Little by Little, She Showed Up.

SUSAN RETHORST P.S. 122 SEPTEMBER 14-17, 1995 REVIEWED BY LYNN GARAFOLA

In her new Little by Little, She Showed Up, Susan Rethorst makes no apologies for being middle-aged. On the contrary, she exploits the diminished physicality and ironic perspective of the older woman artist to construct a persona that seems remarkably close to her real self. We first see her alone, lost in reverie, marking the steps of a dance as they take form in the imagination. Her presence is riveting, yet devoid of apparent artifice: whatever she sketches--a releve, a First Position, a grand plie, an arabesque--seems a natural emanation of her thoughts while also happening to suggest the ideal shape of a classical step filtered through a postmodernist sensibility.

The other characters arise from the same autobiographical quarter of Rethorst's imagination. With David Thomson, a man of elegant line and sinuous grace, she offers an image of the dancer she might once have been or perhaps hoped to be--beautiful, sensuous, androgynous in spirit and physique. With Karen Weber, whose self-effacing plainness seems the very epitome of normalcy, Rethorst toys with another invented or imagined persona, that of the repressed woman prone to spasms of sudden anger and fantasies of erotic abandon to which she finally surrenders.

Rethorst saves the best of her musings for the grand tableau that brings Little by Little to its exultant end. Here, like the princes of yore, she conjures to the stage a sisterhood of vestals, the shades of a postmodernist dream. The dancers enter in pairs, walking backward until they form two vast horizontal lines; then, as the music swells, each of the dancers holds up a spoon. The gesture is subtle, as quietly ceremonial as the tilts and arabesques penchees that fall and rise in unison, or the slow, gracious port de bras that evoke the formality of classicism, without reproducing its style or steps. With a quizzical expression, Rethorst wanders among the phantasms, lost in wonder not, like Solor, at the multitude of their identical female forms, but at the prodigality of the imagination that mothered them.