Choreographer Hollander, partner to his dancers / Yaji and Kita / And a PS

A day before the American Battery Dance Company performed, I had a brief chat with Jonathan Hollander, its choreographer-artistic director. Tall, amiable and quietly charming, he quickly expressed deep convictions. A pianist for many years before he became a choreographer he said, "Dance is music. Everything to me is dance." Having studied ballet with a student of Enrico Chechetti (spelling not guaranteed), he has a strong balletic base. He contended, "There is nothing the body cannot do in ballet."

When he choreographed "Where There’s Smoke" – the opening number of the matinee program at the CCP Little Theater – his mother was gravely ill. She became very frail, a shadow of her old self. Earlier, she was into piano, ballet, and many other disciplines. Here was Hollander between facing a new season in New York and taking care of his mother.

From where does he draw his inspiration? "I begin every dance from nothing. It is as though I know nothing. When I started to choreograph, I knew what I was to choreograph up to the last step. That was because I lacked self-confidence. And the dancers couldn’t quite relate.

"Where There’s Smoke", performed by two men and two women, to music by Poulenc, had moments of anguish and grief as well as of sparkling life, this reflecting the bouncy, energetic, vivacious person Hollander’s mother was before her illness. Thus, the combination of the "earthy" and the "spiritual" to the music by Poulenc, a judicious choice, with pianist Hollander realizing how much a dance can depend on the music for its expression and development.

Hollander’s dancers, whom he calls "partners" rather than "tools", have as wide a dance vocabulary as he has. "Where There’s Smoke" demonstrated ballet, contemporary and modern dance styles executed with skill, grace and vitality.

The choreographer spent his childhood in India where he soaked in the four schools of Indian dance, and came to know some of its greatest proponents. In the program’s "Two Solos", the first of these had the dancer spinning and jete-ing, and executing acrobatic, contemporary and other dance styles with electrifying speed.

In the solos, Hollander confessed to "revising the normal hierarchical practice in which the choreographer dictates the parameters of the creation and a dancer interprets it. The project offers the opportunity to blur the lines of responsibility and channel two creative visions into one." Accordingly, in the second solo, Hollander’s solid background in Indian dancing fuses inextricably with the dancer’s own, making the enthralling solo number visibly Oriental, very Hindu in movement and character. There was no longer a dichotomy between choreographer and dancer. Here one looked back to Hollander regarding the dancer as his partner, not his tool.

Hollander said that for the finale, "Shell Games", he worked very closely with the costume designer Sole Salvo and the lighting designer Barry Steele. Hollander’s approach, cerebral and psychological, illustrated the dual personality of every individual. Each of us is two-faced: one face is the inner character; the other is what is shown to the world. If a person wishes to escape from the world, he hides behind a mask – here represented by a wire mesh armor which each dancer keeps donning and shedding as his/her desire dictates.

The idea was clever, ingenious and visually compelling, the impression heightened by the dazzling light effects, the costumes, and not the least, by the music of Frank Carlberg.

Hollander was also into sculpture, hence his dancers often struck "sculptured" poses.

Dancers Bafana Solomon Matea, Adele LeRoi Nickel, Stevan Novakovich, Sean Scantlebury, Lydia Tetzlaff were excellent. Indeed, their technical skill, versatility and grace were evident throughout their performance.

Earlier, during our conversation, Hollander pointed to the time the Martha Graham dancers were laid off for three years and consequently, to his becoming the happy inheritor of the Graham dancers. As "partners", they must have broadened and enriched Hollander’s technique as much as he did theirs.

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"Yagi and Kita", a presentation of the Japan Foundation at the F. Santiago Hall, was scripted and directed by Tangai Amano who drew inspiration for his comedy about two characters from a comic book based on a classical novel written about 200 years ago.

The story is both simple and complex. Yagi and Kita leave Edo to visit the Ise Shrine. Rain interrupts their journey, and while they stay in an inn, there is a constant shifting from fact to fiction, from reality to illusion, from life to death. Kita is a drug addict who hallucinates, and perhaps much of the constant shifting takes place within himself.

The play is thoroughly Japanese in its setting, costumes, masks; the fantasy created by the astonishing lights and the images they project convey, in turn, the varied places the pair traverses. The setting is so ingenious that Kita or Yagi surfaces from the underground right in the middle of the stage.

A touch of reality was brought about by a boy and a girl ascending the stage while bearing a tray with two bowls of noodles which the players eat forthwith matter-of-factly. The comedy reaches an absurd point when Kita consumes a long noodle through a wide slit across the face of the box-like mask he is wearing.

Hideji Oguma and Satoru Jitsunashi are terrific actors. Although the viewers did not understand the dialogue – flash cards in Tagalog were not much help – they could absorb a great deal of the mood and substance of the comedy through the magnificent miming, eloquent speech inflections in the often abrasive dialogue, and the violent action – all of which, underlining the absurdity of the comedy, kept the audience highly entertained and heartily applauding.

Ben Suzuki and his assistants were in charge of the production which gave the Filipino audience an intriguing sampling of Japanese humor – of farce and fantasy.

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I had meant to mention an important thing, in my review of the Toyota Classics concert, but owing to the tyranny of the deadline, I overlooked it. I refer to the manner Conductor Tatsuyo Shimono wielded his baton over our national anthem. He made it so movingly, so exquisitely lyrical, the shimmering tones reaching a powerful climax, the sensitively nuanced composition turned into a glorious anthem we could truly be proud of.