock-step rhythm, which endows the overall “graphics” effect with a “frame-by-frame” logic. That logic is then reinforced by the repetitive structures of Russell’s score; and the overall result is nothing short of eye-dazzling magic. Last night’s Ball Passing Team consisted of eighteen performers with a wide breath of levels of experience in dance.

Towards the end of the piece, members of the Garrett + Moulton company start to run across the stage in front of the Team. They, too, have balls; but they just toss them up in the air. These are Garrett’s “choreographic flourishes,” throwing monkey wrenches of entropy into the mechanical precision of the ball-passing performers. As the music comes to a climax, the ball-passers themselves throw their balls in the air; and the entire piece ends with an “ultimate flourish.”

The intensity of Garrett’s approach to energy was equally evident in “Gojubi,” where, again, it was supplemented with an original score by Russell. This was the largest-scale work on the program, adding seven Guest Artists to the five dancers in the Garrett + Moulton company. The musicians were all situated at the back of the stage, so one could appreciate their energetic execution of Russell’s score in conjunction with the unfolding of Garrett’s choreography.

This was also the case with Garrett’s “Hunting Gathering.” Russell’s score for this piece involved only flute, clarinets, cellos, and piano; and that instrumental context was reflected in the intimacy of the choreography. I must confess, however, that I found that approach to intimacy rather limited. As a result, more often than not, my eyes would stray to the back of the stage, where the interplay of the different groupings of the instruments in Russell’s score tended to seduce my attention away from the dancers.

The only real disappointment came at the beginning of the evening with “The Mozart.” The “music credits” in the program book read, “W. A. Mozart, Piano Sonatas and Variations.” This was more than a little deceptive. There were individual sonata movements played in isolation. More provocatively, however, the variations were given the same treatment, thus divorced from any performance of the theme being varied. While there was no faulting Chapman’s piano technique, the score she had to execute probably had a jarring effect on anyone given to serious listening to Mozart’s solo piano music.

Sadly, the choreography did little to distract from the slings and arrows of this rather outrageous approach to performing Mozart. It is quite one thing to lay out a sequence of short compositions by Frédéric Chopin and then use them as the basis for choreography. (Thank you, MIchel Fokine.) It is quite another to apply the same technique to the elaborate structures (not to mention overall logic) developed by Mozart, particularly when the choreography involves a rather limited lexicon of motifs continually revisited by different groups of dancers. At best, the music could be approached as a surrealist exquisite corpse; but it was never quite clear what the choreography wanted to do with that corpse.