Jann Dryer.

April 7-9, 1995 Reviewed by Cerinda Survant

Jann Dryer makes sensuous dances that spill across the stage with idiosyncratic logic. She weaves simple yet elegant movement into exuberant phrases that veil their own cOmplexity. Dryer's dances are suggestive and enigmatic rather than literal and linear. But even at their most fantastic, they ring with assured, emotional truth.

This concert, Dryer's first in more than two years, was commissioned by Portland State University's Contemporary Dance Season, the city's major modern dance presenter, as the last event of its eleventh and final season. This troubling context colored Dryer's two new tender and bittersweet ensemble pieces, rem.em.ber and New Orleans Sweet, the latter a work in progress.

Through its juxtaposition of contemporary and archaic images, rem.em.ber evokes the timelessness of dream and memory: Flashlights probe the dark recesses of the naked stage; a dancer holds a bouquet of electrified calla lilies; a ticket booth glides past. Building the work in layers, Dryer places a duet here, a triothere; a projection; an emblematic masked figure emerging from the wings. The dance insists upon no hierarchy among its visual elements--movement, costumes (by Dryer), projections, masks (both by Alva Bradford), and props (by Dryer and Bradford) are of equal weight. In the end, rem.em.ber is almost too much to take in at once.

A still and centered torso supports effortless and expressive limbs in a solo for Dryer. An easy, sliding duet recalls the lindy; another is defined and encumbered by the ballroom dance manual in one dancer's hand. One moment, the dancers move through space with deliberateness and restraint; the next, they hurtle and erupt, leaping and sliding. The calm and focused performance style of Gregg Bielemeier, Joan Findlay, Linda K. Johnson, Judy Patton, Robert Reichers, and Dryer infuses and unifies the dance. The elegance, intelligence, and rapport of their dancing is stunning.

With its black-and-white projections of New Orleans streets and cemeteries, its luxurious sets and sumptuous costumes, and its endlessly inventive movement, Dryer's New Orleans Sweet is, like rem.em.ber, visual art in performance. Dryer displays ample mastery of more conventional approaches to choreography in Mother O,Pearl (1995), Walkin, the Way Home (1983), and Dam Angels (1987).