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There’s always a medieval, gloomy thrill when Death of Classical turns the Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs in Brooklyn into a performance space. A thick layer of peat further compacted the atmosphere in the long, narrow chamber for the dance-concert “Houses of Zodiac” last week. Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, aided by electronics, performed the soundtrack for the dances, while two dancer-choreographers moved through the dirt, up and down the catacombs, illustrating Paola Prestini’s poetically-inspired music.
Selections from the writings that inspired the music served as interludes. Lines from Brenda Shaughnessy’s One Love Story, Eight Tales introduced the concert: “It could have gone so many ways…Tell me another.” Correspondingly, in Prestini’s “Eight Tales” Zeigler employed a panoply of cello techniques: spiky, humble, freakish and beyond. These different musical languages represented the characters portrayed by the two dancers, ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin and Japanese butoh performer Dai Matsuoka.
Matsuoka appeared first, as a “primordial being,” in costuming that suggested a forest of seaweed. The piece takes breath from Pablo Neruda’s odes to the sea and operates in a very lyrical musical landscape (seascape?).
Pazcoguin built her ensuing “Ophelia” dance using ballet vocabulary that clashed creatively with the electronics of the score. When this sex-worker version of Ophelia finally dies, lying flat but with her hands still raised as if reaching for another life, Matsuoka enters and lays a dry bouquet of flowers on her body.
The continually fascinating music proceeds with cello lines marked by whole-note slides accompanied by low electronic grumbles. The dancers perform the longest work, “Houses of Zodiac,” together. The music unfolds with agonized sawing, electric guitar-like distortion, and lyrical passages. Both in white, the dancers approach one another in protective poses, eventually clasping hands, then parting, mouths open in silent screams and cries. Matsuoka frantically scratches himself. Pazcoguin spasmodically folds and unfolds her body. All of this is dreadfully painful in the best possible way.
Finally they embrace, more and more tightly until they are curled together in a closed-up ball on the ground. It was a breathtaking conclusion to a truly original event that took in the definitions of concert, dance, and theater.
Visit the Death of Classical website for information on their upcoming events.
