‘SOAR’ @ Bruce Wood Dance
Photos by Brian Guilliaux
—Gregory Sullivan Isaacs
Whatever you may be doing this weekend, you should make an effort to see the Bruce Wood Dance company’s “Soar.” It opened Friday (Nov. 18), and is being repeated on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon at the Moody Performance Hall. (See details below.) The primary reason for this unqualified recommendation is that the program opens with “Home,” a seminal and much-loved work by Wood, the company’s founder. Its impact in some ways goes beyond the realms of ballet or theater. Two additional works fill out the program and they are almost as gripping and inspirational—almost. But “Home” is, simply put, a hard act to follow.
Wood died in May 2014 at the age of 53; in June of 2014 the company performed the ballet in Dallas (at the Moody, in fact) as a memorial to him.
The origins of “Home” rise from events somewhat earlier in his life. Wood was hospitalized in Austin in the early 1990s and put into an induced coma. When he was awakened, he remembered the vision he had experienced while in that state, and created "Home,” which premiered in 1997 at Fort Worth’s Bass Performance Hall.
The scene opens with a man suspended from the ceiling in a pose reminiscent of the crucified Jesus, but equally symbolic of Wood himself, or in fact any human being in a time of hovering between life and death. A group of ghostly dancers, clad in white, help the man down, then gradually and gracefully surround him with a constant stream of lyrical and loving movement. Wood described them as supportive spirits who were familiar but not individually recognizable.
The perfectly suited music that flows throughout “Home” is from sections of Gabriel Fauré’s subtly gorgeous and low-key setting of the Requiem mass, and capped off with Placido Domingo’s slightly-oversung version of Patrick Doyle’s In Pace (In Peace) from his 1996 film score for Hamlet.
Individual accounts of near-death experiences are remarkably consistent with each other, and closely match what Wood has put on the stage. People describe being surrounded by vaguely familiar and gentle spirits who bathe them in the warmth and glow of love. As the opening night audience waved a fond farewell to the protagonist, there were more than a few dampening eyes in the hall. We, all of us, respond with everything we know about loss, healing, grief, hope…and peace.
The second work on the program is by the Filipino-American choreographer Norbert De La Cruz III and uses the full company. It is based on the award-winning graphic novel The Arrival by Shaun Tan. The story concerns an immigrant’s difficult experience in adapting to a foreign land and culture. The ballet, like the novel, features vaguely realistic humans in fantastical and abstract settings. The protagonists—a mother and child—keep asking the preoccupied and busily scurrying people around them for directions to some unknown location. The frantic crowd, busy being busy, pairs up in modern-day combinations: male/male, female/female, and male/female. The dancers stay in character even for the bows. De La Cruz has compiled a musical smorgasbord of a score, using works by a number of composers from Max Richter to Oliver Davis.
The program closed with "In My Your Head," a work conceived and choreographed by Joy Bollinger, the company’s artistic director since 2018. This wildly varied dance concerns what the program notes calls “the effects of propaganda, government distrust, and future frailty” and is set to music from British pop band Radiohead. The choreography draws on the stylistic wealth of the standard modern dance vocabulary, combined with moves from jazz dance to street dancing (Mannequin or Dancing Machine, Waves, Animation, as well as Pop and Lock among others). And though Bollinger created this dance pre-pandemic, she accurately projects today’s overheated paranoia and “future fear” of even tomorrow's dawn.
Overall, the dancers are terrific and display Bruce Wood’s signature fluidity of technique, a skill honed by years of dancing with the company. They display the assurance that only comes from constant training and discipline, "living the choreography"—and an intense rehearsal schedule. There are some quite impressive solo dancers scattered throughout this program, but it is the unity displayed by the entire company, the corps de ballet, that separates them from other dance groups. They go beyond precision, which can be so calculated, to a kind of “collective think” that seems to connect their minds organically. They are amazing—and astonish us as they accomplish even the most difficult moves.
But it is in Wood’s farewell ballet “Home” that the company’s exceptionality really shines. Here, they are all at home, indeed.
WHEN: November 17-19, 2023
WHERE: Moody Performance Hall, Dallas Arts District
WEB: brucewooddance.org
