Los Angeles Times

Monday, July 24, 2000

Up-Close Look at Artists of Movement

’Live documentary' piece combines dance and personal anecdotes to produce an intimate encounter with members of a creative community.

By CHRIS PASLES

Times Staff Writer

It was far more than a trip down memory lane when 32 dancers spoke about their lives in "The Horse's Mouth Greets the New Millennium" Saturday at the Japan America Theatre.

Sure, every 90-second anecdote in this "live documentary" created by Tina Croll and James Cunningham revealed an interesting part of the dancers' lives, sometimes hilariously, sometimes touchingly.

We got to know, appreciate and embrace them more and in a different way than when they danced later.

Nicholas Gunn, for instance, read his Social Security statement reporting earnings for each year he danced in the Paul Taylor Company. Social insecurity would be a better term for it.

Cindera Che, a native of Taiwan, spoke about how she was offended by the Chinese Dance in the "Nutcracker" but added that Native American dancers walked out to protest her portrayal of them.

"What is the responsibility of the artist," she asked, "when inspired by a culture other than our own?" There was no time for a discussion, much less an answer.

As each person talked, three others performed their own movement styles (ballet, modern, jazz, show, tap and world dance), reacted to the speaker and improvised with the other dancers.
We could see relationships between movement styles (flamenco and bharata natyam, for instance) and witness some extraordinarily caring moments as dancers supported each other.

Although only four dancers were on stage at any one time, in its most exhilarating moments, "Horse's Mouth" filled the space with movement-drunk humanity, making palpable the Hindu notion that all life is a dance.

This was the second incarnation of the documentary, again part of the annual Dance Kaleidoscope series as it was last year, but this time full-length. The cast, assembled just for this program, was new.

For the first time, the talk-dance episodes were punctuated by three dreamlike sequences in which various cast members crossed the stage diagonally, dressed in fanciful costumes--a tapper hopping in one enormous tap shoe, the Queen of the Willis reading a book beneath her veil.

The participants who created this uncommonly rich portrait of a creative community were, in addition to those already named: Ramaa Bharadvaj, Laurence Blake, Dulce Capadoccia, Remy Charlip, Leonard Crofoot, Grover Dale, Ilaan Egeland, Jennifer Fisher, Malathi Iyengar, Walter Kennedy, Sharon Kinney, Katnap, Linda Lack, Carol Lawrence, Hae Kyung Lee, Lisa Lock, Carla Luna, Victoria Marks, Francisco Martinez, Stella Shizuka Matsuda, Yvonne Mounsey, Sharanya Mukhopadhyay, Mitchell Rose, Sophiline Shapiro, Jeff Slayton, June Watanabe, Stephan Wenta and Roberta Wolin-Manker.