Skimming the Surface

Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Company
October 12, 2007
Terrace Theater, Kennedy Center
Washington, DC

By Lisa Traiger

Copyright © 2007 by Lisa Traiger

Washington, D.C.’s Dana Tai Soon Burgess has built quite a career delving into his Asian-American heritage. A fourth-generation Korean-American on his mother’s side, Santa Fe native Burgess, currently a professor at George Washington University, endeavors to reflect on this aesthetic with the predominantly Asian company he founded in 1992. In the slippery discourse that he mines between East and West, his dances navigate an aesthetic that seems out of time and out of place in relation to what populates the contemporary dance world. That doesn’t seem a problem though; DTSB&Co.’s growing prominence includes State Department-sponsored tours and visits to the Far East, South America and, most recently, the Middle East (Egypt, Israel and the West Bank). Among his notable works over the years, the reconstructions of Michio Ito’s distinctive solos from the 1930s stand out, along with his larger scale pieces, among them 2003’s “Tracings,” a heartfelt investigation into his grandparents' immigrant history.

Photo: "Tracings," courtesy Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Company
 

But the program Friday evening at the Kennedy Center, which opened this season’s contemporary dance series, while reflective of his East-ward gaze, felt unfocused. Of the seven pieces, one excerpted from his full-length “Tracings” and two from his meditation on war, 2006’s “Images from the Embers,” few left an impact in wake of scattershot programmatic choices. Present throughout in lesser or greater extent were tastes of the choreographer’s dance values: movement collected from the span of the Asian continent -- Indonesia to India to Korea and beyond -- and a dynamic restraint that rendered the bulk of the evening flat. 

“Leaving Pusan,” from “Tracings,” begins a journey the program never completes. Its dancers elegantly clad in Judy Hansen’s loose-fitting white tunics and slacks become the sea over which elegant spitfire Miyako Nitadori, carrying a white satchel and a traditional Korean mask, prepares to embark. While the others’ breathy ease, punctuated by articulated bent-elbows, suggests ghostly apparitions from the past, Nitadori stands out for her pointed, stylized manner, at once fluid and sharp, free but bound. As Aaron Leitko’s spare, synthesized score recalls both nature and Korean music, Nitadori’s direct attack highlights her character’s determination to journey to the unknown.

This specificity of approach reappears in “Images from the Embers.” Inspired by French novelist, journalist and resistance fighter Marguerite Duras’ World War II-era writings, the work is a throwback: its dramatic narrative of life and death laid out on the trajectory of a writer’s career recalls ballet’s most famous anti-war treatise, “The Green Table.” In both, the character Death figures prominently. While in Kurt Joos’s 1933 work, Death was a dominant, strapping male, Burgess’s Death is portrayed by the formidable Shu-Chen Cuff, initially standing on a stool, later grasping and writhing. With a writer as central character the work becomes a danced drama of interior dialogues and monologues. But Burgess can’t motivate the writer to only dance: he relies on a swath of paper unrolled onto the floor to become the path on which “Tati” Maria Del Carmen Valle-Riestra scribbles a lot and moves less. As the Middle Aged Woman, she carries a weight that belies her petite frame, while her doppelganger, tiny Nitadori again, Burgess’s most accomplished dancer, is the one with a fire within. Seen as an excerpt, without most of the projections and other trappings, this work, paired with a duet after intermission, suffers from a lack of continuity. Sloppy partnering by Leonardo Giron Torres in the duet did not show off Nitadori at her best.

There’s a great divide between Burgess’s experienced dancers and his new company members; only time will reveal if these less acclimated performers can attain the attention to detail, technique and dynamic current that the choreography demands. For example, in Burgess’s lover’s trio, “Fractures,” accompanied by a frequently used Arvo Part score, features Florien Rouiller, of late from CityDance Ensemble, wavering between two partners, the mature emotionally and technically stable Nitadori and the youthful, occasionally unsteady Sarah Halzack. The performance highlighted this disparity among Burgess’s long-term company members and his new hires.

The intricately carved gestures and sculptural plastique of “Khaybet,” a 2003 solo danced on Friday by Jennifer Rain Ferguson, relate as much to bharata natyam and Indian temple dances, as to modern dance. In “Khaybet” and companion “Mandala,” from 2001, there’s a sense of reverence, of movement for a higher purpose, and in “Mandala,” in particular, the quartet of women tracing and sculpting the air in intricate carvings, the sense of ongoingness, suggests a worshipful nature.

The evening’s premiere, “Chino Latino,” purports to mine the confluence of Asian and Latino cultures that Burgess reports he discovered as a child in New Mexico, where salsa and martial arts were both pastimes. Little-known Spanish songs from South America that reference Asians, namely Chinese and Japanese, provided an old-timey soundtrack. And, again, Hansen’s costumes, this time candy-colored dresses, midriff-baring tops and slacks, lent a spirited feel to the work, but the movement material ultimately felt stilted. While the dancers’ thrust and sway their hips, they miss the freedom and easygoing swing that’s integral to Latin social dances. It’s hard to make a salsa step look academic with the right music and motivation, but here Burgess’s dancers carry too great a reserve, which works fine for his Asian-American works, but doesn’t bode well for something located south of the border. Only Connie Lin Fink was able harness playfulness: her smile and casual demeanor felt real, rather than painted on.

Those painted-on smiles in “Chino Latino” underscore an element of Burgess’s Eastern aesthetic that without the piecemeal programming might have otherwise gone unnoticed. His dances and his dancers tend to emotional restraint -– a distinct though not exclusively Asian quality -- with a reserved, often passive face that leaves behind a feeling of blandness. There’s little opportunity both for unmitigated movement and unbridled emotion, save for example in his dramatic works. An emphasis on design and its modeling of classic modern dance forms and Asian performance and martial arts renders the evening a journey aborted, caught up in surface-level technique with only brief moments of depth.

© 2007 Lisa Traiger
October 19, 2007