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Next door in Stewart Theater, Boyce's Pass even resorted to old-fashioned 1960s nudity to exhaust the conceptual theme of the dance. Boyce is never prurient, however, and she consistently entertains. But the naive awkwardness of her troupe gives the work an unintended resemblance to rock group movement.
Marleen Pennison has traveled a very different road. Free Way follows the for tunes of a group of blue-collar teens from school to early marriage. Her characters are dressed realistically in polyester. With their unhurried, natural movements, they might have stepped out of Pennison's Louisiana childhood. Like some other new choreographers, she has left the abstract world of myth that some early practitioners of modern dance favored to locate her dances in real geography and time. The result: autobiography that enchants.
Bill T. Jones employs a trio of singers that would do Ray Charles proud to accompany his four-part Social Intercourse. Jones succeeds best when he goes beyond a slide show of Martin Luther King Jr. and a vocal background of the James Earl Ray trial. His considerable talent lies in choreographing street reality with a raw vitality, evident in the most exhilarating soul-handshake in the ater and the use of a "ghetto blaster" portable stereo.
Both the best and the worst of these new dances expanded from the same conceptual and musical frame: the relentless electronic synthesizer. It powers the whiplash pace of Molissa Fenley's Gentle Desire, which only the droogs of A Clock work Orange might find romantic. Stabbing the air, twisting in undefined space, three expressionless dancers—blankness being a hallmark of new wave productions—fail to establish their point. Behind the deafening music there lurks a mad vision of the future: postsexual, postmelodic movement.
Minnesota-born Charles Moulton, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, employs the windshield-wiper synthesizer beat to create compulsively complex patterns in Nine Person Precision Ball Passing. Three tiers of three performers each pass colored balls to one another like robots playing an electronic game. Though it was the most professionally polished choreography of the series, Moulton's vision, like Fenley's, occurs in a hyperspace between the mind and the heart. Neither triumphs, and only motion itself, divorced from experience, is explored to its banal extreme.
If Graham and Humphrey might be called the Einsteins of modern choreography, this emerging group plays the part of latter-day physicists examining minute particles to prove the grand principles. In the process, intimacy and grace have been lost. Paul Taylor, after one performance, was a bit frightened. Said he: "My God, have these people ever been touched by life?" Perhaps not, but the answer will not come with the next turnout. Mean while everyone into the electronic metronomic pool.
—By J.D. Reed