April 9, 2003

By Rita Felciano

THE FIFTH- anniversary concert of Kirstin E. Williams's all-women Strong Current Dance Company, titled "Underground: Behind the Faces," was somewhat of a retrospective. The earliest works – At Stake: The Witch Hunts Remembered and 9 to 5 (With a Three Hour Commute) – dated from 1998. But three premieres were also included; one of them, Rock the Nation, was performed by hip-hop dancers from City College of San Francisco.

Williams is more interested in using dance as a vehicle for large-scale expressiveness than as a means to explore the body's formal possibilities. She is a throwback to pre-Cunningham times, with all of the concomitant advantages and disadvantages. Her work addresses issues of particular, though not exclusive, interest to women, embracing wide-open modes. Reaching broadly – in terms of thematic ideas, musical inspiration, visual design, and the sheer number of dancers onstage – Williams sometimes shortchanges the shaping of material. Nevertheless, her well-trained company (in particular Ann Berman, Kelly McCann, Cynthia Rodriguez, and Chimene Pollard) dance with gusto and commitment.

The Grass Is Blue was a country-and-western romp through female adolescence, outfitted in overalls and jeans. At its edges lurked the kind of shadows – an attempted rape, a stalking exhibitionist – that darken many women's formative years. At first the athletic boisterousness of the piece's duets and unisons seemed almost silly. Then a sense of fear crept in; it colored but didn't obliterate the survival mentality of the girls. Enthusiastically performed by Williams's genial dancers, Grass nevertheless needed a lot of attention. The choreography was too hand over fist, and Patty Liu's elaborate score of music by Dolly Parton and narrated text by the dancers needed to be layered better.

You couldn't miss the timeliness of the other premiere, Underground. Cracked segments of speeches by the man in the White House and phalanxes of training, marching, and falling bodies were punctuated by hear-not, see-not, speak-not gestures. Soloist Katie Aggen staggered through unisons as if windblown. At the end she seemed defeated even as she stubbornly refused to fall. The ribbed, earth-colored costumes by Christephor Gilbert, with camouflage material between the legs that restricted movement, were excellent.

Delicate Choice (2000), a clearly designed quintet, opened with Rodriguez shooting across the stage like a force of nature and ended with a ceremonial walk around a fallen body. Introspective and quiet despite its periodic explosions, Choice used a cupping gesture over the womb as a signifier of both individual choice and communal solidarity. The ritualistic quality of the choreography was enhanced by beautifully designed, uncredited formal costumes in black and red.

The somewhat long program started with At Stake. An imagistic evocation of women's persecution, it featured tracks by Dead Can Dance and Tibetan monks' chants. Blunt in its representations, the work made its points simply but forcefully, using a walking, crawling, twitching, cradling vocabulary. Strobe lights revealed, on trapezes, immobile bodies that looked like they had been hung; in using a ballet bar to help portray persecution, Williams may have wanted to needle the exigencies of Western classic dance.

In the faintly humorous 9 to 5, each of the seven dancers – dressed in various work uniforms and suits – tried to convey the frustrations of being stuck in the rat race. The mechanistic, repetitive quality of the movement and text fragments worked up to a point. However, they needed to be more tightly integrated into the overall piece.

War (2002), a solo choreographed and performed by Williams, wasn't successful. Noble sentiments are not enough to make a piece viable. Photographs by Sebastião Salgado of what looked like war orphans were projected onto a white screen that became a shroud and a garment as Williams moved into a slow downstage trajectory. As the images became smaller, they fused with Williams's body, but the mechanics of projection and overly simplistic choreography defeated the work.