Wide-ranging troupe creates powerful allusions

October 05, 2005|Globe Correspondent

Kate Digby makes intense, earnest dances that are as informed by history as by the choreographer's own idiosyncrasies. In the five pieces she presented last weekend at Roxbury Community College, references to everything from reality TV to the ritualism of dance pioneers such as Martha Graham filtered through her now frenetic, now weighted movement vocabulary.

With their turned-in and gnarled gestural quirks, the dances resonate emotionally like compositions played in a minor key. At least at their best they do. The quartet ''Here/Waiting" (2005) is a kind of deconstructed folk dance. It's full of swift, vigorous movement phrases that Digby crumbles into ever-smaller bits: In canon and unison, the dancers plunge into deep hinges, clasp hands and skip backward through bridges of their own making, hook ankles and lean dangerously forward. They are at once calm and impatient, portraying the tension between togetherness and necessary boundaries.

Digby's solo ''Molt" (2003), to music by Ben Harper, travels from coy to creepy in a single breath. Her hands -- as cramped and shuddering as tiny rat paws -- play against elegant brushes of her foot, then segue into fists punching, arms flailing, and finally her entire body's falling splat. ''Bound, Boundless, Bounding" (2001) sends its five dark-suited dancers flying from allegro to adagio, spins to lunges, and pipelike rolls to quiet sits topped by lolling heads in an exploration of the distance between constraints and freedom.

The duet ''Warp & Woof" (2004) -- a paean to the joy of pure movement -- swings between the comic and the daring. Set to music by Maurice Chevalier, J.S. Bach, and the Beatles, the dance pairs the lush Kimberly Miller with the eye-popping Zack Winokur (only 16, he seems born to dance) in a series of simultaneously clowning and brazen arrangements.

Only the premiere on the program, the quintet ''No Such Thing," fell flat. To be fair, it's described as ''a work in progress." But the piece should have been more polished for a formal show. Ostensibly an investigation of how TV distorts our values, ''No Such Thing" -- a mix of music, spoken word, and movement -- zigzags from scenes of an alarmingly acrobatic race to suggestive model-like poses, drags offstage on all fours, and fetal curls. The topic is a tough one to make fresh. The dance needs shaping on all levels -- from the macro (its structure) to the micro (its movement phrases). When Digby does that, we'll understand more fully its reason for being.