Joyce Theater DANCING WITH GLASS Review

Like a dervish exiting their dance of ecstasy, pianist Maki Namekawa folds into her piano’s keyboard at the end of the evening…

She had just performed her sixth solo and the last of 11 Philip Glass etudes comprising Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes. Each etude has a unique signature and pattern. We hear a four note progression on continuous loop. Our attention wraps around a predictably unpredictable breakout of high note melodic fragments that plead more than sing. A musical phrase is added to step by step and then systematically subtracted from to return to where it began. Then, a spiral. And as finale, in Namekawa’s last etude, we hear the marriage of a slow metronome and a whisper.

We are mesmerized by each etude’s imprimatur. So too, one imagines, were choreographers Leonardo Sandoval, Bobbi Jene Smith & Or Schraiber, Chanon Judson, Justin Peck and Lucinda Childs, who were tasked with creating the five dances that accompany Glass’ music, as opposed to the more typical music accompanying dance.

Joyce Theater Program Laces Five Dances in the Music’s Meditations

There were five dance performances in all. This is a program that is mainly about the music that envelops the rich visual splendor of each choreographer’s touch. Dance aficionados who thrive more on displays of dancers’ physical prowess or the large ensemble spectacles of more typical dance programs might find Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes not meeting their sweet spot. For the rest of us– and especially those who are smitten with the symmetry of music like Glass’ etudes or anything like an Adams score– this program is a top pick.

How perfect to begin with the tap, clap and snap energy of Brazilian rhythm artist Sandoval that comes across as a shout out to Glass saying, “We GET your beat.” He starts with four fellow dancers until one slips off stage to man the piano. They stay in nanometer precision sync with Glass’ rhythms– until they don’t. Then their tap embellishments remind of a skat singer catching the song’s spirit. SPOILER ALERT–Sandoval ends with a slide off the tap board to lie lifeless like a deflated blow up yard balloon, giving physical form to how empty the hall feels without the music’s perseverating ruminations.

Smith & Schraiber give form to the music’s roiling repetitions with spots of quick staccato jerks of hands, arms and fingers doing quick freezes as though captured by strobe lights. Chanon Judson’s turquoise satin dress has a billowing flow that belies her body seeming to bottle the push and pull within each phrase of the music. We see dancer Patrica Delgado arch back back back before escaping from her chair that in the end becomes her shelter in choreographer Peck’s channeling of the angst in the music’s churning.

In the penultimate duet, dancers Caitlin Scranton and Kyle Gerry clad in white Indian pajama costumes and dancing to Childs’ choreography especially give the geometry of the etudes physical form. They begin, return and then return again to repeating dance patterns just as the music does. It’s the systematic mathematical progression of the music that matters most, Childs’ choreography seems to say.