Past Performances

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Repeatedly the kind of support on view defines the emotional relationship depicted between the performers. In formal terms this seems to be Ms. Osserman’s governing idea and it is a sophisticated concept… These are studies in emotion as well as motion…a welcome fresh note.

The veteran choreographer Wendy Osserman unveils her latest evening of work — with a group of talented dancers, including Joshua Tuason and Cori Kresge — that features the premiere of Undermine. Inspired by the current political climate, it draws on concepts from the Native American medicine wheel and features music by Skip LaPlante, who creates scores for traditional and homemade instruments. Also included is Udjat, a trio from 1985.

It had the shifting, crepuscular feeling of something you caught a glimpse of in half-light, down the hall, reflected in a mirror.

Bountiful work, richly textured with visual, aural, and physical collaborations. Projected designs by Sanya Kantarovsky, lively arrangements of color and shape reminiscent of Matisse’s cut outs, set a scene. Each projection brings to light a new environment making the stage into an ever-changing forest of sorts, where the music and dancers — the flora and fauna of each locale — constantly arouse our attention and curiosity.”

Four dancers cycled through solos, duets, and the group, each dancing with a distinct, individual style although still easily moving harmoniously with one another, their movements appearing to flow entirely naturally from their body, with a complete freedom

An Enigma, Bound by Chaos, Staged by a Veteran Choreographer: Any opportunity to see the dancer Cori Kresge is welcome. When she was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Repertory Understudy Group, her steely, sensuous strength and staggering facility made you question her status as an ‘understudy.’ In works by the Cunningham alumni Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, she has been just as incisive, if more animal, almost otherworldly, in what seems like her insatiable need to be dancing.

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On Friday at Theater for the New City, Ms. Kresge brought those virtues to Vestigal, a new, hourlong piece by the veteran choreographer Wendy Osserman, who has been presenting work in New York since 1976. The premiere marked Ms. Kresge’s 10th anniversary with the Wendy Osserman Dance Company, and evidently it has been a fruitful decade… As a performer, Ms. Osserman, who is (hard to believe) in her early 70s, has her own kind of magnetism. ‘Who wants to be vulnerable, really?’ she asks during a monologue about, of all things, trilobites

With the premiere of Compromised at the Hudson Guild Theatre, Wendy Osserman Dance Company explores the polarization of the political stage through an evening-length work created by Osserman in collaboration with four dancers. Set to musical arrangements of Eric Satie and drummer Victor Lewis, the score also includes interviews with people representing both right- and left-wing viewpoints. The tone of the performance is generally light and breezy; Osserman manages to avoid treating this over-wrought subject with a heavy hand.

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As a soft hum of jazzy drums starts to play, dancers Milan Misko and Cori Kresge enter from the back of the small theater, heads bobbing like chickens, eyes alert, scanning the scene. Both dressed in dark suits, Misko takes the lead as Kresge dutifully echoes his movements—the image of an eager campaign aide comes to mind…Osserman herself appears several times throughout the piece, often accompanied by text that pits progressives against conservatives; this ideological split is reflected in the lighting, which alternately illuminates and darkens halves of the stage. As if trying to guide the discussion, Osserman stands center stage, directing traffic with her hands before finally giving up; apparently the effort of making opposing sides listen to each other is just too much.

Osserman’s movement follows the light, improvisational vein established early in the piece; it often appears that her body is making its own decisions about what it wants to do—sometimes she tries to control it, and sometimes she just goes with it.”

‘more’ engages and flows from the beginning. It’s light, humorous and eccentric, with moments of mild cacophony, delighting and providing, as [Gertrude] Stein did in her own day, unexpected pleasure.

Looking statuesque in an enigmatic solo, Osserman may have been a maternal protective presence before she sank feebly downward, only to be revived by Bittová’s violin music.

Provocative precisely because it feels like a new amalgam of some indefinable kind… There is a kind of magic, a sense of being taken to a place you might never visit again.

Udjat was made in 1985 and has a darkness to it that is both powerful and compelling. The dance is for a trio of women dressed in black and begins with a striking tableau: one figure lying supine, a second standing holding the third upside down…The dancers’ bodies combine in various ways to create friezes that are arresting to the eye…The work ends in a vertical totem of the three dancers, their faces made paler by the surrounding blackness, gazing into the audience with a look that is both searching for that which is to come and accusing for that which has passed.

Udjat was made up of sculptural, slow reaches and tumbling. Crouched over, the women walked as one creature towards the side lights They separated and whirled, with their arms held wide, then formed a totem that held still as the lights went out. It could have been from Nijinska’s Les Noces.