Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company in Intersections. Photo by Steven Pisano

 

Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company: Intersections

                                       

                                          By R. Pikser

 

This 20^th anniversary concert of Daniel Gwirtzman’s was a retrospective of pieces created between 1999 and 2018.  The pieces were extracted from their original ballets and put together for this hour and a half concert, and were restaged for presentation in the round in Buttenwieser Hall, the large open second floor dance space of the 92^nd Street Y, with an intricately painted beamed ceiling hung with chandeliers.  The audience was placed on two rows of seats on all four sides of the space.  The result was at once elegant and intimate.

Christian von Howard and Daniel Gwirtzman in Intersections. Photo by Steven Pisano

The evening’s pieces included unison works and duets, trios and quartets, the smaller group pieces often developing the movements of the unison pieces into inventive lifts, with bodies counterbalancing each other and intertwining, the sculptured shapes appearing to sprout new body parts or to eliminate them.   The imagination shown in the lifts provided a stimulating contrast to the similarity of the vocabulary. 

 

The choreography used different levels, from floor to air, and was mostly concerned with cleanness of execution, in which aspect Jason Garcia Ignacio excelled.  However, watching both Christian von Howard, one of Mr. Gwirtzman’s original company members, and Simone Stevens, formerly a student of Mr. Gwirtzman, one could see that there exists the possibility of using these same movements to express texture and even emotional subtext.  Both of these dancers infused their every movement with an awareness, a sensuality, and a presence in the moment that made each of them riveting in their own way. 

 

Dance, because it depends on the body, partakes of sensuality by its very nature.  Sensuality suggests a certain surrender of oneself, implies a certain danger, the danger of losing control.  The play of sensuality is the play between that surrender, that possible loss of control, and at what moment one gives in, maybe to lose oneself, or pulls back, once again taking control.  It is for that moment we wait with bated breath.  It is the moment spoken of by Martha Graham when she likens dancers to an acrobat on a high wire, living at the instant of danger.   These two dancers recalled that sensuality to us, and reminded us of why we go to see dance and why it pulls at our souls.

 

 

Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company

Intersections

February 22^nd-23^rd 2019

Welcome to the World of Dance

February 24^th  2019

92^nd Street YM-YWHA

92^nd Street and Lexington Avenue

New York, NY

Tickets $20

92Y.org/Dance

212 415 5500