Good looks, charm and plenty of personality
Michael Crabb , National Post
Thursday, January 30, 2003

JULIA SASSO DANCES: BEAUTY
Premiere Dance Theatre, Toronto

If I recall correctly, it was the 18th-century Irish cleric and philosopher Bishop Berkeley who defined that elusive concept "happiness" as a way of travelling, rather than as a point at which one finally arrives. On the basis of the hour-long work she is presenting this week at Toronto's Premiere Dance Theatre, it appears that experience has taught 46-year-old choreographer Julia Sasso to view the concept of beauty in much the same way.

There is little in the conventional sense that can be called pretty about Sasso's Beauty, no defining moment when you say, "Ah, so that's beauty." Like some of the earlier works -- Maxine (1993) and Sporting Life (1996) -- Sasso choreographed during her 16 years performing with the contemporary troupe Dancemakers, Beauty is full of raw energy and asks as much as it answers. Despite the absence of a specific narrative thread, Beauty has a
circuitous through-line that spans the cycle of life, from birth to death -- with a good deal of robust and mostly joyously breathy rutting along the way.

This flexible structure allows Sasso plenty of leeway to explore a variety of ideas. Human desire and existential longing are powerful emotional currents that run freely through Beauty and, as Sasso sees it, they are not defined by sexuality. Relationships may be dual or extended, same sex or
opposite sex.

Costume designer Heather MacCrimmon's narrow colour palate -- from off-white to pinky-beige -- reinforces a sense of homogeneity. Only one of the two women wears a skirt. The rest are in loose-fitting pants. In one of Beauty's more overtly light-hearted moments, the dancers begin lustfully tugging at
each other's clothes. This leads to an impromptu cross-dressing strip-down to underwear, with the discarded garments being playfully adapted as headdresses, false breasts and padded buttocks.

Sasso has been developing Beauty ever since she quit Dancemakers in the fall of 2000. The work had its official premiere at last summer's Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa and has been further polished for its current local debut. The result is a dance that is so meticulously honed that it is hard to imagine either taking from or adding to it. At the same time, Beauty contains moments that seem so spontaneous, almost improvisational, that you could imagine it being made up on the spot. The soundscape created by
Geoffrey Bennett and TTG Music Lab is not the kind of score a dancer can count. It is full of electronic burbles, pings and ruminative rumblings, and functions largely as an atmospheric aural backdrop, offering up everything from jungle sounds to the cries of newborn babes.

Much credit is due to Sasso's excellent cast of two women, Justine Chambers and Heidi Strauss, and four men, Michael Sean Marye, Mike Moore, Ron Stewart and Michael Trent. With the exception of a short sequence during which Marye, Moore and Stewart move into the audience to observe the two women in
an intimate duet, all six dancers are on stage for Beauty's entire length. Their physical effort is never disguised. They often pant freely. Although Sasso breaks them into smaller combinations, they remain connected, as if by an invisible bond. They could be a family or a microcosmic metaphor for humanity in general.

Sasso blurs all the lines, even at times transforming her dancers into strutting birds or galloping stallions. In one of the most affecting sequences, Stewart seems possessed by demons, jerking and quivering spasmodically but, by the time Trent approaches to calm him, Stewart has morphed into a skittish colt. Trent even mounts him -- the sexual innuendo is not accidental -- and the united pair cavort gleefully.

Choreographically, Beauty represents an advance for Sasso. When she gives the dancers steps or gestures, they are fresh, inventive and fully developed. Nothing is fudged. On the other hand, she is not afraid to deploy stillness and silence or to slow down movement until it becomes frozen into a sculptural pose. Unlike those choreographers who prefer to view movement
as an abstract vocabulary, Sasso's work is deeply humanistic. For her, dance is not an end but a means, a vehicle for exploring life. Although she provides no definition of beauty, she certainly offers new ways of thinking about it.

Dancers drunk with longing
SUSAN WALKER, The Toronto Star
Jan. 29, 2003

A sign in the lobby of the Premiere Dance Theatre, where Beauty will be performed through Saturday evening, warns of "mature content."

Not that there's anything X-rated in this hour-long dance created by Julia Sasso. But if you're looking for passion, desire and a sophisticated expression of what Freud called the "polymorphous perverse," this is the show to see.

There's nothing abstract about Beauty . Sasso's choreography doesn't lead one toward a contemplation of aesthetic ideals. This is more about the powerful attractions that lead us to declare that the object of our desire is a thing of beauty. The six dancers appear almost drunk with longing. And those longings are frequently indulged, as if this were a Temptation Island of infinite possibilities.

As Beauty opens, two women with blood-red hair, Justine Chambers and Heidi Strauss, perform an exploratory duet in front of a mewling heap of four men: Michael Sean Marye, Mike Moore, Ron Stewart and Michael Trent. To the overheard sounds of babies crying, they rise like a newborn litter. The women
watch.

There's a lot of watching and a lot of caressing. Even when there's no physical connection between them, there's an energy that binds the dancers together like an electric current. Beauty is about transformation and the continuity of the life force. The human and the animal merge as women become bird-like and men take on the shapes of four-legged creatures.

An evocative soundscape, by Geoffrey Bennett and TTG Music Lab, provides the settings for a series of memorable vignettes that are scenes from a life in pursuit of the sensual. At one time, a tropical rainforest is evoked, at another, a windless mesa. In one scene, Stewart becomes a mighty horse and Trent the adoring boy who rides him. "I remember the feeling," says Marye, in one of the few phrases spoken during the piece.

Two dancers leap off the stage and run up into the audience. The others watch them, as if following their progress up a mountainside. In an extraordinary tableau, a woman gives birth, sprawled atop the other dancers' bodies as they writhe in a rhythm of labour. For a few giddy moments, an orgy breaks out as the dancers strip off clothing and trade items, exchanging sexual identities and sexual preferences. Near the end, Strauss goes into a frenzy and falls in sickness, as the others form a circle around her. The dance contains no explicit narrative, yet it has the emotional
impact of great drama, like a Strindberg play produced without words. Mature content, for sure. Beauty marks the coming of age of a remarkable choreographer.