“It starts like this,” Dan Schuchart told the audience as his spouse Monica Rodero bound his hand tightly to hers with masking tape. “We start like this.” Music started and the couple danced rapidly, equally in charge, testing every twist, turn, bend, lift, fall and wriggle possible for people so united.
The pair’s 10-year partnership informed each heartbeat of Duetted, the hour-long concert they danced with such transparency last weekend that every breath invited new thoughts about boundaries and communion. Presented at Danceworks, the concert confirmed their unique place among the city’s dance artists and re-established them as an important force. Schuchart also entered new territory with Connected, a separate, hour-long, audience-interactive solo executed back to back with Duetted.
“Taped Hands” was followed by “There’s You & There’s Me,” which had Schuchart running in mad circles as Rodero coached him to scream in her key. Later, in “Don’t Wake the Wind,” they were sleeping lovers, curling into, over and under one another or rolling apart, dreaming of who-knows-what. He’d hold his hand over her various body parts, creating negative space which she’d fill with a jolt, her eyes closed, miraculously responsive, dream dancing with him till they lay together breathing deeply in unison. In their wry finale, “I am for now, maybe not later,” they miscommunicated painfully through honest-sounding argument written on handheld posters and danced like children.
They went to deeper places in separate works by choreographers Debra Loewen, Suniti Dernovsek and Susan Marshall. They made real the images of romance and loss in Loewen’s tragicomic “Some Years After.” They entered the synchronized world of Dernovsek’s “This is How We Disappear” with wary awareness of the risks of perfect unison. They went gorgeously crazy in Marshall’s erotic, exhilarating, ecstatic “Sound.” It was a great show.
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Modestly thanking us, inviting us onstage, seducing us into participation, gently leading us in exercises he finds meaningful and fun, reading his moving poetry and, best of all, dancing his heart out, Schuchart was a shaman-like community builder in Connected. He left the audience, limited to 25, lying onstage in a circle, humming in harmony, looking up at quickly changing rings of richly colored light on an overhead canopy we’d helped him erect, our fellow-feeling palpable.
