Erin Baiano Photo
In “First Word,” a silent solo that follows Tyondai Braxton‘s “ArpRec1,” acclaimed dancer Wendy Whelan rediscovers her body: Her arms, that have carried so many classical performances, are now unbound. Her long, dextrous torso reaches forward and snaps back. Her legs — how they bend so violently when asked! — delight in new configurations. Even her huge eyes, deeply expressive when they catch the light, convey a profound sort of reeducation. When fellow dancer Brian Brooks joins her onstage for an exercise in impossible synchronicity, it’s all that the audience can do to try to not blink, lest they miss something.
“First Word” is the entry point into Some of a Thousand Words, the latest from Whelan, Brooks and the New York-based quartet Brooklyn Rider. Thursday evening, the duo and quartet came together for the work’s world premiere at the Shubert Theater on College Street as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. It will be performed a second time Friday at 8 p.m. before moving on to the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. A work of outstanding vibrancy, power, and heart, it stands as a testament to exactly where Whelan wants to be as a human and as a dancer, and the culmination of an artistic process in which success was not certain.
On an artist’s residency in Whelan’s hometown Louisville, Ky. earlier this year, Brooks and Whelan ran into a problem: For the first time since they had started rehearsing Some Of A Thousand Words, the pendant to Whelan’s 2012 collaboration Restless Creature, Brooks felt that the piece was getting away from them. Like, really getting away from them.
Before the residency, things had seemed relatively stable. Brooks was accustomed to leaving sections of the dance on the lyrical cutting room floor, but this — practicing in an old industrial complex, where the space swallowed the work whole — was different. Was the work’s intimacy a handicap, Brooks had to wonder? And if so, would part of Some Of A Thousand Words live or die depending on the space where it was performed? What changes needed to be made?
“We felt like it was spinning away from us a couple months ago,” he said in an interview earlier this week. “There was a real disconnect between the design that Joe [Levasseur] and I were working on for the space and the intimacy that I was working on with Wendy. They were totally different ends of the spectrum and it was really unnerving to be talking about this intimate relationship and we’re in this cavernous theater with this big, giant lights. You couldn’t feel the piece. I reined myself in and really looked at the core of this piece.”
Erin Baiano Photo
That instability was a good thing, it turned out. Brooks took the opportunity in Louisville to reset, talking to the creative team about what the piece had become and what he genuinely wanted it to be. More good news followed: Early rehearsals proved that Shubert, though no black box, mirrored “the intimate, interior space” that he was going for.
Thursday night’s triumph was the result. If Whelan’s 30 years with the New York City Ballet (NYCB) ended in fanfare, nostalgia, and the well-warranted fêting of a trend-setter — her muscled grace and now-legendary pas de deux, followed by a 15-minute ovation in October 2014 — Some Of A Thousand Words showed that she, with steadfast determination, is now moving into a contemporary future.
Some Of A Thousand Words marks a paradigm shift with which the audience must get comfortable fast (seriously: If you are going for whispers of the the NYCB, please catch the Metro-North out of town so more people can attend this). But it’s still underscored by a formalism that jives with Whelan’s background and the high she seems to draw on precision. Brooks has mentioned the influence of Duchamp (and I would guess, more strongly, the Italian futurists) on his work, and a fascination with the stop-and-start of the clock, the dissection of seconds, appears throughout. There are careful, measured forays into mechanization, punctuated by humor and exquisite grace; minimal grabs and lifts made urgent by a striking, consistent intimacy. As Brooklyn Rider plunges from Evan Ziporyn and John Adams into an original composition by violinist Colin Jacobsen, Whelan and Brooks respond, their bodies and the music wholly intertwined by the end of the night.
First Fall, then — danced to Philip Glass, bringing the program to its emotional knees, and then its emotional conclusion — feels totally natural, tying up Some Of A Thousand Words’ loose ends. It makes clear, too, that Some Of A Thousand Words is a momentous love story — not between Whelan and Brooks as woman and man, but between them as artistic partners, between Whelan and her willing body, between her bare feet and the stage. A draft, too, of something still very dewy, slow-blooming. Not a chapter, but a sketch that is just right for its moment, and for what it might yield in the next phases.
Some of a Thousand Words closes at the Shubert Friday, June 24. Visit the Arts & Ideas website for tickets and more information.
