Nicole Diaz (left) and Ryan Rouland Smith in the West Coast premiere of Kate Weare Company's Marksman at ODC Theater.
An informal head count at ODC Theater on Thursday evening, Oct. 5, suggested that the contingent of local dance professionals in attendance rivaled the common folk in numbers, and that's understandable. Everyone was there to see the Kate Weare Company in the local premiere of Weare's 2016 "Marksman," a captivating work that stylistically resembles nothing else on Bay Area stages and a piece that heralds a genuine original.
A California native who relocated to New York and later formed her own troupe in 2005, Weare has returned here often, thanks to Brenda Way of ODC Dance. (This season she is resident artist.) In 2019, she will make a work on ODC's dancers.
Until Thursday, I had thought of Weare as a kind of master short-story writer, fashioning compact duets of searing intensity, complete mini-universes that left nothing unanswered. "Marksman" finds her working on a broader scale, although the 55-minute work for six barefoot dancers was, apparently, based on an earlier trio.
The opening is typical of what is to come. A man grasps a woman by the knees while a convulsion runs down her spine. Is this ecstasy? Or is this a serpentine despoiler? Weare has proposed possibilities and now she moves on to the next episodes, which mingle solos and ensemble numbers. In the matter of gender, the bending of a man's leg suggests woman has triumphed. When Thryn Saxon implacably points her arm like a late-model replicant from the latest sci-fi epic, capitulation follows. The men must console themselves by falling into a tango.
They never complete that duet, thanks to Weare's gift for surgical editing of movement phrases. She whisks us from episode to episode with masterly economy, pausing for a perky solo from Kayla Farrish or a march that divides the dancers and narrowly avoids a collision. Much of "Marksman" is very funny, but Weare doesn't wait for the laughs.
The recurring gestures (recurring in different contexts, to be sure) impose a formal rigor, The dancers often fall into beetling around in circles, or clustering in the middle of the performance space, or gallivanting like crouching cavemen. There's a point at which transition becomes the main event and our attention is held for ransom.
Perhaps the dancers' greatest achievement is their gift for evoking emotional states through their limbs and torsos, rather than facial contortions; melodrama is banished. In addition to Saxon and Farrish, the performers are Nicole Vaughan-Diaz, Julian De Leon, Douglas Gillespie and Ryan Rouland Smith.
"Marksman" arrives with a few problems. The commissioned score and sound design by Curtis Robert Macdonald is bland, brooding stuff, often at odds with the tone of the choreography; the few moments of silence are a revelation. Clifford Ross' hanging panels glow with a sedate beauty, but Brooke Cohen's costumes, with their floppy tops, are among the least attractive of the season, which is still young.