Tempo de Verão (review)

From childhood lullabies to films' lush love scenes, the waltz's lilt connotes intimacy. That expectation drives choreographer Marcia Milhazes's evening-length Tempo de Verão("summertime" in Portuguese), which had its US premiere at New York City's Dance Theater Workshop (DTW). By taking an iconic musical rhythm as Tempo's central theme, Milhazes points to the contexts that help audiences make meaning from dance. The attunement to expectations heightens awareness of all the frames around Tempo, including extra-diegetic elements, like program notes, which situate Milhazes's choreography as Brazilian even though her movement vocabulary emerges from multiple national histories. Taken together, Tempo's choreography and its marketing suggest the necessity of constant vigilance around the expectations we bring to performance, and an awareness of what those expectations might occlude from our interpretive field.

Although program notes describe the waltz as a way to unlock family memories, the dance explores the nature of groups of three—the waltz's very structure. Milhazes questions how the waltz pulls audiences along by directing attention to its triad, demonstrating how the desire for pleasure can blind people to power struggles. As dancers Al Crisppin, Fernanda Reis, and Ana Amélia Vianna vacillated among different configurations—three soloists, one heterosexual couple and one soloist, one man and two women—their single, odd-numbered unit raised questions of asymmetry. Must one person always lead, as the waltz's strong downbeat does? Might the quieter second and third parties come together as one?

Tempo's first waltz music brought structure to a solo, danced by Vianna, already underway. With the waltz playing, her frenetic movement gained an objective: getting the other dancers' attention. Eventually she failed, fading away dejected as Crisppin and Reis came together, still dancing to the waltz. Reis's incredibly blank eyes stared straight through Crisppin. He focused his body and eyes on her, pulling her along like an extra-limp limb. The inequality between the two dancers' attention for each other suggested Crisppin's constant grasp as being unsolicited; throughout Tempo, his touch never seemed desired. In a later duet, he anchored Vianna's flying form, her legs launching through the air in leaps, charting vaulting paths around his body. While the waltz's notes always seemed to need one another, the dancing trio resisted cohesion.

As the waltz music slowed and then faded, Tempo's final scenes fully revealed Crisppin's predatory relationship to the two women. The women removed their filmy dresses, stripping to transparent beige tunics and underwear. Crisppin took off his T-shirt and turned toward the audience, pink cotton bundled over his crotch, suggesting sexual deviancy. The women had resisted the intensity of his touch and now we had one potential clue why.

By closing Tempowith the threat of sexual abuse, Milhazes displayed the stakes behind accepting the too-easy expectations the waltz creates in dance. While many choreographers, particularly those faithful to John Cage's teachings, have stretched the possibilities of the relationship between dance and music, they generally do so by shunning music. Milhazes also undermined music's power, but she did so by playing music and dance against each other.

The choreography's critique of expectations draws attention to the program and press materials, which repeatedly identify Milhazes's company as Brazilian. Based in Rio de Janiero, the company is a mainstay of the Brazilian dance community, producing work since 1994, when Milhazes returned from studying at London's Laban Centre—training that clearly influenced Tempo's movement vocabulary. Milhazes's long, smooth, almost monotonous phrases most closely resemble those of choreographers, like Siobhan Davies, associated with the British tradition of postmodern release technique, a style that emphasizes transition over punctuation and loose muscularity over composing shapes. Vianna's opening solo set the physical tone for the entire piece as she launched through athletic, though floppy, choreography. She moved constantly, testing the capacity of her hip and shoulder joints, which seemed to open in every direction.