Storyteller's imagination captured in movement

JULIA TIERNAN/YH YaleDancers explore dance as narrative.

Much of recent dance talk heralds the return of narrative. Broadway's resurgence has brought musical choreography to the fore. A new Swan Lake has critics in a quandary about whether cross-dressing swans are dance or simply "theater." Neoclassical plotlessness should take a back seat, it seems, and just let the storytellers take over. At the YaleDancers show this weekend, one can see how fluid categories like "plotless" are. Good dancing always tells a story--not always a sequential or a specific one, but one with its own truth made physical. The YaleDancers fall concert is full of good dancing and richly imagined stories.

Alyssa Rapp's, DC '00, "Underlying Love," a plotless ballet set to Pachelbel's Canon, takes the more-than-familiar music and examines its construction in the shapes of five dancers whose movements mimic the score's balance between staccato accent and legato lyricism. Rapp is a sophisticated choreographer, confident enough to make some gutsy choices--at one of the music's broadest passages, for example, there's just a single dancer on stage.

The unorthodox fitness of the steps makes the audience rediscover the canon's remarkable construction. Musical and physical shapes are imbued with emotion; at one point, Sidra Bell's, SY '01, outstretched leg has all the poignancy of silent prayer.

"Night and Day," Rapp's second piece, finds that same plotless emotion in more down-and-dirty subject matter. Two couples meet and break up, come together and turn away. There are a million stories here--of lust, mornings-after, missed chances--and the dancers explore every one.

Some pieces have more straightforward plots. Liz Vacco's, SM '00, "Approaches" casts its four dancers as "The Flirt," "The Seeker," "The Seeker's Shadow," and "The Vixen." But the more successful dances are subtler. In "Birdland," created by guest choreographer Arlene Erb, Brown is the master showman, putting the large, energetic cast through their paces, then sitting back and watching the results. In "Blue and Green," James and Bell manage to create a relationship without ever meeting on stage. Trapped in two pools of light, they each explore the same simple movements, simultaneously and then in staggered rhythm.

The rich associations such movements evoke depend, of course, on flawless execution. YaleDancers has always been in a class by itself, and this performance sets some new highs. For example, "Unearthed" is set to the rhythms of African drumming, but choreographer Jessica Lin, PC '01, sneaks in a couple of bars of fouettés right before the end. These should be ridiculously out of place--the ultimate classical showpiece in an anything-but-classical dance--but the turns are beautifully and naturally done. Technique falters a bit in "Birdland," where some sequences are out of synch with the jazzy improvisation of the score, but the overall quality of the dancing varies between competent and inspired.

I wish that the careful attention YaleDancers paid to steps and emotion extended to their choice of costumes as well. But otherwise, the group shouldn't change a single thing. Except, of course, that these dancers are always changing, experimenting with different steps, finding ways to make them work, and finding ways to make them meaningful.

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