The United States and Cuba may differ on many subjects, but baseball isn't one of them. So it's only fitting that McKnight International Artist Osnel Delgado found inspiration in the sport for a Zenon Dance Company premiere. Now performing at the Cowles Center, just a couple of blocks from Target Field, Delgado's "Coming Home" is a grand slam of a local debut.
Delgado, a former member of Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, leads the Malpaso Dance Company in Havana. His "Coming Home" breaks down the mechanics of baseball — pitching motion, batting stance, hand signals — to the point where the movement source remains clear yet assumes entirely different dimensions.
Even as the dancers size up targets from behind imaginary gloves, wind up their arms and gaze after an imaginary home run, we witness just how universal these actions can be when considered in a different context. Baseball is, after all, a metaphor for life in its constant striving for the win.
Alyssa Mann and Laura Selle Virtucio, two of the more athletic dancers in town, share a duet midway through "Coming Home" representing the sweet spot where sport and artistry meet. They are as strong as they are graceful while dodging, weaving, leaping and setting up for the next big moment in the game.
The program also features "blind drive drive-way," a premiere from Brooklyn-based choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh. This eccentric work is tailor-made for the bigger performance personalities in the company, like Leslie O'Neill, Mary Ann Bradley and Tristan Koepke.
There is dancing but Anspaugh focuses more on what happens when we follow the logic of imagination. Having set aside the rules of structure and technique, what remains is the sometimes manic urge to connect — with one another and the world beyond.
Wynn Fricke's darkly dramatic duet for O'Neill and Virtucio, "My Very Empty Mouth" (2011), and Stefanie Batten Bland's atmospheric "Caught" (2013) are also part of the evening. Taken together, all four works show the continuing evolution of Zenon, a troupe that takes chances and challenges its audience to see dance in new ways.
Caroline Palmer writes about dance.
