The Meaning of Daring
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Version 0 of 1. The choreographer Patricia Noworol, who grew up in Poland and moved to Germany as a teenager, is fond of emotional and physical extremes. In the United States premiere of “?Culture,” performed at Danspace Project on Thursday, she is the queen bee. She perches on a high ladder wearing a hot pink robe while shrieking into a microphone, dances topless under strobe lights and lectures the audience about arts financing. As dance-theater, this collaboration with the German hip-hop company Renegade is purposely garish, yet not a bit daring. “Theater is only interesting to me if I am taking risks that challenge the whole system,” she tells us at the start of “?Culture,” and adds that if she doesn’t, her work becomes weaker and weaker. But for all its attempts to be risky, it already seems weak. Ms. Noworol, who lives in New York, is hardly the next Pina Bausch or Ann Liv Young, the provocative performance artist. Yet “?Culture” signals that she is aiming in that direction. Four male hip-hop dancers join Ms. Noworol, who, in the work, talks about how she had originally hoped to make a piece addressing homosexuality in hip-hop culture. The moments between her pontifications, when dancing actually occurs among the men, are the most compelling. The dancers have skill. Shawndrick D. Hallman performs head spins without using his hands, but power moves aside, his mastery and control are marvelous. The acrobatic Sefa Erdik instills his tricks with a silky fluidity, and Patrick Williams Seebacher lends his popping a rubbery resilience. We eventually learn that the fourth dancer, Dodzi Dougban, is deaf, which makes the stark, silent solo he performs near the start all the more haunting. Toward the end, Ms. Noworol requests feedback from audience members, asking them questions. In the final segment she is at her most conventional and repetitive: dancers run circles around the stage, stomp their feet and pull their elbows into their chests with loud howls. After several laps, it peters out, and she kisses each dancer on the cheek. That gesture, tender and a bit awkward, is the most startling of the night. <NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Patricia Noworol Dance Theater continues through Saturday at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village; (866) 811-4111, danspaceproject.org. |