June 10-16, 2004

dance

Beyond the Eastern Standard Time: A Celebration of 35 Years

by Deni Kasrel

Group Motion's 35th-anniversary concert offered an opportunity to see how much the ensemble has both changed and stayed the same over the years. The program consisted of an early work, "Beyond the Eastern Standard Time" (1973), and a recent one, "Cultures and Species" (2003). Both incorporated video and sound collages, though the treatment was different for each piece.

In "Beyond," which is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the video — primarily a grainy black-and-white vision of a naked man seemingly floating through space — was seen intermittently and was more an accent or parenthetical addition to the dance. It alluded to notions of the out-of-body experience, entering in a brilliant void and being in a place of blissful contentment. As they used to say back when this one first played, "Far out, man." Also reflective of the early '70s was a sensational bit of psychedelia in a scene where dancers' bodies are projected in tricolor DayGlo shadows. The gestures in "Beyond" — especially the strident, sometimes hieroglyphic extensions of arms and legs; the frequent body expansion and contraction evocative of deep emotional intake and release; and the trancelike whirling dervish tour de force solo by Emily Hubler — clearly reflect GM's German expressionist roots.

With "Cultures and Species," the troupe continues to glow in the expressionist flame, though now it's bathed in a postmodern light. Inspired by a trip company artistic director Manfred Fischbeck took to his birthplace, Tanzania, as well as his reaction to the tragic crash of the Columbia space shuttle, it is a fine example of the company's penchant to blend the personal with the communal. Early on the dancers twitch, jerk and wobble, to imply elemental impulses of primordial creatures. Separate in their places, they gradually grow into a collective. Meanwhile, the choreography develops from isolated incidents to full-fledged phrases that vacillate between ritual and pedestrian movement.

The abstract video component — initially color-saturated, X-raylike images of landscape and later split visions of the earth paired with changing atmospheres and climates — is no mere accent here, but rather a full-fledged framework around which the dance revolves.

So the group has surely evolved in its 30-odd years, but the essence keeps on hanging on: These cosmic messengers merge the tribal and the technological, the earth and the spirit, to ponder the mysteries of our place in the universe.

(d_kasrel@citypaper.net)

BEYOND THE EASTERN STANDARD TIME: A CELEBRATION OF 35 YEARS - June 5, Group Motion, Arts Bank