On a pleasant late-summer evening, just after sunset, two men enter the amphitheater at Little Island, the park on the Hudson River. Glancing at each other with a smirk, they break into motion — stretching wide and snapping back, twisting and slapping their thighs in folk dance steps, stopping, locking eyes then diving in again. In the silence you can hear their rhythmically expelled breath and imagine captions: “Bang!” “Pow!”
After a while, a cellist (Coleman Itzkoff) walks in and adds music as the dancers repeat the choreography. This is the opening of “Seven Scenes,” a new work by the in-demand choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. It is their first collaboration with the composer-musicians Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee Parpan, known together as Ringdown, and the first scene explicitly raises the question of what will happen when one duo’s dance is combined with the other duo’s music.
The two pairs are joined by five other dancers and three other musicians, all excellent, who cycle on and off the stage. The playful intensity of the first section is soon replaced by histrionic intensity. In a round-robin of touch-me, don’t-touch-me duets, dancers embrace and separate with near-acrobatic athleticism. They grab with hands, and then, with the same fervency, rip them away. The tension only increases when a third person is squeezed into a two-person ballroom clench.
The scene that follows is much the same: Smith and the dancer Jonathan Earl Fredrickson alternately clinging to and rejecting each other around a table. She falls face first into his lap. He dips her to the floor and leaves her there.
For the round robin, the music is Brahms; for the table scene, it’s Willie Nelson’s “Crazy,” sung by Parpan in Patsy Cline style. “Crazy for loving you” might put words to what we’ve seen so far, but while choreography sometimes repeats through the rest of the hourlong show, it does so without a story line or consistent characters. The music is pretty miscellaneous, a mix of classical chestnuts with more minimalist Ringdown compositions. The scenes turn out to be sketches, sutured together with skill but not coherence.
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