Christopher K. Morgan Makes Strong Malashock Dance Debut

Malashock Dance’s show at the Saville Theater last weekend was titled “Cultivate,” but I saw it as a debutante ball. The program offered a first look at dances made for the company by its new artistic director, Christopher K. Morgan. Good news: Morgan’s work has the kind of complex engagement with ideas we’ve enjoyed from John Malashock for 35+ years. There’s also an appealing playfulness, as well as a democratic approach to composition that may be a mixed blessing.

Morgan made three of the evening’s dances, including “Companions,” a pair-up with Malashock that offered an intriguing look at contrasts between them. Each artist created a piece in response to the same painting, Arshile Gorky’s Child’s Companion. And both engaged with Gorky’s Armenian heritage but did so in refreshingly different ways.

 

Malashock cast his gaze backward, choosing music by Gorky’s contemporary, Soviet Armenian Aram Khatchaturian. (Both Gorky and Khatchaturian were born in the early 1900s.) Malashock has set memorable work to Eastern European composers, and this dance, to movements from Khatchaturian’s Children’s Album No. 1, again shows him feeling the music in his bones. There’s a wonderfully earthy, folk-dance feel as five dancers move in a circle, gallop and slap their thighs, and weave under each other’s arms.

The piece is a visual delight, with vibrant monotone costumes in colors—saffron, paprika, cobalt blue—that echo Gorky’s painting.

The dancers wear the same costumes for Morgan’s dance that follows. But he makes a contemporary connection with Armenia, via a video by Armenian artist Sareen Hairabedian. The video shows daily life in the Armenian enclave of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabkh) in 2019-2022; the following year, the Armenian population suffered ethnic cleansing.

With the video covering the back wall, dance and video images cascade. Dancers Micah Parra and Chelsea Zeffiro shout out numbers like kids at play, and what’s just downstage that they keep running toward? There’s video of a mischievous-faced boy playing a drum and laundry hanging over a street. Five dancers slowly crawl or seem to comfort each other. Are the pockmarks in that wall bullet holes? Near the end, we see the Gorky painting. The music is by Michael Wall, who specializes in composing for contemporary dance.

It’s a lot to take in and makes this a piece to see again (probably without scribbling notes in the dark). I only noticed some lovely juxtapositions of dance and video when I saw them captured in photos by Doug McMinimy.

Morgan’s “You Are Here/Usted Está Aqui” was a getting-reacquainted piece for the choreographer, who lived here in the 1990s (performing with Malashock), then went on to direct arts organizations in Hawaii and Washington, DC. He recorded oral histories with San Diegans, then made solos for company members embodying the stories, using excerpts from the recordings in the sound score. He showed three of these, in which the dancers collaborated on the choreography.

Jessica Rabanzo-Flores goes from making small, tentative moves to expanding energetically across the stage as we hear about interviewee Araceli Carrera’s work as a teaching artist that takes her from the border to North County. Lauren Christie does clean architectural arm gestures and leg extensions as Lynn Susholtz speaks about the physical space she’s developed to nurture community, Art Produce Gallery in North Park.

In the most satisfying marriage of story and movement, Morgan performs to his own oral history. His father came from a fishing village in Hawaii, and he wears voluminous netlike wings on his shoulders, turning and swooping, and slapping the wings against the floor.

Morgan was inspired to make “The Dulling Effect” by a 1934 Harvard study claiming that radio has “a dulling effect on the higher mental processes of the listener.” Just take a minute to let that sink in. Radio.

Six dancers cross the rear of the stage in slow single file, their individuality hidden by hooded black robes. Quickly, though, dancers break away from the line—scrambling, reaching, swaying. Two women manipulate a third, removing her monkish hood. Zeffiro’s long blond hair becomes a prop; other dancers lift it, then wave hand-held fans as Zeffiro poses, hair blowing, like a model at a fashion shoot, flirty and fun.

To throbby music, Joseph Lister shows off his muscular bare chest, in a section that feels like it hasn’t yet gelled. He then joins Zeffiro in delicate partnering.

The monkish robes have given way to white tops with ruched collars. Now those come off, revealing shirts with glitter spilling from them. Like the glitter, this dance is an associative journey with a lot of shiny objects and a terrific sense of play.

“Companion Piece” and “You Are Here” are credited to Morgan “in collaboration with the dancers,” while “The Dulling Effect” merely has “creative contributions from the cast.” That made it the best showcase for Morgan’s choreography, and it was his most substantial work—raising questions about the choreographer as auteur and democracy in the studio, which I anticipate will make for a lively creative process going forward.

The program also included three pieces—by Gina Bolles Sorensen and Kyle Sorensen, Khamla Somphanh, and Viviana Alcazar—from a Malashock Dance show reviewed earlier this year.