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Last Dance

2002, Movie, NR, 84 mins

Last Dance: Review

LAST DANCE
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The professional dance world is as mysterious to outsiders as a cloistered convent, and almost as insular. Mirra Banks' documentary about the tempestuous collaboration between the Pilobolus dance company and writer-illustrator Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) provides an illuminating glimpse into what goes on in the dance studio. Banks follows the development of a work created in 1998 and rooted in Sendak's deep preoccupation with the Holocaust, particularly the Theresienstadt ghetto near Prague, Czech Republic, a Potemkin village created by Nazi propagandists to prove that they weren't sending Jews to extermination camps, just relocating them to controlled surroundings. Over the course of several months, Banks records the process by which a germ of an idea is fleshed out, pared down, pushed and pulled into a fully formed dance-theater piece. Pilobolus, a six-member company founded in 1971 and renowned for its acrobatic, sculptural and often whimsical works (it was named after a tiny fungus that lives in barnyard dung), is headed by Robby Barnett, Michael Tracy and Jonathan Wolken, college friends and three of the company's original six members. The company is unusually committed to collaborative creation, with pieces credited to both choreographers and dancers, a practice as unusual as jointly crediting a movie to the director and actors. Pilobolus works are seldom story oriented, while narrative is paramount for Sendak, whose Night Kitchen company develops theater pieces. Sendak comes to the table with an image: six people, five members of some kind of theatrical troupe and a mysterious stranger, trapped at a train station in a burning city. The music is by Czech musicians Hans Krasa and Pavel Haas; Krasa's short opera, Brundibar, was staged by the children of Theresienstadt, and both composers died at Auschwitz. Characters develop, based in part on the personalities and physical abilities of current dancers Otis Cook, Matt Kent, Rebecca Anderson, Josie Coyoc, Benjamin Pring and Gaspard Louis, and relationships evolve. Sendak and Wolken, the most outspoken of the Pilobolus crew, butt heads over everything from the Holocaust theme to the use of nudity as the work winds to its stark conclusion; more than once, it looks as though the project may not survive. But it does, and the finished work, A Selection, premieres at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. Banks includes a generous 12 minutes of the completed piece, so viewers can see for themselves what all the artistic sturm und drang brought forth. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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