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Reflections, Reverence, and Spellbinding Artistry

Terry Beck first saw Hellmut Gottschild’s Zero Moving dance company as a student at Temple University in the ’70s. Beck was working towards a teaching degree in Special Education and took a work study gig as a glass box technician. He was not a dancer. One night he saw Zero Moving doing “Dogs are Faithful,” an early work of the company. Stunned, he asked “What is that?”

Performance

Temple Dance Department: “Harbour” / “Dig” by Terry Beck

Place

Tomlinson Theater, Department of Dance, Philadelphia, PA, September 6-7, 2024

Words

Merilyn Jackson

Tim Early and Janet Pilla Marini in “Harbour” by Terry Beck. Photograph by Brian Mengini, courtesy of Temple University

Soon after, an advisor urged him to take a dance course because it would give him two credits. Beck continued and eventually, Gottschild, a founder of Temple’s dance department invited him to be in the company. He came back nearly 50 years later to fulfill the 2024 Choreographic Commission from Temple’s Boyer College of Music and Dance. 

Full circle, last weekend’s “Reflection: Response” program was to honor Gottschild, who was one of Mary Wigman’s last students before immigrating to the United States in 1968. Along with partners, Brigitta Herrmann and the late Manfred Fischbeck, they brought German Expressionism to Philadelphia with their company, Group Motion, enriching our dance community ever since.

Exploring themes of age and lifetime memories, the program included many of the original ZeroMoving dancers and Gottschild’s wife, Professor Emeritus of Dance, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild for an evening. But by the end, even though there were hints of death and loss, the show didn’t look backward, but forward. 

Post-show, Beck elaborated a bit on his dance career. “It was 1977. I was young and arrogant, but I knew I would learn from Hellmut. Then I began doing independent work,” he said. “And one night a Rockefeller Foundation representative saw me dance at the Painted Bride and dumped a boatload of money on me. I was able to make a company and pay my dancers.” 

Much of his dance career took place overseas, in Edinburgh and Wales, as he continued to work as independent choreographer and performer. He also studied Tai chi and acupuncture, opening a practice in Dunkirk, a small town outside of State University of New York in Fredonia, NY, where he also taught for many years, recently retiring. 

Tim Early and Haotian Liu in “Dig” by Terry Beck. Photograph by Brian Mengini, courtesy of Temple University

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.  

Tim Early and Janet Pilla Marini in “Harbour” by Terry Beck. Photograph by Brian Mengini, courtesy of Temple University

The second half of the program premiered the full-length “Harbour” with music also by Rudge with the addition of Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel performed by Rudge and Heath Allen on piano. “Harbour” is so different from what I saw in 2019, but still kept the atmosphere, expanding and enlarging it to three sections.

The organic set evoked an underworld or dark, faraway island. A lighthouse, represented by a tangle of window frames barely lit from above, suggests wreckage found on the ocean floor. A driftwood seat made a throne for Dixon-Gottschild, the first Siren to appear. But it also imprisoned her as she struggled to rise from it. Upstage left, Beck sits in a boat dipping his oar hypnotically. Liam Henry Boyd Shaffer designed the lighting throughout and limned the props and the dancers’ limbs glyphically. Mitch Fitzgibbon and Beck created the haunting sets for each piece. 

As the lights come up on Dixon-Gottschild, she seems more griot or sage than siren. She struggles to escape the confines of her seat and mimes rowing a boat, until the lights reveal the other Sirens:  Alexei Borovik, former Principal Dancer with the Philadelphia Ballet, and Mady Cantor, Patricia Graham, Laura Katz Rizzo, Jonathan Stein, Paul Struck, Christine Vilardo also in Haley Newell’s tattered drab garments. Many of them were in Beck’s early company or with ZeroMoving. 

As they dance, Dixon-Gottschild rises to join them and before they disappear into the darkness, they pull a fishing net off the prone bodies lying downstage left. Thus begins the Lighthouse section, a touching duet between Pilla Marini and Early. It’s an awakening, an exploration of each other and a discovery of Beck methodically rowing in the boat. Early carries a birdcage placing it in the boat. Is he saving it from washing away? They repeat a gesture from the first section, reaching for something to pluck out of the air, one of many repeated gestures that, as much as dance, comprise this work. Themes of rescue, comforting, rejections, leave-takings and returns fill their slow-motion, almost Butoh-like moves, a drifting toward some finality: a Beckett-like going on?

The Bardo closes the work with a final Beck solo in a flaring red-hued robe. As he climbs from the boat, we also see several antique clocks attached to it. Is time suspended or is there still a boatload of time? Either way it was an exquisite dance that can live as a full-length on its own, and ended an evening of spellbinding artistry by all.

Merilyn Jackson


Merilyn Jackson has written on dance for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996 and writes on dance, theater, food, travel and Eastern European culture and Latin American fiction for publications including the New York Times, the Warsaw Voice, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, MIT’s Technology Review, Arizona Highways, Dance Magazine, Pointe and Dance Teacher, and Broad Street Review. She also writes for tanz magazin and Ballet Review. She was awarded an NEA Critics Fellowship in 2005 to Duke University and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for her novel-in-progress, Solitary Host.

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