Garrett + Moulton: Twentieth Anniversary

A previous performance of Charles Moulton’s “Ball Passing” (courtesy of Scott Horton Communications)

Yesterday evening at the ODC Theater, Garrett + Moulton Productions presented its twentieth anniversary program. This consisted of three selections, the first two world premiere performances, one by each of the founders, Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton, presented “in order of appearance.” An intermission was then followed by a joint effort, bringing Garrett’s choreography together with Moulton’s ongoing study of inventive patterns of ball passing.

That final selection, entitled “Roll Out,” made for a delightfully engaging climax, even if it was the only selection not given a premiere. (The premiere took place in November of last year at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.) The whole idea behind “Ball Passing” is one of repeated patterns, both the static images and the transitional movements that lead the viewer from one image to the next.

The earlier incarnations of this work involved performers in a rectangular grid executing uniform movement along both up-down and left-right axes. However, by virtue of the “genetic crossover” with Garrett’s choreography, the performers break free of that grid, allowing for a new generation of patterns to emerge. The entire offering was accompanied selected movements from the third, fourth, and fifth string quartets composed by Marc Mellits, performed by an ensemble in which a string quartet was extended with piano, clarinet, and bass clarinet. The result could not have been a better representation of what has emerged from Garrett + Moulton Productions over the course of twenty years, as well as the forecasting of innovations yet to come.

Indeed, there was another innovation in Moulton’s contribution to the first half of the program. “Angry Bear” was an animated film. No dancers had to worry about the limitations of physical movement in the making of this film. Indeed, the entire visual experience involved only Moulton’s own inventive drawings and the occasional lines of narrative that linked those drawings.

The soundtrack consisted of a score by Christopher Benstead, and it was presented through the full resources of the Constellation® technology developed by Meyer Sound. Thus, if the projection itself was confined to the limitations of two dimensions, the audio was unmistakably a three-dimensional extension to the viewing experience. All this amounted to a bracingly novel perspective on Moulton’s ideas of choreography.

The evening began with the world premiere of Garrett’s “Threnody.” This was the one disappointment of the evening. The musical accompaniment involved a selection of pre-classical excerpts from longer compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Josquin des Prez, George Frideric Handel, Henry Purcell, and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Some of the selections were vocal, sung by contralto Karen Clark. Ironically, in the midst of all this musical diversity, the choreographic discourse was disappointingly, if not painfully, repetitive. Thus, while there was an imaginatively rich tapestry of musical accompaniment, the dance itself bordered on the impoverished.

However, if the “overture” of the evening was unfortunate, all that followed could not have been more stimulating.