Paul D. Mosley and Kraig Patterson.

CLARK STUDIO THEATER MAY 25-26, 1996

Dance fans may know Kraig Patterson best as the sassy maid in Mark Morris's Hard Nut or from the wide collection of roles he dances in the Morris repertoire with singular style and spirit. But he's a distinctive and promising choreographer too, albeit so reluctant about promoting himself that lots of people who would rejoice in his work don't yet know he's doing it.

I met up with his dances last summer when Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project performed two of them at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. Both were on the shared program that marked Patterson's local professional choreographic debut: the solo Flys, a funny, poignant study (set to Chopin preludes familiar to every balletomane) suggesting that a pesky winged creature may possess a soul; and make like a tree, an ambitious excursion for six set to a fiery Ginastera string quartet. Here Patterson demonstrates his innate command of composition, a mastery akin to that of Paul Taylor and Morris: the unerring sense of what, how much, and when, which (pace Louis Horst) cannot be taught. Both pieces reveal, too, a fertile imagination that, like Taylor's and Morris's, is so daring, it seems to take its own peculiarity as the norm.

New to me were two pieces created for the Barnard College Dance Department. The White Room, from 1993, set to an Arvo Part symphony, depicts simply and searingly the fate of the human spirit and community in concentration-camp circumstances: the dehumanization, the terror of the nameless, the desperation, the embrace of death as the only way out. The recent raWo_an warGasm, to a wild, raunchy assortment of hit-you-on-the-head-and-leave-you-dead songs, is disposable, but a real tour de force. It takes that genre of pieces made to order for a large group of female undergraduates, whose talent and technique may be limited, and, with it, ignites the space and the moment. Patterson hurls at us a horde of Amazons with attitude in riot grrrl dress. They do obscene things with their mouths on Eve's (overripe) apple and with a red water pistol held at the crotch. Somehow the acting up and acting out come across as sheer energy, freedom, and joy.