STAN SADOWSKI
Elrey "Starchild" Belmonti lifts Lindsay De Looze in Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Company's presentation of "Salt,"which premiered over the weekend at the Painted Bride.
Celebrating story, glory of 'Salt' with dance
As everyone knows, too much salt, or not enough, is no good.
Salt, the dance by Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Company, premiered at the Painted Bride over the weekend. Salt, by the tubful and drifting down from the fly, was supposed to be part of the program, but there was too much concept and too little salt - only 100 pounds - not enough for what ought to have been a spectacle.
Getting a dance from conception to rehearsal to premiere is no easy task in today's economy, and taking on a big subject on a small dance company's budget is fraught with pitfalls.
Mulgrew had only one day in the Bride's space to run her tech and get her lighting designed by Peter Jakubowski - who ably warmed up the dancers with side-lighting. But in her 25-year history as a dance-maker, Mulgrew has made more with less.
This one-hour show had 10 disconnected sections that attempted to celebrate the story of salt. Interspersed between sections were slides of Himalayan salt fields, and videos with the curtain opening loudly each time. Leaving the screen open as background for the dancers with more images continuously dissolving into each other would have eliminated that distraction.
Carmella Vassor-Johnson videotaped a salt-tasting, as well as Mulgrew bathing in a candlelighted bathroom. Sure, you could make the connection between bathing, bath salts, and ritual baths, but I wish Mulgrew and Vassor-Johnson had made the connection explicit.
When the musical choices worked well - particularly selections by Biddu Orchestra and Rick Wakeman - they made the dancing shine, especially where the dancers froze in beautiful archetypal poses evoking ancient Middle Eastern and Eurasian imagery.
Frances Gremillion and Rebecca Patek often brought some feminine grace to the stiff choreography. In a twice-tried effort to mimic salt mounds, the eight dancers circled in close and bent over, each raising a leg to form a pyramid. But they were never in place and had to hop choppily to center their pointed feet.
An unforeseen development - humidity - caused the salt drift to clog, and with no liaison between the sections, the piece looked woefully underrehearsed and in need of a strong director.
The schema of the fascinating history of salt, as danced, was crushed.
Entertainment Videos
today's 
