Dorrance Dance Batters imaginations with dystopian dangers

Zakhele "Bboy Swazi" Grabowski in Dorrance Dance's "The Center Will Not Hold" on opening night at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. (Photo by Christopher Duggan)

Jacob’s Pillow opened its 93rd season with one of its most memorable and vibrant collaborative efforts – Ephrat Asherie and Michelle Dorrance’s dynamic and dramatic “The Center Will Not Hold.”
 
Audience at the Ted Shawn Theatre’s first night were gob smacked by the power to harness percussion, lighting and Black American vernacular dance – from tap to street to current club styles — to shape a dystopia that served as a cautionary tale with a hint of hope.
 
As Pillow Artistic Director Pamela Tage explained, the title comes from William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” that speaks of the drowning of innocence and the darkness of the world, and prayer for a second coming.
 
Regardless of one’s belief in the possibility of a second chance, Dorrance Dance created an audacious world in which confrontations and struggles rarely get a helping hand. And as such, blackness descends, and humanity isolates, untouched by the healing the power of love.
 
The piece begins with a call to action with drummer John Angeles banging with fingers, palms and fists on a table. The anger of his percussion, as scored by Donovan Dorrance, and his subsequent disappearance into a blacken stage, sets the tone for the rage that followed.
 
Asherie, a break dancer, and Dorrance, a tap superstar, then appear in a spotlight, centerstage. Their sneakered dialogue is muted but clear – they are facing a discord that is not settling well. Yet they end, however, by standing side-by-side, offering each other a hand, a slim gesture of hope.
 
Then comes the stage craft, designed expertly by Kathy Kaufmann, that shows dancers appearing and disappearing. It all lends an anxiousness of the whole as the work moves through clashes of sound – Dorrance and Angeles duet was particularly powerful – and sights with dancer Zakhele “B-boy Swazi” Grabowski throwing himself down in a way that looks more than dangerous. It’s a call for help.
 
The scene with Asherie doing the same as a strobe light flashes, as if she were enduring a raft of missile strikes, also hits home. It clearly depicts a world wracked with military conflicts.
 
Other standouts include the sleek Tomoe “Beasty” Carr, the compelling Donnetta “Lil Bit” Jackson and the spiraling Matthew “Megawatt” West.
 
The ensemble, 12 in all, are donned in black. Is that a references to our psychological, spiritual and physical funerals? Perhaps. Regardless, “The Center Will Not Hold” is a feast for our nightmares. Watch if you dare.