Lucky Plush Productions in Punk Yankees. Photo: Dan Merlo

The most significant difference was that the revival’s cast was smaller (six dancers, versus eight) and, overall, stronger. Which isn’t to say that the premiere was handicapped by weak performances. But the addition of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago alumni Francisco Aviña and Benjamin Wardell, for example, lent precision tools to the work’s excavations: What is originality in choreography? Where is the line between artistic interpretation and alteration? Who “owns” a movement, its creator, or the dancer who executes it? Both? Neither? Thorny questions all, to which there are no definitive answers.

The most poignant scene in two acts is a long pure-dance section, backgrounded by projected video of static or interference, shot through with the colors of the rainbow. (Video design is credited to John Boesche and Jocelyn Kelvin.) Having learned in earlier scenes where certain movement phrases were born — the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Twyla Tharp’s The Golden Section are among more than 60 credited sources — we watch as the cast incorporates them into a swirling stew, in which they seem both liberated and melancholy. “We can do anything with our bodies,” the collage-ography suggests. “Within each of us is a wealth of Western dance history.” But in overtones, there are whispers: “Where are we? What are we doing?”

As in 2009, the show started with a post-show discussion. Sitting in a semicircle of folding chairs, facing the audience, LPP artistic director Julia Rhoads and the five other cast members “took questions” from the crowd. (None were actually asked; the performers simply mimed listening, then gave scripted, often humorous replies.) Arranged as they were for the “Echad Mi Yodea” from Ohad Naharin’s Anaphaza, the dancers slipped from the “talkback” into that well-known piece of choreography…and then another. And another. And still another, skipping down the aisles of a dance-history grocery store, grabbing movements off of the shelves and throwing them into the Punk Yankees cart. “This feels like [José] Limón,” says Kim Larimore Goldman, as she executes a short phrase. “It is Limón,” replies Timothy Heck.

Benjamin Wardell, left, and Timothy Heck in Punk Yankees by Lucky Plush Productions. Photo: Dan Merlo

Original music by Stefen Robinson, a.k.a. Yea Big, mirrors this stage environment with mash-ups made from scores for the source dances. (Fourteen of these are earlier Lucky Plush works, further amplifying the chamber’s echoes.) Within the first 15 minutes of Punk Yankees, the can of worms is wide-open.

Rhoads and her collaborators set boundaries for this work of investigainment. In a joking exchange toward the beginning, Goldman and Meghann Wilkinson discuss whether or not to broach the subject of appropriation by whites of movement that originated in non-white cultural contexts. Black choreographers Pearl Primus and Alvin Ailey are mentioned but it’s explicitly decided, onstage, that Punk Yankees won’t go any further into all that. This despite the fact that Beyoncé’s appropriation of choreography by Bob Fosse and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — both white — is the most centrally positioned pop-culture reference in the work, as well our point of entry.

It’s a discomfiting moment in a well-crafted, funny and smart work of dance-theater. That Lucky Plush began this conversation in 2009, continued it in subsequent works and revisited it with this revival of Punk Yankees shows dedication to the subject. Declination of its more political and racially charged proposals might not annul the piece’s viability. But that probably depends on your point of view.

To help me hash all this out, I enlisted artist Baraka de Soleil. The founder of D UNDERBELLY, a fluid network of independent artists of color, recently returned to his native Chicago following more than two decades developing movement, music and performance in Brooklyn and Minneapolis. We attended Punk Yankees together and debriefed afterward via Google Chat; what follows is a partial transcript of our conversation.

Zachary Whittenburg: So, about the show: We talked afterward about how one creates a performance that includes some sort of survey of, or reference to, history. And where the “lines are drawn” — how far one decides to take the inquiry. How do you feel Punk Yankees approached this challenge?
Baraka de Soleil:  Challenge: I think that is the key word. I feel that, in some ways, the “history” that was chosen to be represented was not challenging. Understandably, this chosen history was subjective, was a creative exploration and a personal take, in some regards.

Right. It’s not, in the end, a textbook or a history lesson — it’s a piece of choreography, the work of artists. Does that, in your opinion, let them “off the hook”? Why or why not?
I don’t think it lets one off the hook, because the creative choice was to address history — the history of appropriation. Punk Yankees is a representation to its witnesses of what may be considered valid, affirmed; which histories we should uphold.

And to mention Karole Armitage as the choreographer of Madonna’s “Vogue,” but not Armitage’s source, the vogue scene in New York…
Exactly.

And yet, as I asked last night: To what extent does Punk Yankees deserve credit for beginning the conversation, for toppling the first domino, if you will? Is it more important that these issues be brought to the table, even if incompletely discussed or assessed? Or should one just stick with the existing paradigms and conventions if questioning them isn’t done fully or responsibly?
It definitely should be brought to the table. But I think this work is savvy enough, and able to take the risk of going further than just toppling the first domino.

You mentioned some people last night you felt were missing at the table: Bill T. Jones, Ishmael Houston-Jones. I brought up Josephine Baker. Reggie Wilson was another.
Marlies Yearby.

I don’t know that name.
Marlies Yearby choreographed Rent.

Why do you feel she should’ve been included? What’s her place in the lineage that Punk Yankees sought to investigate?
Her technique is about release, incorporates postmodern, contemporary and sometimes pop-cultural references. She is alongside the history of Ronald K. Brown, Ishmael, and very much in the postmodern scene, very much a part of the development of contemporary technique. Again, this goes back to choice. Inside the landscape of the evening, multiple choreographers were brought up, some perhaps not as well-known as any of the above-mentioned choreographers. Why include those choreographers and not these? Again, this goes back to subjectivity.

The common thread seemed generally to be choreographers with whom the cast had had personal experience or contact, with some exceptions. Would you agree?
Your question has me wondering about how the piece brought up Pearl Primus and Alvin Ailey, given the common use of these choreographers in discussion of black contributions to dance history. I wondered what specifically the cast’s experiences were with those choreographers.

Did those references feel like tokenism?
Looking at the landscape in retrospect, the personal choices about inclusion, to me, it did feel like tokenism. It felt like the easy answers. There was talk of the history of appropriation in regard to white people taking from black culture, then the choice to draw a line and not go further into that.

Right, at the beginning. Now, I also wanted to talk about that second-act section, with the “rainbow static” video, that I felt was sort of melancholy.
Yes.

There’s a kind of excitement in the first act about picking apart these divisions.
Indeed.

About investigating lineage. But then, as the work continues, it shifts in tone. There’s a sense of loss of certainty, of wandering in the dark without sequential, accepted lineages and clearly defined categories.
The aftermath of what happens when all the distinctive flavors of dance have melded into a hodgepodge of unrecognizable parts.

And what’s lost when interpretation becomes alteration, on a fundamental level.
And this is where I felt the piece was most provocative: Where it opened up possibilities for reflection, and to look at appropriation from multiple perspectives.

Benjamin Wardell and Lucky Plush Productions artistic director Julia Rhoads in Punk Yankees. Photo: Dan Merlo

As you said, it’s a sophisticated group of artists.
Yes, they are a beautifully sophisticated group of dancers.

Who might be more comfortable with starting a conversation than with owning its implications.
Is that a question?

I’m just wondering if you agree.
I believe there was possibility to challenge us, themselves and the act of appropriation. This is not easy work, but I believe it is the work when you are dealing with subject matter as potentially volatile as this.

And as we were discussing last night, subject matter that’s inherently and inescapably political.
Yes.

It is about power, as it relates to appropriation, especially in the Beyoncé example.
I would add the word exploitation. With appropriation comes exploitation.

Always?
As it relates to the choices of “appropriated” material explored inside the performance? Yes. In the act of addressing Beyoncé’s choices to appropriate Fosse and De Keersmaeker for her own creative work? I believe there was an amount of exploitation. Now, I realize that part of the conversation we have been having is not about what I witnessed, but what I would have liked to experience. And that is not fair, in some regards, to the work or to Lucky Plush.

A good point.
I do want to return to the craftsmanship of the work and its execution. But Beyoncé: Why her?

It’s not a new thing to appropriate dance?
Exactly. There is a long and exquisite history of appropriation. Why begin with her?

True although, as a point of entry, it’s accessible, and I thought the joke about how Beyoncé “keeps giving us material to work with” was funny.
That is where I find the concept of exploitation integral to this conversation. We have exploited Beyoncé as one clearly visible figure who has publicly been criticized for appropriation — but not others?

Such as…
Madonna.

She comes up later.
Yes, but there is no developed energy around her. She’s just a name, projected on a screen, with a reference to Karole Armitage and to “Vogue,” not vogueing. Clearly, Beyoncé was the “mark” and, I feel, an easy mark.

And you feel Beyoncé as such was exploited?
Yes, but understandably so. As you say, she was most accessible and easily identifiable. Lucky Plush gave us an opportunity to build this conversation from a pop-cultural reference, and allow for the possibility to dig deeper into, What does it mean to have ownership of a dance? Of moves? Of physical language? What makes the language of a choreographer distinctive? To dig deeper into a place, in Beyoncé, that is so clearly appropriation; to look exactly at the steps and vocabulary that she took from choreographers Bob Fosse and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker; to witness the complexities of developing, of creating dance in relation to the work of other postmodern and contemporary choreographers as well as to Lucky Plush’s own brand of movement.

To that last point, “Lucky Plush’s own brand”: You and I both noticed the influence of Joe Goode, although in a work specifically about borrowing ideas, his name didn’t come up. There’s tension, if you’re “in the know,” between what you’re seeing and what’s being named that, I think, speaks to this broader issue in Punk Yankees of what is and what isn’t on the table.
You said it clearly. I don’t have more to say on it other than we, as artists, need to be as transparent as possible with work like this. Sometimes there may be people we miss in the work. There may be some people we may not even know have influenced the work. But I think of Joe Goode as a highly influential artist in the field of dance-theater — his way of sharing stories, of putting together phrases.

Benjamin Wardell of Lucky Plush Productions in Punk Yankees. Photo: Dan Merlo

Especially in this city. I wrote a story for Time Out Chicago about how deeply felt Goode is in the “Chicago aesthetic.” However — and this is what interests me — the lifting of specific dance “moves,” from Tharp or Ailey or whomever, was identified up front. The qualities of the work that reminded me of Joe Goode were less easy to define and pin down. They weren’t easy to locate in specific moments. The use of video during the single-file line to the microphone, maybe, but that’s an exception.
I first came across Joe Goode and his aesthetic in Minneapolis, over a decade ago. You’re right: Some identifiers were clear and others more subtle. Perhaps he’s an influence that was not identified because the examples were so subtle. Athough I also sensed it in the phrasing of the dances Lucky Plush identified as “their own.”

Punk Yankees seeks to be final and specific about itself, I thought, but inside territory that’s exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to navigate.
It comes up in the work in regard to memory — how memory is intangible and part of the provocative act of appropriation in dancemaking. How one remembers the influences, where the step comes from. How it informs an aesthetic.

And what one chooses to remember.
Indeed. The choice to acknowledge, affirm or recognize those influences. Again, it’s easy to do that when the step, the move, is easily recognizable as another’s bit of choreography, as another’s aesthetic. This is not as easy when it’s more subtle or not accessible, through video or other means of recording history. When the influence lies beneath the surface.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for helping me dig beneath the surface. Like I said, the piece might not be completely successful, but it invites an important conversation.
I agree.

Meghann Wilkinson, Hogan McLaughlin and Jeremy Blair in Punk Yankees. Photo by William Frederking.

Julia Rhoads‘ latest evening-length work bucks trends by embracing them. Before and after Punk Yankees — and during a brief intermission packed with enough stimuli to make me regret needing to use the restroom — a live feed of at-replies to Lucky Plush’s Twitter handle were met with instantaneous responses from the account as well as those of the piece’s eight performers. The transition from pre-show music by Girl Talk into a score only slightly less mashed-up similarly showed no fear toward new forms and boundary-testing of copyright law. What sticks about Yankees is how it turns a spotlight on aging notions about choreographic originality gone translucent from living in shadow.

A surprising and very funny opening scene gives way to a deluge of information recognizable to avid dancegoers (less-so to casual or novice audiences — more on that in a bit). Samplings of Ohad Naharin, Bob Fosse and Trisha Brown are fed to Lucky Plush’s ravenous grinder and made into sausages of new and old, classical and modern, obscure and iconic. Rhoads’ own repertoire is a primary ingredient throughout, satisfying to longtime followers of her company. For those that aren’t, it probably works just as well as a visual bonding agent.

The mood stays light throughout Punk Yankees but, huddled around each other murmuring and humming, the dancers suggest a séance, conjuring the spirits of dancemaking past. All the longer dance sections take on the quality of a primordial soup; although every movement has a distinct source, the broader statement is that, on a basic level, it’s all just a bunch of steps — it’s the individuals that give them life that should be treated as sacred. Surely, an uptight purist will never stand for the sunburst from Apollo being bookended by the macarena and a phrase from “Thriller,” but I found it much less questionable than, say, Tony Powell hollowly aping Forsythe or Ma Cong hawking his Duato knockoffs like fake Fendi handbags on Canal Street (somebody stop them, please).

Kim Larimore Goldman, Meghann Wilkinson, Jeremy Blair, Julia Rhoads, David Gerber and Lia Bonfilio in Punk Yankees. Photo by William Frederking.

Punk Yankees‘ referential layering is unabashedly optimized for dance-savvy audiences. And I found that refreshing — there’s a pride in how deeply Lucky Plush has dived into the hall of mirrors that is the last fifty-odd years of choreography. Desks with laptops come in and out of view along both sides of the stage, the company’s eight faces on webcam projected onto the upstage scrim in a Brady Bunch/Hollywood Squares grid. The computer screen is treated both as reflector and long-awaited steady stream of fuel for their appropriative jones; when Lia Bonfilio finds a choice YouTube link, Rhoads is instantly over her shoulder like a junkie saying, “Ooh, can you send me that? Send me that link.” Dancers not sucked into duets and trios of borrowed material pace restlessly in wait for their next fix.

Text in general, which is included in nearly every scene, is occasionally too obvious but often pleasingly open-ended. Lighting Designer and Technical Director Kevin Rechner walks nonchalantly onstage at the close of the first act, announcing “Screen coming in!” in a way that makes it as figurative as literal. Other times it’s succinct in framing what’s happening vocabularily: Rhoads and Kim Larimore Goldman clue us in to how a phrase was developed, similar to a game of telephone, making it logical and rewarding to watch the following section for subtle transpositions.

The best result of a show like this is the work it does in coaxing acknowledgment of influences out of the closet. Dance has a lot of catching up to do in this regard — the myth of the choreographer-as-singular-generative-force sits on a carpet of eggshells and conspires to keep the field woefully slow to adapt. Punk Yankees is a work of dance theater but, more importantly, it’s an invitation to a conversation.

Lucky Plush Productions’ Punk Yankees continues through October 31 at the Dance Center of Columbia College.

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I’ve heard stories about Sheldon B. Smith and Lisa Wymore for years now — each one makes me wish I had had the opportunity to get to know them during their Chicago days. The show they shared with Lucky Plush Productions at Link’s Hall last weekend made me wish I knew them even more, because they’re versatile, mysterious performers and because parts of the program relied upon a familiarity with their work I simply don’t have.

A quartet of works by various combinations of Julia Rhoads’ Lucky Plush and Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts, In the Middle, Somewhat Replicated was rock-solid on the conceptual-consistency front. The incorporation of live video played an integral role throughout, all but one of the pieces requiring a camera and tripod to stand downstage center surrounded by an assortment of Apple hardware and other tech toys. Surprisingly, the ubiquity of video in daily life didn’t make a yawn out of its heavy use by Plush and Smith/Wymore. It helps that Rhoads has stuck with the format for a few years; although her longtime multimedia collaborator John Boesche wasn’t involved this time around, effective incorporation of projections is by now easily achieved by Rhoads and the ensemble (they’re all comfortable, nuanced pros on camera, too).

Smith and Wymore’s collaboration Witness, which opened the show, took a different tack with the screen. A “duet” of sorts, it begins with Smith watching Wymore perform a gestural, internally-motivated solo in a black-and-white recording that fills the back wall of the space and is scaled such that the floor looks as though it carries through, creating a tricky and satisfying Pleasantville effect. Wymore is often motionless or cycling through some small repetitions as though looking for an initiation that feels honest. A few bursts of percussive energy break the tension, but it regenerates swiftly like Wolverine’s turbo-healing skin — she finishes and it’s hard to discern whether anything has happened at all. Then, in the first hint of a comedic strain that’s par for the Lucky Plush course, Wymore (still on video) debriefs with Smith, engaging in a back-and-forth about how the dance felt that’s not so much illuminating information but another layer of meta-engagement. Neither seem able to squeeze out a complete sentence or generate a firm statement. The pair then swap places, the real Wymore entering the room to watch Smith perform his own, similar solo dance, which upon its finish is also dismantled by compulsive verbal unpacking. Witness describes itself in a series of questions as being about subjectivity, but it may even more be about language. It recalls what Molly Jaeger‘s been working on — there’s a jarring interplay between the simplicity of seeing movement that needs no explanation and the annoying dust storm that buries that simplicity under descriptive language, working its way into every crevice and staying there forever.

Asynchronous Love Scene (from One Life to Live) Version 1.0, Smith and Wymore’s other exclusive contribution, is a simple gag that retains its humor even as it becomes increasingly predictable. The setup — what if, on a single-camera shoot, the camera had to stay in one place and everything else on set had to move in relation to it? — takes the conceit of filmmaking and lampoons it while at the same time taking the audience (we can’t move, either) on a proxy joyride. A Looney Tunes version of Handel plays over Smith and Wymore frantically keeping pace with a series of chimes that tells them when the tape is rolling. They have to be in place for each two-to-three-second shot while also wrangling three pieces of furniture, a bottle of wine and two glasses; they’re also simultaneously throwing costume pieces and other props around in an admirable stab at continuity. Although the “shots” are filmed in no logical order, the simple story — a couple on a date down a bottle of vino, rip each others’ clothes off and make comically passionate love — is readily apparent and funny because rather than in spite of its obviousness. The real stunner is that Smith and Wymore have their hands on a piece of software that, once this zany parade ends, properly sequences the footage from this first section, throws a more traditional arrangement of the same score behind it, and instantly spits out a complete movie (called A Short Film About Getting Drunk and Fucking, which we all promptly watch together).

Appearing Acts is a play on Smith and Wymore’s company’s name as sure as the evening’s name is a reference to William Forsythe’s 1987 masterpiece in the middle, somewhat elevated. Built out of what the program describes as re-contextualized samples of choreography by Smith and/or Wymore that the Lucky Plush ensemble recalled from memory or learned from online video, it’s clear that the Bay Area duo’s body of work has had a profound influence not just on Rhoads but visibly upon Chicago contemporary dance as a whole. My obstacle was, as I suspect some other audience members shared, I wasn’t familiar with the source material at all. Many of the vignettes, which were composed to flow into and out of one another in montage, were interesting (it’s doubtful they’d be so honored if they weren’t), but Appearing Acts told me little about the dialogue these artists share and how this particular sort of homage honors the mutual intellectual engagement they’ve maintained over the years. One bit, the speedy run-through of Beckett’s 1965 dramaticule Come and Go with which Rhoads opens 2003′s Endplay, provided a few belly laughs as the characters’ names were here changed to Julia, Sheldon and Lisa, but I think it’s just because this sacrilegiously quick performance of the Beckett is always funny. I appreciate good-natured work and I think Rhoads made Acts mostly out of happiness at the occasion of this reunion, but on the rest of the program, also good-natured and very funny, that happiness had already registered.

Lucky Plush Productions' Julia Rhoads. Photo by Karen Wade.

True Value, another premiere and joint venture between Rhoads, Smith and Wymore, is a better example of Rhoads’ recent investigations and increasingly-pointed pursuit of contemporary dance theater that looks head-on at authenticity, appropriation and commercialization in Internet culture. Members of the Lucky Plush ensemble sit in the house as lights come up and “bid” on small shifts in Rhoads’ posture, facial expression and projected mood. Some stances elicit a bored “two dollars” while other, flashier arrangments (including Smith and Wymore, who enter the picture) garner an excited “twelve bucks” or even “fifteen-fifty.” There’s a fluid slipping into subsequent scenes, one of which involves close-up TV-confessional-style stories told by performers to the camera and projected on the wall; interrupting each other and causing the narrative to leapfrog over itself, the simple tale turns into a three-legged race that defeats its own purpose and collapses inward. The movement vocabulary extrapolates a shared collage that developed between Chicago and Berkeley in videos passed back and forth online — it’s rapidly-shifting dynamics and logic structures are a natural fit with Lucky Plush’s other collaboratively-generated vocabularies. Lia Bonfilio, Asimina Chremos, Autumn Eckman, Kim Larimore Goldman and Meghann Wilkinson are some of Chicago’s most versatile and creative dancers and each has grown immensely with the challenging tasks Rhoads introduces to the creative process. Text-based scenes — often essentially straight theater, which dancers can seriously butcher — carry heavy loads of self-reference, satire and irony to the summit of their dramatic potential and dump it all at the top for a celebratory get-down.

Darrell Jones. Photo by Dan Merlo.

First, let me run down the list of phenomenal peeps with whom I’m honored to share the bill:

• Current CDF Lab Artist Grant recipient and AD of Khecari Jonathan Meyer will dance in a solo work. I gushed about the direction his work is taking in one of my first blog posts—if you missed him then, catch him now.
• Lisa Gonzales and Darrell Jones are two of this city’s bona fide gems and, with the unfortunate cancellation of Peter Carpenter’s premiere (he’s on the mend and getting ready for a big show of his own), are now involved with NEXT, bringing their by-all-accounts-incredible duet Traitor I (stupidly) missed at ODF last fall.
• Julia Rae Antonick is no joke and, along with myself, will present a new work commissioned by Mo & Co as part of the Emerging Artist Mentoring Project Award. Her duet is titled Loose Legged Wing Dividers and uses stillness—the evening’s theme—as a constraint through which she’s developed a movement vocabulary. We’ve managed not to see any of each others’ work in process, but I can tell you that A.) I’m very excited about it and B.) her portfolio speaks for itself.
• Company namesake Shirley Mordine is collaborating with two artists on separate works: Sahridaya is a recent duet co-choreographed by Natya Dance Theatre AD Hema Rajagopalan and pleases me thusly: There is no ill-considered attempt to take Mordine’s modern dance vocabulary and mash it up with Rajagopalan’s Bharatanatyam technique. They remain uncompromised, and the dialogue between the two pure forms is—as always—far more engaging than some slipshod Frankenform confusing homogeneity with a post-cultural Shangri-La. She’s also teaming up once again with video-for-performance maestro John Boesche for a beautiful duet between Meghann Wilkinson and Molly Perez entitled New Ground, which neatly displays the weapons-grade talent of everyone involved.

Elizabeth Jenkins, Charles Cutler and Emma Draves in Dancing about stillness is like writing about

I had a helluva time figuring out how to approach Shirley’s instruction that I make a dance about stillness: Analytical as I (obviously) am, I just couldn’t get past the conflict between it being this simple, universally-understood concept and at the same time completely illusory. Out of this impasse comes Dancing about stillness is like writing about, a trio for Charles Cutler, Emma Draves and Elizabeth Jenkins that, like that missing last word, is inconclusiveness cropped out and zoomed in on. My dancers have done incredible work in an amazingly short creation process and, regardless of what anyone else ends up thinking about it, I love the piece and its strange spaces of tenderness, dismissiveness and hostility.

Elizabeth Jenkins and Charles Cutler.

Shirley observed in an early rehearsal that it’s subtly coded, like social protocol in a royal court—I agreed, took her note and ran with it. In some ways it’s a return to some of the first pieces I made, Ground won and WON TWO OWN in workshops with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Back then (’03 and ’04) I was blathering a lot about what happens when you take a gestural signifier (a thumbs-up, a hand cupped around the ear) and place it alongside other information (a middle finger, an index “shushing” over the lips) that cancels it out. I moved onto other things in later choreographies but never until now returned to these ideas about taking body language, maximizing its clarity and communicativeness, then sequencing the images in a way that forces a choice: Either the narrative makes no sense or the images have come to mean something new. Brushed up alongside the usual low-level anxiety about sharing my work, I can’t wait to hear peoples’ reactions to and interpretations of it—especially yours, so get a ticket! Paying full price ($15 advance, $20 at the door) is always appreciated, but it bears mentioning there’s no need to: There are $5 coupons at See Chicago Dance, texting “Mordine” to 30364 gets you a reply that’s a 2-for-one coupon (green!) AND Time Out is holding a drawing for a free pair on Tuesday. Just don’t tell me you can’t make one of three shows. The space is gorgeous, there’s plenty of free wine to lubricate your watching and there’s a crazy-diverse, fascinating program of outstanding dance. Hop to it!

Emma Draves and Charles Cutler.