Review: With a light and a lawn, Charleston dance bounces back | Charleston Scene

Dance is emerging once more in Charleston. And it’s landing squarely on its feet.

It can be homegrown, like the reanimation of “A Light in a Window” by Annex Dance Company. And it can blow in from parts up the Eastern seaboard, like Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group’s “Pepperland.” But the art form is bouncing back in ways both intimate and grand, ruminative and jubilant. 

On April 9, Annex presented two performances of “A Light in a Window” at The Schoolhouse in West Ashley, transforming the venue’s former so-called cafetorium into a meditation on movement. 

The six-person work was created by Kristin Alexander, Julie Clark and Evan Parry, along with both the performers in its original 2018 production, as well as those in the present one, whose organic contributions are intrinsic to the piece.

On a floor-level stage shaped by the oval of audience seats surrounding it, six dancers — Alexander, Clark, Parry, Tara Rooks, Sydni Shaffer and Bethany Willis — come together, outfitted in jewel-tone tops and leggings. They intersperse with spare narrative that is further realized in gesture, and set to reflective music by Four Tet, Dustin O’Halloran and Michael Wall.

The story involves a house that has a light in its window, one that glows invitingly from the street. The account is based on Alexander’s reaction to a painting, “Abiquiu,” by Leslie Alexander,” the choreographer’s mother-in-law, which depicts a white residence with a light beaming from its second-story front window. 

The story holds memories of family, chief among them the nightlights that punctuated the rooms and hallways of a home, and that created a shared experience for the children. As the dancers interact, they mirror one another’s movements, waving, pivoting, lurching. And as the story unfolds, they increasingly come together, with arms reaching up as if to lift a sash or swinging sideways to pull a curtain.

These movements also give agency to the individual dancers, who lend their own perspectives and gestural choices, forging a story formed from the intimacy of family. The effect was transcendent, and as I reemerged into the late Saturday afternoon I felt I was departing a whole world, spun one elegant phrase after another, and one that felt like home.

Then on April 10, Mark Morris Dance Group’s “Pepperland” descended in all its verve and wit on the Charleston Gaillard Center. It presents a new take on an old favorite, the Beatles’ 1967 musical extravaganza, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” 

The work was sprung from a 2017 commission by the city of Liverpool for the Sgt. Pepper at 50 Festival, with Morris enlisting composer Ethan Iverson to offer his own compositional interpretation of songs from the album, among them the title song, as well as others including “With a Little Help from My Friends,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Penny Lane” and “A Day in the Life.”

But wait, there’s more. Before the show, the venue had hatched an activation of its Calhoun Street-proximate lawn, a new initiative intended to underscore the venue as a welcoming hub of community.

Festivities included master classes with the group’s dancers, the Charleston-based Battery Brass Band blaring rousing renditions of Fab Four hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from the Gaillard portico and complimentary beverages for ticket holders to boot. There was even the choreographer on hand, giving a talkback under a tent, shushing and quipping to the merriment of all. 

Needless to say, by the time patrons streamed into the Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall, they were in fine spirits for the hourlong show. 

Thankfully, right before then, my friend Gerry had trotted out the LP before, and we set to placing names to the rogue’s gallery that inhabits the album’s iconic front cover, spotting the mugs of Oscar Wilde and Marilyn Monroe and the like.

So we were all primed for the opening burst of color and conviviality, as ’60s-pop-bedecked members of the troupe sprung onto stage and were introduced each by one of those bold-faced names.

From there, the fun began and carried on and on. It included a giddy can-can for “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a convivial “Penny Lane,” whose charming mime-like gestures held my 8-year-old rapt, a deconstructed “A Day in the Life” that departed its initial literal take to go full abstract, and a culminating “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a reprise/curtain call that succeeded in propelling the crowd to its feet in an onslaught of applause.

There were also balletic segments woven through these moments that illuminate Morris’ deep understanding of classical music and dance, named aptly “Adagio,” “Allegro” and “Scherzo,” and reveal the underpinnings of Morris’ ethos.

From start to finish, these phenomenal dancers achieved that ineffable Mark Morris feat, leveraging mastery and rigor into something that appears like a breeze so that we are suspended in delighted disbelief. As they heave one another merrily over shoulders, we are bolstered, too. As they launch sideways into the air, defying gravity and grinning all the while, we are launched, too. 

With some luck from the pandemic furies, such dancers from near and a bit farther will continue to animate Charleston’s stages. There, they can demonstrate how much is possible when artists are inspired by other artists, and then take visionary leaps.