Paul Gordon Emerson is no stranger to running a dance troupe, nor to international connections. He led the local troupe CityDance Ensemble for 15 years, guiding it from a vagabond existence to headquarters at Strathmore, where it expanded to add a lucrative training program.
Before that, Emerson was a congressional staffer. He knows how to work through Washington channels. A dance group is a relatively portable, inexpensive export — appealing qualities for State Department-sponsored tours, which were a CityDance mainstay.
But when funding shortfalls forced CityDance to disband its professional company last year, Emerson left the organization to launch a new plan. He formed a 12-dancer troupe with some of the CityDance members and a few new recruits. They will not perform works created by Emerson — he concedes that’s not his strength — nor, by other typical, inexpensive means such as up-and-comers in the region. Company E will dance works by established foreign choreographers. Emerson will get those artists’ embassies to help foot the bill. And their mailing lists will help fill the seats.
Emerson insists that the ‘E’ in Company E is neither for his last name, nor for the embassy connection. It is for another partner, the Shakespeare Theatre, housed in the Lansburgh Theatre at 7th and E Streets NW. (Do we believe him? No. But who cares? Everybody asks about it, he said Saturday, which simply proves he’s chosen a memorable name.)
With the embassy funds, help from the Shakespeare Theatre, which owns Harman Hall, and from the Washington Performing Arts Society, Emerson is planning annual performances at the Harman as well as international tours (paid for by the home states of the choreographers Company E is showcasing, in a nice bit of circularity).
Bear in mind that for all the buzz about Saturday’s one-night-only performance, Company E’s impact on the local dance scene will be small — one or two performances a year.
Its debut was a mixed bag. Two works by Ohad Naharin, director of Israel’s highly respected Batsheva Dance Company, underscored the pretensions to mystical heights that have long dogged the choreographer. “Black Milk,” a tribal display for five bare-chested men who smear themselves with green slime, had its moments of muscular power. But it came across as only a marginally better echo of Naharin’s “George & Zalman,” for five women, which it had the bad luck to follow. In “George & Zalman,” the dancers twisted and posed to the sour words of a how-to-live-your-life poem by Charles Bukowski, read in a voice-over: “Ignore all concepts and possibilities,” we heard, over and over (so we couldn’t ignore it — um, got it). Blunt exhortations to copulate and mind one’s hygiene were, like the aggressive moves, meant to shock but felt tiresome.
Tired, too, was Andrea Miller’s “Dust (for Jack),” where sad dependency played out in a homoerotic wrestling match between Jason Garcia Ignacio and Robert Priore that left you no one to root for.
The evening’s gems were team efforts. As Delphina Parenti and Tom Weinberger tore their clothes off in Yossi Berg and Oded Graf’s “Most of the Day I’m Out,” they chased each other around like animals. Oh, the sexual tension! But once they were down to their underwear, all they had stamina for was a slow dance. Tension was rife in Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s “Killer Pig,” but so was musicality: The dancers looked robotic in their white unitards, tight as sausage casings, but they moved with a rubbery sensuality as they grouped and regrouped to follow the ticktock beat. At the end, like a gasp, the energy suddenly changed and softened. It was lovely to see a piece with warmth.
Company E plans a “Next: Spain” program in the fall.
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