SQUEEZEPLAY.

SQUEEZEPLAY THE KITCHEN NEW YORK, NEW YORK MARCH 22-25, MARCH 29--APRIL 1, 2000

The avant-garde accordionist Guy Klucevsek is an adventurous fellow with a lovely sense of humor and an interesting set of dancer friends. In his charming concert, Squeezeplay, commissioned in part by The Kitchen and Live Music for Dance Program, he provided the squeeze on the accordion and his friends (all seasoned downtown dance-makers) provided the choreographic play. Squeezeplay was a choreographic breath of fresh air, an unusual evening of diverse and tasteful dances. While Klucevsek and his instrument and musical skills provided the unifying element of the concert, it was the whimsical physicality throughout, furnished by the five choreographers--Victoria Marks, Claire Porter, Dan Froot, David Dorfman, and Dan Hurlin--that made this an occasion of visual pleasure as well as aural satisfaction.

In Inside Score, the first of the series of pieces each employing Klucevsek in different physical ways, the accordionist sat playing as Victoria Marks's delightful video was projected onto the balloon thought bubble over his head. It included shots of Klucevsek hopping here and there on a giant music stave and pictures of an audience overcome by slumber.

In Claire Porter's Not Without You, Klucevsek and Porter (she costumed all in black and white polka dots) initially shared a park bench, then gambolled around it in a gently affectionate movement dialogue that seemed simultaneously mature and innocent.

Dan Froot and David Dorfman burst through the audience, gaudily dressed and slightly sleazy, in A Guy Called Dan-n-Dave, eventually playing clarinet and saxophone respectively and cavorting about the space, Dorfman losing the sole of his shoe in the process. Their verbal patter made them seem like latter-day vaudevillians. Late in the piece, Klucevsek wandered about in the dark, his accordion sounds responding to their vocal directions.

After Mary Ellen Childs's ingenious piece of music, Margin Release--the only music not composed by Klucevsek and not accompanied by choreography--Klucevsek assumed yet another persona, a blind man amidst Dan Hurlin's fine and various puppet stages.

In the concert's finale, Hurlin's complex The Heart of the Andes, a reference to the painting by Frederic Church and in part a contemplation on perspective and focus, Klucevsek sat, wearing dark glasses, and played while Hurlin made small, proper Victorian shadow puppets dance. In the end, Hurlin himself poignantly assumed the pose of a young boy running across a field in "Snap the Whip," the painting by Winslow Homer.