John Jasperse, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York

Lindsay Clark in John Jasperse "Canyon"

It is impossible to say “I love you madly” unironically now that romance writers have exploited the phrase, Umberto Eco once claimed. Dancing for joy has an equally vexed history, but in Canyon (until tomorrow) – his fourth commission for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival – John Jasperse embraced rapture even as he made clear how “super-problematic” it was for dance.

Canyon began with a burst of momentum – leaps that shot forward into hops or skidded sideways in burbling triplets. The six dancers burst on to the stage from one side or the other, all at once or in succession. The three women paused to cluster together, swaying like top-heavy trees in the wind. The exceptional James McGinn slipped and slid on his back as if tumbling head over heels down a waterfall.

Composer Hahn Rowe and three other musicians responded to the choreography’s every dynamic shift. The music began propulsively, paused to gain dimension, stretched upwards in a thick arc of melody and launched into a halting waltz.

It was the set that injected scepticism into the scene. Skeins of fluorescent green and orange tape on the floor, up the proscenium’s back wall and down our aisles were like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs, but they produced no witch. Poles flying orange flags dotted the diagonal swath of white Marley floor, though the game never materialised. And a white cube on wheels navigated the stage according to its own private compass. I puzzled over these clues for a while before deciding they led nowhere. Perhaps that is the point: private states change their nature when they are made public; they can only honestly remain hidden.

But the dancing belied this claim. Jasperse achieved the considerable feat of calibrating the headlong moments in the choreography so they drew us in without dramatising themselves. Or at least two of the dancers, Lindsay Clark and McGinn, succeeded in creating that effect. Nothing in their bodies obstructed the flow; they became the movement’s transparent vehicle, seeming to turn themselves inside out. Like saying “I love you”– or even “I love you madly” – people have moved with clarity and abandon before, but it does not make its latest iteration any less difficult or true.

bam.org