How do we feel about red? That’s what Boston Dance Theater is investigating this weekend in its Global Arts Live–sponsored appearance at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “Red is a feeling” offers premieres from Iranian-Hispanic choreographer Roya Carreras Fereshtehnejad and BDT founder and co–artistic director Jessie Jeanne Stinnett along with repertoire pieces from German choreographer Marco Goecke and Israeli choreographer and BDT co–artistic director Itzik Galili. In brief voiceovers, the four choreographers suggest what red means to them; then the audience is invited to answer the question “How does red make you feel” on red slips of paper that will be collected at the end of the show. In Friday’s performance, “red” read as power, fear, anger, heat, darkness, and, finally, celebration.
The dancing begins with a four-minute excerpt from Galili’s “Memories,” which he created in 2019 for the women of BDT. Henoch Spinola recites, “I cannot erase fear, anger, borders, narrow-mindedness, time, memories.” Then to the drumming of the Japanese taiko troupe Kodo, three men and two women in red shifts gyrate in their individual spotlights, jabbing, kicking, somersaulting, moving out as the lighting creates a track for them to follow.
Reprised from BDT’s May 2024 ICA program, Galili’s “If As If” (2006) is a seven-minute duet for Stinnett and Spinola where, in repeating sequences, she evades his attempts at partnering. Truce is declared during a middle section in which they separate and mirror each other; when they regroup, nothing has changed, the dance ending as it began. The piece was worth a second look; the title is as mystifying as ever.
The other returnee from last May, “Firebird Pas de Deux” (2010), looked different this time. Goecke’s two firebirds are not gender specific; Stinnett and Olivia Coombs performed the piece in May, but this time out, Stinnett and Wesley Urbanczyk are a more obviously courting pair. Dancing to the final 10 minutes of Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” they converse in a wary, jittery language of undulating hips, twitching shoulders, spastic arms, fluttering fingers. After their split-second embrace, they shuffle away from each other in silence, dejected, as if the moment of mating were all the contact they could bear without burning up.
The two premieres aren’t quite as fulfilling. Carreras Fereshtehnejad’s “Red is a feeling,” which gives the program its title, was inspired by her experience battling two forms of cancer in her mid-30s. The four performers — Stinnett, Spinola, Urbanczyk, and Sean Pfeiffer — gasp for breath to start. Urbanczyk relieves Stinnett of what looks like a hospital gown; underneath she has on a bright blue top and trousers (the only piece on the program with no red in the costuming).
Sitting in a stenographer’s chair, Pfeiffer is wheeled on and off by Spinola and Urbanczyk. Pfeiffer whispers in Stinnett’s ear; she nestles against him and he guides her gently from behind, even as Spinola wheels the chair back out with Urbanczyk draped over it. Urbanczyk seems to battle unseen forces while Spinola and Pfeiffer manipulate Stinnett in a series of imaginative, awkward-looking lifts. Urbanczyk eventually disappears upstage, leaving Stinnett to crawl toward the audience. Carreras Fereshtehnejad has said, “My body is a protest, a puzzle, a mirror, and a keeper of secrets.” That’s a fair description of a piece that for me didn’t quite come into focus.
Stinnett’s “Fifties” is the party-piece closer. The mostly ‘50s music, from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong singing “Cheek to Cheek,” is well chosen; the six performers all wear red. Everyone bops to “Johnny B. Goode”; the three men support one another through Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow”; the women salsa to the Champs’ “Tequila.” It’s all fluid and acrobatic and, apart from Ameia Mikula-Noble’s cheeky wave at the end of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a bit generic and feel-good. But maybe red can be that as well.
RED IS A FEELING
Performed by Boston Dance Theater. Presented by Global Arts Live. At Institute of Contemporary Art, Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, March 14. Remaining performance March 15. Tickets $44-$48. 617-876-4275, www.globalartslive.org
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.
