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Flash Review 1, 6-5:
Direct from the Heart
Keeping Up With Jones's Vision Quest
By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2000 Chris Dohse
Angela Jones's ambition
collects incongruous elements. Her concert "Unbound," seen Saturday
at the Clark Studio Theater, showcased Jones's diverse abilities
-- aerialist, jazz-snazzy actress, comedienne -- by juxtaposing
them against guest artists and collaborators. Jones presented an
intersection of theatrical forms particularly evocative of the contemporary
popular imagination. However, seven dances plus miscellaneous entr'acte
are too many; there's no need for a kitchen sink in a dance concert.
Jones is a beautiful
woman and she dances with the kind of pizzazz that could ride the
crest of America's renewed lust for dancerliness, as evidenced by
those omnipresent Gap ads. In "You Got the Time?" Jones's curvaceous
isolations dialogue with tapper Barbara Duffy's percussive glances:
simultaneous competition and conversation. "Standing By..." (a shortened
form of the work-in-progress I saw last month) proved a crowd pleaser.
Jones flopped, dangled and wiggled at, on and for her man, to Tammy
Wynette's classic ditty.
Gary Pozner threatened
to steal the show. His piano composition for "Mare Nostrum," played
live, flowed through the mind with ineffable fluidity, and his video
installation for "Grace" added a needed layer of subtlety and complexity
to Jones's straight-forward interpretation of Jane Siberry.
Generally, Jones seems
drawn to texts and songs with strong narrative content, but her
current dances don't significantly complicate that source material.
This literalness weakens her charismatic performance and her strongly
designed compositions. Her talent for directly-communicated heart,
a rare essence, becomes subsumed into another's vision.
In Eva Evdokimova-Gregori,
Jones has found a sweet facility to deliver an ephemeral persona.
Evdokimova-Gregori's ornately detailed gestures perfectly complemented
her characterization of an Edwardian lady in "Where Everything that
is Desirable Meets...", to Virginia Woolf's "The Waves."
Sometimes a flair for
cross-discipline can be cross-purposive. The singers (Anne Ricci,
Erin Browne and Andrea Browne) of "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle!"
filled the stage with such insouciance, the dance Jones and her
partner executed simultaneously irritated. I didn't want to tear
myself away from one to engage in the other. The trapeze fait accompli
of "Sleeping Beauty Lies," while breathtaking of itself, occurred
like two solos happening at the same time, confusingly.
I should disclaim that
I have limited familiarity with the popular entertainment stuff
of Jones's salad. But my personal vote is that she jettison the
dictated content of otherbodies' subject matters. This little light
of hers, she oughtta let it shine.
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