Mi casa, su casa

As with many contemporary choreographers, Deborah Colker is interested in how we live our lives - how we eat, sleep, dress, love. She wants to know what shapes us, and how in turn we shape our environment. But she is wonderfully unlike all too many contemporary choreographers, in that she has both the theatrical and choreographic skills that can take these questions and turn them into an evening of pure pleasure.

Colker's Compahnia de Danca is here from Rio for their second BITE season, and it is impossible to imagine that Casa (House) could ever be performed by anybody else. The performers are not merely dancers, but mix acrobatics and gymnastics with more conventional dance training.

Casa opens with two dancers performing an athletic pas de deux, itself a terrific balancing act: it is both complex and lucid, complicated and immediately transparent.

The house behind them is twodimensional, a flat, closed faÁade. Within minutes, the first couple is joined by another dozen dancers, and the house begins to reveal itself as the dancers peel back emotional and physical layers to reveal the core of the evening. Doors open, walkways appear, floors transform themselves into walls, windows into floors.

The dancers climb, run, balance, hang and spin from various portions of the building, using the structure as another limb, through which they create a fourth
dimension. Gradually, the house and the dancers reach parity. The dancers dress, eat, quarrel: they go about their daily lives. In return, the house becomes a living entity that shapes these actions, giving them point and focus. The dancers move through the house as they move through relationships, and it soon becomes impossible to separate one from the other.

The athletics, the gymnastics, the sheer physical skill are breathtaking, but Colker never allows us to forget that she is first and foremost a choreographer. Apart from Mark Morris, it is difficult to think of a choreographer who handles large
numbers of dancers as impressively - the groupings, in their simplicity, have the inevitability that only a great choreographer can achieve.

Dance criticism is all too often like prospecting for gold: most of the critic's time is spent sifting through large quantities of mud; if nothing better than a shiny pebble emerges, it still causes great excitement after all that sifting. Colker is not a shiny pebble. She is a deep, rich vein of pure gold, beckoning us on to discover what is truly valuable.

Casa