CND2 arrived this week at Jacob’s Pillow – did you hear the explosion of energy, passion and audience hysteria? I did, because I was there to see this young company for the first time.
In a 3-ballet programme, the company of 13 dancers (all between the ages of 17-24) reveals the power of youth and the hope that such boundless optimism can project. The Pillow audience, not precisely young (though forever young-at-heart-and-soul) was sent out into the night with smiles and laughter and more chatter than I have heard in my recent visits this season. How can anyone be impervious to the unqualified love of craft that these dancers possess?
The evening begins at its highest level of full-out energy with Gnawa, a propulsive interplay of bodies, many in duet pairings that defy space and time. Limbs are in motion without ever pausing to relax or recoil. Nacho Duato, the choreographer and now the former A.D. of the company, has taken a studio filled with youthful energy and strength and he has put it onstage in this 30-minute ballet. There are no tricks, unless you count the complete body and its manipulations as trickery. I do not. Nor did the audience – the extended applause sounded as though we were at the end, rather than at the beginning, of the evening.
Insected, the second piece is choreographed by Tony Fabre, the company’s co-Artistic Director. The athleticism continues through a series of dances that depict an underbelly of humanity that, as the title suggests, is related to the insect world. Movement echoes the title and the visual imagery is, of necessity, skittish and creepy. More than this, of course, the choreography is insightful and challenges he dancers’ performance skills – they are pushed to the physical limit and, in the process, the emotional heights are scaled. The emerging sadness and pain is startling both for being unexpected and being revelatory. CND2, as the junior company to the professional CND, makes it abundantly clear that there are no also-rans in Duato and Fabre’s world. There are dancers, first and foremost, and the few who get as far as this stage are en par with any you will see on any stage.
The evening’s final ballet, Kol Nidre, was inspired, we were told prior to the performance, by Duato having been in Gaza and having marveled at the sight if children playing in the face of war. He was startled and intrigued by the ability of children everywhere to be, well, just children. The dance itself has no specific time or place and he information about its inspiration is not writ large. Kol Nidre is a quiet ending, a sad meditation on youthful idealism forced to endure a world where games and innocence have no essential place. The dancers invoke imagery of children’s games and childhood behaviour. They inhabit a world wherein the sandbags of defense become their hideout or their comfort zone. Movements that begins as free and entirely unchecked and uncontrolled, soon deteriorates into convulsive and frantic jabs and punches. The sadness evoked in the earlier Insected here becomes all encompassing.
That the evening doesn’t end on a high note – a note the excessive energy that highlighted the opening ballet presents – speaks further to CND2’s philosophy. Duato, during his twenty-year tenure, has sought to present dancers as wholly human – he disdains the godly manner in which many dancers are presented. He eschews and fully dismisses classical repertoire (though he demands the finest classical and traditional techniques for all of his dancers) and has always striven to show us dance as a reflection of humanity. As Fabre has mentioned, the youth of the junior company allows him to manipulate the bodies of the young and the spirit of their youth to serve his grand vision.
How fortunate we are to have seen the vision realized with the fine ensemble he has brought to the Pillow. Ella Baff and the entire Pillow staff continue to lift us up to their enviable standards of excellence.