A confession: I have a fear of post-performance Q&A sessions. While they can sometimes offer surprising insights about a given piece or choreographer’s process, they also have the potential to devolve into drawn-out torture sessions of discomfort. Either everyone is too shy to ask a question (guilty), or someone in the audience is all too eager to display his or her dance knowledge with a long, rambling dissertation about something that has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Happily, there are exceptions–and Sunday afternoon’s salon series performance of Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance at NYU’s Tisch Dance Studio was one of them. There, a very young audience member’s comments renewed my faith in the value of Q&A sessions and left me with a deeper appreciation for the work of Lavagnino, a choreographer who blends classical ballet and contemporary dance.
On the program were four pieces, including a work-in-progress called Menage, which Lavagnino and her company created during a residency at The Silo this past summer. According to Lavagnino, the inspiration for the piece came from Degas’ ballerina sculptures, and indeed watching the dance was like seeing those sculptures come to life. Dancers coupled and un-coupled in a series of intricate partner work that is one of the hallmarks of Lavagnino’s style. The movements were deliberate and meditative, as though the dancers were figuring out in that moment how they might fit together and how their movements–the sweep of a leg or the nudge of an elbow–would cause the other to respond.
Little hints of narrative flickered throughout. In one, a woman clung passionately to a man who appeared not to notice her. In another, two men joyfully waltzed each other across the floor, coming to rest side by side with linked arms.
The program moved along swiftly, and by the time the last piece was over it took me a moment to bring Menage back to mind. But a young boy, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, was ready with an astute observation. He noticed that there were lots of different stories in the dance, he said, but not one whole story. He was right on, and Lavagnino told him so. The piece lacked an overall cohesiveness because it was still stuck on the fence between abstract and narrative.
Thanks to the boy’s thoughtful observation, we learned from Lavagnino that narrative work is new territory for her. She added that she plans to bring in Kay Cummings, who teaches acting for dance at NYU, where Lavagnino is dance department chair, to help flesh out the story and the dancers’ characters. And though the dance was sparked by Degas, both Lavagnino and composer Scott Killian admitted that it seems to be taking on a kind of deep-South, Tennessee Williams flavor as they continue to work on both the dance and the music (composed by Killian in collaboration with Jacob Lawson and Jane Chung).
And so, as the boy so precociously suggested, the whole story has yet to emerge.
It will be interesting to see how it all turns out. We’ll have our chance in the spring, when Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance has a season at Symphony Space May 6-8.
In the meantime, the kid in the audience has given me a lot to think about–not just in terms of Lavagnino’s piece but in how I approach my work as a dance critic. Like the know-it-all who hijacks a post-performance Q&A session to expound on obscure bits of dance ephemera, dance critics can fall into the same trap in our writing. In our valiant attempts to grasp at a piece’s meaning and relevance we can often lose sight of what’s happening right in front of us. The boy reminded me that the first thing you have to do is take a deep breath and tell what you saw, and say it simply. The rest will unfold from there.
