Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet.

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet 

Cedar Lake Theater, NYC 

January 8-18, 2009

Cedar Lake keeps getting better. The European-looking NYC-based company is slick, sleek, and technically fierce. Their winter season included two world premieres: memory/measure by Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti and frame of view by Dutch choreographer Didy Veldman. They also reprised Crystal Pite's haunting Ten Duets on a Theme of Rescue from last year.

Veggetti's memory/measure is set to a score of thunderous metallic claps and a spoken text that intermittently calls out stage directions. The four dancers (two male, two female), dressed in black leotards or tight pants, move between poses, muscle and flesh sinking into bone. The choreography, like the costumes and white floor, is as stark and clean as an expensive car commercial. At times the dancers follow directions from the voice above; at others, they find their own interpretations. One dancer on pointe creates praying mantis-like shapes, then rushes to another part of the stage, screeches to a halt, and makes a new shape. Two men take a woman's malleable body and turn her over in the air, her legs like a windmill. Their lyrical movement snaps into place like a bow releasing an arrow, and their downcast eyes tell us they are processing the movement, feeling the effect of a cause. The piece fittingly ends with the words "voices, movement, voices, stillness."

Veldman's theatrical frame of view is suspenseful, ironic, and humorous. It takes place within the pliable framework of a house, whose three yellow doors act as entry points, props, and partners. In one passage, the slender Audrey Hepburn-esque Ana-Maria Lucaciu sits at a desk that she later pushes around the space in a soulful, pained solo to Nina Simone's cover of "Ne me quitte pas" (Don't Leave Me).

Veldman plays with--and at times mocks--the roles of women in society. There are those who faint, sending a man running to catch them. There are others, like Acacia Schachte, who walk through a group of prowling men without giving them the time of day. She takes sexy, swaggering steps as if her bare feet were inside stilettos. There's also a hilariously slow-motion lovers' quarrel between Marina Mascarell and Jason Kittelberger; another dancer sprinkles confetti at poignant moments in the fight.

The piece ends with the dancers in line at the front of the stage, quietly grooving to Dean Martin's "And the Door Is Still Open" with hip swivels and shoulder twists of satisfaction.

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