Joyce Theatre, 175 8th Avenue, New York
Tuesday November 24 2009
Complexions’ current season at the Joyce, 8th Avenue at 23rd Street, is the hit of the fall Manhattan dance season and I was lucky to get a seat at the performance last Tuesday night. I did not read the program notes before the curtain rose because I was so interested in seeing who else was there. I have never seen so many unaccompanied people, very seriously taking notes or reading the program or signalling greetings to each other. Judging by their appearance they were now or had once been dancers themselves, and I felt both privileged and fraudulent to be a mere dilettante in the midst of what was obviously a serious ballet crowd. My distraction paid off because my first gasp occurred when the curtain rose on the entire company confronting the audience in a stance of defiant pulchritude before they hurled themselves into what felt like an intense representation of the tortures of birth, life and death. This swept along to conclude in a phenomenal and gravity-defying epiphany as the dancers were swept up on each other’s shoulders in an elevating spiral of grace. During the interval I was moved to read that this was the first act of “Mercy,” a ballet by Complexions’ choreographer Dwight Rhoden, who created it in memory of Patrick Swayze, who was beloved by the company and whose wife is on the Board.
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