"refreshing, original, and engaging..."

The dance company Johannes Wieland recently concluded a week in seclusion rehearsing new work at Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Lavan Center. At the end of their residency, they performed three pieces from their 2002 repertory at BTF’s Unicorn Theatre. In addition, they ventured to show an excerpt from what they’ve been cooking up over at Lavan. Johannes Wieland is a young choreographer from Germany, now living and working in New York City. His work is refreshing, original, and engaging, and has been called by some reviewers "architectural" and "structural." All works performed by the company this evening were choreographed by him.

The evening started with five dancers performing Struction, an energetic, physical (verging on acrobatic) work set to electronic music by Vladislav Delay. Wieland studiously avoids the standard dance vocabulary, and has created a new set of movement, lift and aesthetic for his work. There are occasional throwbacks to what has been done before, and some interesting variations on the established lexicon. For the most part, what he presents in Struction is new and interesting. This piece is serious, at times too much so, but is an accomplished and original work.

The next piece, Trio, is set to audio samples of Gershwin's "The Man I Love." Trio is a wonderful, amusing counterbalance to the more serious Struction. It starts with a woman dancing alone to a four note strain from the Gershwin tune, repeated occasionally with significant silences in between. Early in the piece, another woman comes out on stage dragging a man by his leg. For the duration of the piece this man, danced tonight wonderfully by Julian Barnett, is tossed back and forth between the women like a rag doll. They act exasperated by his paralysis, abuse him, use him as a structure around which, over which, on which to dance. Here again, Wieland uses aspects of his new dance vocabulary, though not the range shown in the first piece. Trio is both entertaining and substantive.

The last piece of the evening is Shift, a duet danced by Julian Barnett and Isadora Wolfe. It is set to more continuous, melodic music by Michael Gordon, and may represent a new direction for the Johannes Wieland group. It seems that they are moving toward a more musical and fluid type of work and away from the electronic, “structural” work that characterizes earlier pieces.

After the performances, three from the company showed two minutes of new work that they had been working on during their residency. While it is not fair to review such work, I feel that it is appropriate to say that the company took a much appreciated risk in showing this work-in-progress, and that it was most rewarding to see.