The Reviews Archive

Entertaining Dance Theatre with Some Blatant Plagiarism

The Brooklyn based performance group, Nicoll + Oreck Dance Theatre has returned to the 2008 Boulder Fringe Festival after a totally stunning 2007 performance. This year’s performance of eight quick, tightly nested works is for the most part just as successful, providing a solid hour of non-stop dance/theatre entertainment to their audiences. In fact, last year's success resulted in a good audience even at 9:00 PM on a Sunday night – a time not even Boulder Audiences tend to “get out.” As last year, performers Jessica Nicoll and Barry Oreck are ably moved along in their performance journey by Mike Durkin and Laura Livingston.

The August 17th Boulder Fringe Festival Performance in the Naropa University Performing Arts Center included eight works performed in continuum using moving tables, gliding chairs, head lamps, three backpacks, and every piece of clothing one could stuff into those packs. Choreography included that set by Nicoll and Oreck themselves and Phyllis Lamhut, with much of the performance’s ideas and implementation coming from Livingston and Durkin. Characters were created using Oreck’s and Nicoll’s bodies and variations in costumes, only to have the same characters virtually destroyed as those costumes and bodies were manipulated in sometimes absurd ways. Backpackers became dancers, dumped out their backpacks, only to have Nicoll discover the litter, dance a phrase amongst it, don every piece of clothing she could find, and put the knapsacks on her back, repeatedly dancing that same phrase until she fell down. Music varied from Handel, to Bach, Edith Piaf, Steve Reich and others, and it all “worked.”

At least it worked until the final, concert title piece, “They Might Be Napping.” The two tables became green, and a meeting in voice and movement convened around them. Suddenly Donald Rumsfeld’s voice recited his fractured English in “There are some things we know and some things we do not know and there are some things we don’t know we don’t know.” At that point the piece became a take-off (a rip-off?) of Kurt Joos’s stunning 1932 ballet, “The Green Table,” an anti war ballet so powerful it is still performed by companies such as American Ballet Theatre. The similarities were too blatant to be an accident, and with no acknowledgement to Joos, they can only be categorized as plagiarism. Joos’ estate maintains strict control of his ballets. One hopes Nicoll + Oreck have done their legal work carefully and do not get billed for huge retroactive royalties. Clearly this appropriation of the essence of Joos’ creation bothered me.

Donald K. Atwood MFA, Ph.D.

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