Wilde, But Nothing Knew | 1994

The Drake Theater

The Philadelphia Inquirer
February 25-27, 1994
Author unknown

I have watched so many choreographers trying to say something new, or seeking new ways to say old things (with varying successes), or sacrificing to their personal gods, that I approached two recent assignments with trepidation. Archetype Dance Company is so young that most of its dancers and its choreographer/artistic director Brian Sanders are 1992 grads of U. of the ARts’ some are still there. The Choreographers Project presented three young women whose work I know, but this time the pieces were not only new, but works-in-progress.

Thankfully, Brian Sanders, Ilse Pfeifer, Leah Stein and Asimina Chremos do have new things to say and original ways with old ones, and their private sacrificial rites are unselfconscious enough to be refreshing and intriguing, if at times perplexing. Sanders uses an amazing variety of music, and he has that rare gift among today’s angst-ridden dance-creators: a sense of humor. In his new On A Mad World On A Road To Nowhere, an audition for two bored interviewer-voices turns into a hectic dash of modern/post-modern dance figures: a woman enveloped in plastic wrap, a crawling creature, a scurrying, gesticulating Hasid in long coat, and a white-gowned woman who jumps on and over him. Sanders ends up suspended by his rear in a harness above the stage, bungee-bouncing in play with others, left dangling as they run off, oblivious to the plaintive “Guys?” Lest Thou Merge (1991) with its chant-intoning soprano and sermon-spouting woman in priest’s gab, mixes dark humor with anguish as the business-dressed dancers leap and run from one to another, to merge but briefly. Sanders humor is most bizarre in the main premiere of the evening: Wilde But Nothing Knew, a theater-of-the-absurd version of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Selfish Giant. It is most successful theater when least absurd: Sanders and Jim Strong as Giant and Ogre contort their athletic physiques; the Giant frightens or plays with the children; an ominous Grim Reaper appears. Other sequences are great for laughs (one: Sanders as a on-Wilde personage called M.C. Androgyne), some exaggeratedly so, as in the overlong “Hail” and “Snow” sections. A yard-long penis was much funnier when glimpsed briefly than when wagged in all directions, and Karen Finley’s text was simply vulgar, crude, ugly and tasteless. Too bad: Sanders, bouncing slowly in his black balloon-suit as another non-Wilde adjunct, Fertile Myrtle, was fun to watch, like an overblown, charbroiled Michelin Tire man. I wondered, though, what lots had to do with Wilde or his story. For all my appreciation of Sanders’ wit, I felt his best work was the one purely beautiful choreographic treatment of two oiled bodies on a plastic stagecloth, Polymer and Glyceride (1992). Sanders and the suppleMichele Di Cola move apart and together, now gently, now propelled, now spinning. I hope Sanders cultivates his sensitive side.