FROM ROCK TO ROCK

Lincoln Center inaugurated its new biannual Contemporary Dance Festival’s opening performance at Alice Tully Hall with a press conference celebrating its roster of performers and producers. Dr. Mariko Silver, Lincoln Center’s President and CEO, introduced the evening by reminding the audience that “together we move, together we dance….”

Donald Borror, (Director of the Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance) who spearheaded this biannual festival along with guest curator Kyle Abraham, spoke proudly, announcing this opportunity as a way to feature new and upcoming choreographers and artistic excellence with a “big-tent definition of dance.”  Offered to a wide audience in a “choose what you pay format,” he hopes that “the seeds we are planting now will grow into the future.”

Then, in a New York premiere, Brooklyn-born choreographer Jeremy Nedd’s From Rock to Rock…aka how magnolia was taken for granite opened the festival. He attempts to express “his disillusionment about a lawsuit over the theft of black cultural expression by corporate forces.”  

Nedd, along with dancers Brandy Butler, Zen Jefferson, Nasheeka Nedsreal, and Jeremy De’Jon Guyton, start out on the floor to the back of a curved, multilayered set (designed by Laura Knusel and Jeremy Nedd). The dancers are wrapped around each other in a huge “rocklike” ball of bodies toward the back of the stage. Intimately entertwined like puzzle pieces, they slowly roll forward, climbing over and around each other.  Dreamy music and bird sounds by Fabrizio Di Salvo, Rej Deproc, and Xzavier Stone, fill the air.

Eventually, they crawl out of formation, as if being born as individuals.  They rise, and begin repetitive movements in unison (the “Milly Rock,” a hip-hop dance invented by Brooklyn-based rapper 2 Milly, aka Terrence Ferguson) to a rhythmic, tapping drum sound. 

Dressed in sweat outfits with hoodies, they dance with a fluid rocking arm motion, with lots of hand play, and walking steps that bounce from their feet through their bodies (the Milly rock, a traditional hip-hop step.) The formation of five changes position on the stage, facing front, side, back. A solo breaks out, then a duet with twisting spiraling lunges and swirling arms. A jazz piano and bass accompany a stroll. 

Scenes from the city take over this sci-fi-like universe, as a figure with a helmet on an electric skateboard circles the stage before leaving as the scene darkens. (Has the dance disappeared?) 

From the back, an ominous figure dressed in white with a silver cape emerges, invades the space with “stone-like” stilted shoes, gliding across the back. The stage darkens again and a meteor-like image on the set highlights change. 

The work evolves, slowly, like rocks shifting over time, a metaphor perhaps for the development of hip-hop culture. All the dancers celebrate its vitality with their virtuosic dancing, while stage elements and intruders invade its purity and natural forms. 

At its core, Nedd celebrates the innocence and purity of creativity and black dance culture, with a melancholy and protectiveness about its vulnerability to cultural appropriation. 

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Mary Seidman

PHOTOS BY: Lawrence Sumulong