The New York Times-20080128-Moon and Earth and Sky- A Festival-s Long Reach- -Review-
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Moon and Earth and Sky: A Festival's Long Reach; [Review]
Full Text (452 words)Young Soon Kim, the founder and director of the White Wave modern dance company, has a thing for festivals. But there are usually several choreographers and performers who stand out in what are essentially showcase series. The Cool New York festival's program on Friday, at the company's John Ryan Theater in Brooklyn, opened on a high note with 359 Degrees, a solo choreographed and performed by Ashley Lecille Suttlar. Set to music by Donny Hathaway, the dance communicated a deeply felt emotional state clearly and evocatively, through a strongly centered body that seemed drawn to the earth and sky from moment to moment.
Another highlight was the ChangMu Dance Company, a modern-dance troupe based in Seoul, South Korea, and founded in 1976 by Kim MaeJa. Ms. Kim's Slow Moon distinguishes between shamanistic traditional dance, performed by her with a powerful delicacy and contained sorrow, and choreography in a more Western modern-dance style, with which the piece begins. That opening section is vividly imagistic, with women in flowing white, manipulating what might be large bouquets made of newspaper pages, serving as fast-moving, stop-on-a-dime ranks of fierce handmaidens.
The traditional and modern were more seamlessly mixed in SuMee Yoon's No Man's District, a ritual, set to music by TaeWan Kim, for four handmaidens who looked angelic even when arching up on all fours or looking just as earthbound as Ms. Suttlar. The luminous Ms. Yoon led the angelic women, who seemed to become more exalted with her arrival. Here, as in Slow Moon, the choreography's shapes and pathways were clearly defined and precisely danced.
Young Soon Kim and Pascal Benichou were urgently clinging lovers in a duet from Ms. Kim's SSoot, with minuscule gestures signaling large and rather complex emotions. The lovers seemed much less confused in The Farewell, a sweet-natured folk duet choreographed by Mariah Steele and performed by Ms. Steele and Dusan Perovic. And Melanie Aceito did reach, as promised, in her Reach, a lyrical but slight solo performed to music by Mark Olivieri.
Charly Wenzel was buffeted by society in his compelling performance of a solo by Darcy Naganuma but another excerpt from her Unveil, a churning group dance, was less successful. Welcoming though the White Wave space is, it is too shallow for group pieces like this and Elisha T. Clark's Frozen Angels, presented by the ETC Dance Co., which also needed to be seen at a greater distance from the stage.
The Cool New York 2008 Dance Festival continues through Sunday at the John Ryan Theater at White Wave, 25 Jay Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, (718) 855-8822 or whitewavedance.com.
[Illustration]PHOTO: Kim MaeJa dances Slow Moon at the Cool New York festival. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ROB BENNETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)