One Found Sound Concludes Eighth Season

Yesterday evening One Found Sound (OFS) concluded its eighth season with the final program in its Water Music series entitled RIVER. The title referred to the performance of two movements from the music that Duke Ellington composed for Alvin Ailey’s dance, The River; and new choreography was featured through much of the program, including an overture that the Chevalier de Saint-Georges composed for his comic opera L’Amant anonyme (the anonymous lover). All of the program selections were provided with video interpretations by Max Savage of Noisy Savage.

Indeed, video was very much the center of attention for most of the program. Thus, Lynn Huang’s choreography for the overture was clearly designed with the many multi-image techniques that Savage added to the mix. As a result, the repeated structures associated with eighteenth-century overtures provided Savage with an opportunity to explore mirror images, which, in turn, would expand Huang’s choreography from being a work for solo dancer. Furthermore, both Huang and Savage kept up with the dynamic pace of the score and the energetic interpretation by the OFS musicians. If the purpose of an overture was originally to seize attention and prepare it for what would come, Huang and Savage offered a thoroughly engaging take on that tradition.

Ailey created The River for American Ballet Theater (ABT), rather than his own Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, in 1970. It was set to an original suite with the same title composed by Duke Ellington. Ellington’s primary colleague, Billy Strayhorn, had died on May 31, 1967; and, for those with keen ears for the Ellington style, his absence of influence on The River is evident. Having seen the ABT performance, I have to say that the choreography was also disappointing.

That said, the OFS musicians gave a solid account of Ellington’s score, and any shortcomings were more than compensated by Savage’s visuals. The “Lake” movement again involved choreography, this time created jointly by Julia Jerome and Benjamin Reynolds. After a seductive prologue, they introduced fire into their choreography, escalating the old fire-eating carnival act to a highly engaging art form.

Symmetry on steroids in Max Savage’s film for “Giggling Rapids” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

This was followed by the “Giggling Rapids” movement, which inspired rapid-fire close-cutting in Savage’s editing. He also returned to many of the mirror effects he had evoked for the overture selection. This time, however, it seemed as if he wanted to explore every possible kind of symmetry that Hermann Weyl had enumerated in his Symmetry monograph for Princeton University Press. However, the dazzling results were far more evocative of the film choreography of Busby Berkeley than of higher mathematics!