A last-minute injury caused an alteration to last Friday's opening of Zenon Dance Company's 35th-anniversary season. With casting changes to two pieces — and another piece being dropped altogether — it was enough to keep the company on its toes.
"It's been like 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' " Zenon's artistic director, Linda Andrews, told the crowd before the show. Company member Gabriel Mata stepped up to replace the program's canceled world premiere ("Set Zero" by New York choreographers Alex Springer and Xan Burley) with a piece from the solo show he produced for this year's Minnesota Fringe Festival.
Mata's meta-theatrical piece worked perfectly under the circumstances. His highly athletic solo was stopped by an omnipotent voice (played via the theater's sound system) who pushed him to lunge deeper and "spice it up." Dialogue between the two offered an inside look at a dancer and his inner critic. Eventually, Mata's exhaustion forced him to take a break, drink some water and eat a banana as he massaged his calf with a ball. The moment offered keen insight into the brutal toll professional dancing takes on the artist's body.
Penelope Freeh's world premiere "Gemini" had a slight Merce Cunningham quality, with its regal lines, stark formality, shiny silver leggings and utmost precision. The dancers spiraled in and out of marvelously created images of the stars above. They also portrayed humans grounded to the Earth, stretching with ecstasy toward the heavens, furiously scribbling their findings into the air or onto each other's body. The piece, with its sense of awe, drew on universal yearnings.
Wynn Fricke's 2004 piece, "Blessing of the Earth," was set to echoing drumming by the Kodo Drummers troupe of Japan. The two dancers wore skin-colored loincloths and performed a low-to-the ground, visceral rite of sorts, with intense, muscular movements. The tribal-looking outfits and primitive aesthetics felt uncomfortably out of touch in 2017.
"Ezekiel's Wheel," Danny Buraczeski's emotionally riveting and powerful work from 1999, lost some of its potential due to the company's lack of diversity. Not all the Zenon dancers are white, but because this particular piece incorporates the words of James Baldwin, with projected photographs of black and white people during the civil rights era, the lack of black dancers limited its impact.
Zenon offers another set of concerts next week, with Fricke's "Blessing of the Earth" performed once again. The program also includes the world premiere of "Culture Quartet" by Michelle Boulé, Mariusz Olszewski's "Hotel Tango (para Sharon)" and Daniel Charon's "Storm." Freeh's "Gemini" will be reprised for Sunday's performance only.
Sheila Regan is a Minneapolis arts writer.
