DANCE REVIEW: Monica Bill Barnes & Company at Jacob's Pillow
Dance
Program
Another Parade
Mostly Fanfare
Here We Are
Another Parade
Mostly Fanfare
Here We Are
Review by Seth Rogovoy
(July 28, 2010) – If Charlie Chaplin was reincarnated as a female dancer/choreographer in our time, she’d be Monica Bill Barnes.
Just as Chaplin invented an utterly original character who spoke his own language through facial expressions and gestures, so has Monica Bill Barnes.
Just as Chaplin was greatly inspired by the juxtaposition of movement and music – so much so, in his case, that he became his own composer – so does Barnes’s work begin and end with the universal impulse to move upon hearing the sound of music.
And just as Chaplin struck a chord through his everyman persona – in his case, the Little Tramp, a lovable innocent and loser who ultimately wins by being so entertaining – so does Barnes connect with her audience through the figure of the ... let’s call her the Dork. And like the Little Tramp, the shy, clumsy Dork becomes possessed by the spirit of music to achieve feats of grand virtuosity of movement that are beautiful, brilliant, and funny.
In Barnes’s case, she has done even more than Chaplin, in that she hasn’t only invented herself as the Dork, but rather has found a way to create a Dorkian vocabulary that her fellow dancers – Anna Bass, Charoltte Bydwell, and Celia Rowlson-Hall, as seen this past week at Jacob’s Pillow – have adopted and adapted to make it a company-wide grammar. And to the credit of the dancers, they have learned and embodied Barnes’s language through and through, while bringing to their performance their own accents and phrasing, maintaining their individuality of expression (has anyone ever replicated Munch’s Screamas perfectly as Bass?).
In her program at the Pillow, Barnes relied mostly on the work of Nina Simone, Bach, and James Brown to fuel her choreography. Sometimes her corps of dorks transformed into a football team; other times they were boxers; always they morphed into gorgeous ballet dancers, only to return to their base as frumpy, dorky women (and they were all women – could this language work with men? That’s an experiment we’d like to see) in knit sweaters who seemingly can’t stand up for tripping if not falling down.
To drive home the everyman quality of the work – and in this case it did include men – the dancers even brought four audience members onstage to shimmy and twist with them. In the world according to Monica Bill Barnes, everyone is a dork, and everyone is a dancer. And what better approach to take than one in which we all laugh together at ourselves?
Editor-in-chief Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning cultural critic.
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