Choreographed by Wen Wei
DanceWorks Presents Wen Wei Dance
Fleck Dance Theatre
April 9& 10, 2010

   The title of Wen Wei’s 70-minute ensemble piece is, of course, a pun, one of whose connotations is sexual. Wen Wei created the dance out of autobiographical experience as an adolescent dance student in China. He had shared a room for more than five years with four other boys, but none of them was allowed girl friends, so they merely dreamed about them, while coping with anxious, baffling, disturbing sexual urges. Cock-Pit has, accordingly, erotic edges and macho dance vocabulary that is kinetic, but it is often camp writ large—partly owing to comic exaggeration and partly to theatrical artifice. Gaming, tests of strength and physical prowess, exhibitionistic carnal display are incarnated in sequences that, alas, do not progress beyond themselves to an over-arching meaning. Dancer and dance only become one at moments—and hardly ever without the dancer vying for a viewer’s attention against the extraordinary trembling pheasant feathers, exaggerated in length and flexibility, that animate the choreography. These feathers, attached to head or arms or waist or knee, are alluring but distracting as well. They describe phallic arcs, become tensile weapons, tentacles, wings, antennae, insect tongues, golden flames, et cetera. They are semaphore adornments that sometimes seem to have a life of their own, though they are always manipulated by the dancers through body movements. So there is a fascinating symbiotic relationship that occasionally has an electric charge, velocity, and kinesis.

   But, though wonderfully performed, what of the choreography itself? It begins with low-key comedy as the four men (Scott Augustine, Edmond Kilpatrick, Josh Martin, David Raymond) play a game with eggs that generates a strange incantation as one dancer enters into a tranced-like state. A solitary woman (Alison Denham), head adorned with a long pheasant feather, is part of the second sequence as she joins the men, enticing and exploring them physically, but she is easily dominated by tall Kilpatrick, probably the most striking of the four wonderful male dancers. The men acquire their own feather appendages, and the dance resolves itself into solos, duets, and quartets, with various permutations in martial arts vocabulary, spirals, bird or insect imagery, and an amusing parody of phallic dominance and what sounds like Asian vocalizing, as Giorgio Magnanesi’s score supplies an effective background to the dance. The piece concludes with two images: one created out of a mysterious (because unprompted?) formal procession, with the men trailing behind the woman as they all evoke a multi-winged creature that may, of course, be related to the eggs used in the opening sequence. The final image is of two men who, after all the confrontations and posturings of earlier sequences, now have a silent intimate moment in which they regard each other out of the boundaries of contestation and self-advertisement. But the piece seems to shrivel into an arbitrarily willed rather than organic finale.

photos: Donald Lee

pic 1: Ensemble in "Cock-pit"

pic 2: Duo in "Cock-Pit"



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