10:01 PM CDT on Sunday, September 28, 2003
RICHARDSON – On Sunday, Bruce Wood Dance Company transported its new Cowboy Songs – with exuberant success – to Dallas County. Well, to the Dallas-Collin county line, actually, since the Eisemann Center for Performing Arts and Corporate Presentations sits right on the line. The rousing show proved once again that the center's larger hall is an ideal venue for dance, at once grand and intimate. It's also a spot that can attract a large and enthusiastic dance audience, at least when country great Michael Martin Murphey is on top of the bill. Mr. Wood calls this 105-minute piece "a new musical," which raises all kinds of issues about genre. In our post-modern age, asking, "Just what the heck is it?" becomes ever a more academic exercise. In this case, though, the choreographer himself throws down the gauntlet of taxonomy. Also, the extraordinary Mr. Wood is nothing if not eclectic. Cowboy Songs doesn't just mix every imaginable sort of Country dance and Western movement with a generic modern-dance style; it deliberately, nay ostentatiously, alludes to 20th-century masters such as George Balanchine, Twyla Tharp and Martha Graham. (Mr. Wood danced for the first two, and Kimi Nikaidoh, who trained in the Graham school, gets the "Martha" number, the powerful "Bury Me Not.") In his salad days, of course, Mr. Balanchine choreographed for Broadway and the movies. What one suspects Mr. Wood had in mind, though, in calling Cowboy Songs a musical is the example Ms. Tharp gave in last season's surprise Broadway hit, Movin' Out. It won her a Tony Award nomination for best direction of a musical and the award itself for best choreography. Superficially, Cowboy Songs strongly resembles Movin' Out. The Tharp piece uses a couple dozen Billy Joel songs and puts a live singer who strongly resembles the piano man and his band on a platform above the dancers. The singer sings. The dancers dance. In Cowboy Songs, the band similarly sits on a platform above the action. Mr. Wood has a strong advantage in presenting not just a surrogate star but the real thing: Mr. Murphey's deeply felt performance is one of the primary reasons Cowboy Songs works so well. Again, Mr. Murphey and a couple of backups sing. Mr. Wood's glorious, mostly Texas-grown ensemble dances. The similarities pretty much end there, though. Movin' Out takes enormous risks in creating a highly detailed contemporary narrative. Cowboy Songs can't keep its mind on mere storytelling even for one entire number. Its dances are mostly as abstract as anything Mr. Balanchine or Ms. Tharp ever created. For all Mr. Wood's cleverness in incorporating every kind of Western material from hoedowns to honkytonks, he doesn't limit himself to one of these for a whole number, either. There's a big contrast between what he has done here and, for instance, the spiffy choreography that the (also Balanchine-trained) Melinda Roy created for Broadway's Urban Cowboy last spring. Ms. Roy proved how much variety and interest you could create onstage using only elements you might see during an evening at Gilley's. Mr. Wood wants to have it all – and does. The real antecedents to Cowboy Songs are Mr. Balanchine's Western Symphony and Square Dance or Ms. Tharp's Sinatra Songs – all of which are basically ballets incorporating vernacular elements. Cowboy Songs plumbs greater emotional depths than any of those in two or three of its numbers. In that it does resemble Movin' Out. But it's hard to justify calling it a musical, even if you grant that status to Ms. Tharp's masterpiece. Whatever you call it, mind you, Cowboy Songs is a foot-stompin', rip-roarin' delight. E-mail ltaitte@dallasnews.com Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/overnight/stories/092903dnovebrucewood.8dd65.html
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