ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT
The Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th Street (212) 242-0800. Altogether Different Series runs through Jan. 28. Further performances by Mark Dendy Dance are Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening.
DENDY is trendy, but he is also remarkably good.
On Wednesday night at the Joyce Theater, the three-week annual modern-dance series “Altogether Different” got started with Mark Dendy Dance and Theater.
The series, which offers seven dance companies, each seen three times, is dance’s shopwindow to the future.
Companies not quite ready perhaps to assume the artistic risk and financial burden of a full week season here can get their feet wet and their ears dry before the dance public and critics.
Dendy – whose company has actually appeared in this series on earlier occasions – is certainly by now ready for prime time. His is a most unusual talent.
The one doubt is where it will lead him.
Dendy’s new work, set for his seven-member troupe and choreographed by him and his leading dancer Lawrence Keigwin, is called “I’m Going to my Room to be Cool Now and I Don’t Want to be Disturbed.”
The wild, mad, beautiful and extraordinarily energized choreography is all danced to music of the post-boomer generation, just before X made its real mark. It’s Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, The Temptations – it even ends with a runaround finale to Led Zeppelin.
The dancers are brilliant and the evening said to deal with “a teenage boy’s need to claim an independent identity” – although you are free to take that with a dramatic pinch of salt – is a smashing revue parade of 13 separate numbers, all stylishly costumed by Bobby Pearce, and cleverly lit by Dale Knoth.
And where could this lead Dendy? Well, he perhaps has a choice. He could be the next Mark Morris, leading another modern-dance troupe into the promised land, or his special showbiz talents could lead him to being the next Bob Fosse.
Last year he had a notable success in choreographing Andrew Lippa’s splendid but unlucky musical “The Wild Party” for the Manhattan Theater Club, and I should imagine Broadway is waiting for him in the wings.