I wrote about his work in progress, “Harbour,” in 2019, months before the pandemic. Beck’s acupuncture practice was locked down, along with everything else. During this downtime, Beck said he “had a lot of dreamtime” and worked on the fulfillment of his vision for “Harbour,” for ten dancers and himself, a 40-minute piece with a set representing a high-water point of a haunting and reverential evening of atmospheric dance and music. 

Beck says his work is “improv with language.” He began with a solo, a structured improvisation of dance, music and lighting, simply called Improvisation. Under five swinging lamps which lit him from above depending on his spot, Beck danced with youthful agility and thoughtful intensity as a video of actor Tom Marriott’s face directed by Ellen Hemphill played on a screen above the lamps. Marriott, of Chapel Hill, NC’s Archipelago Theater, allowed his expressions to subtly react to a recorded narration by NPR’s StoryCorps. It was a gut-wrenching story of a WWII soldier who had to kill a young German soldier and who never really recovered from it. “He was angel,” was the repeated refrain. Beck responds by stomping his foot flatly and sharp as a gunshot as the lights dim. His colleague at SUNY, David Rudge, composed the soundscape with input from Beck.

The second piece, “Dig,” was a 2010 commission by the Pennsylvania Ballet, originally for ten dancers. Here, Beck pares it down to two: the imposing presence of a mature Tim Early, of Brandywine Ballet, and the youthful shock of Haotian Liu, a graduate student from Changchun, China. In silence, Liu dips his fingers into an underlit fishbowl and runs a wet finger around its rim, the pitch signaling the opening notes of Arvo Pärt’s elegy, In Memoriam for Benjamin Britten. 

In “Dig,” Early enters slowly turning with an outreached arm and then clutching both arms to his chest as if hugging a memory. He runs to the small piles of dirt or sand dotting the stage and I am thinking of biblical times and other rituals when grieving people toss ashes over themselves. His anguish is palpable. To original music composed and performed by Mollie Glazer with Toshi Makihara’s percussion, Early spins and shoots an arm down like an arrow finally standing on a small green patch. What is left of the earth? A safe base? When Liu returns, Early lifts the green patch and disappears with it, leaving Liu with no ground under his feet. In a fact-checking phoner, Beck said “it is a last little oasis in the long search of trying to deal with loss.”  

Early returns for a duet with Liu. They could be father and son, teacher and student, brothers or lovers mirroring each other’s leaps and tours. But as Liu’s frenzied and repetitious dancing escalated, Early wrapped him in his arms and quieted him. Poignantly, the youth needs the elder, but ultimately the elder must leave him to go his own way.