Pharrell’s dance/music collaboration a triumph for Soluna Festival

In interviews in national publications like Rolling Stone, choreographer Jonah Bokaer’s latest dance Rules of the Game, a collaboration with visual/video artist Daniel Arsham and songwriter/producer/composer Pharrell Williams, has been touted as “a brand new medium.” While it is not — choreographers have created work with composers and videographers/artists for decades — it is definitely a captivating work of art.

Rules had its world premiere Tuesday at the Winspear Opera House to kick off the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s second Soluna International Music & Arts Festival, and will have more productions around the world and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music beginning this fall. Nabbing such internationally known artists — not to mention a major pop star with artistic cred — is a coup for the Dallas Symphony’s commitment to this multidisciplinary festival, which runs for four weeks with concerts, lectures, exhibits and theater and dance performances at various venues in Dallas.

Rules is inspired by the texts of absurdist Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, notably his 1921 landmark Six Characters in Search of an Author (the dance title comes from Pirandello’s play Rules of the Game), but doesn’t follow a specific narrative. Arsham’s video, on a large screen behind the dancers, shows images of terracotta-looking classical busts that resemble ancient Roman and Greek sculpture, and appendages such as an arm, falling and crashing on the floor or into each other. Also basketballs — a contemporary image of idol worship.

Chris Stamp’s costumes have the eight dancers — an international ensemble that includes Dallas’ Albert Drake of the Bruce Wood Dance Project — in pajamas with hooded jackets in terracotta pink to match the sculptures. Actual basketballs, painted the same color, are used as props, sometimes rolled on the floor and other times thrown between dancers as if they are players warming up for a game.

Pharrell Williams wrote the music with hip-hop and new wave influences and recorded it electronically and with drum machines. It was arranged for the DSO by Grammy-winning producer David Campbell, the father of musician Beck. Campbell also conducted, and as played by the DSO, the music has a memorable rhythm line and a number of references. In the first third, and at the end, it especially recalls 1970s Muzak or TV theme music, what with that sleepy trumpet.

Bokaer’s choreography is purposefully somnambulistic as well, rooted in street dance and enhanced with balletic fluidity. There is partnering, asymmetrical stage pictures and some group work, but the most exciting section has dancers Drake and James Koroni in a physical fight, filled with martial arts moves and stage combat tumbles. Overall, the dance might not thrill lovers of fast-moving and athletic dance, but that’s not the goal. Like Six Characters, these performers are on a philosophical quest, and the results are intriguing.

The evening began with Bokaer’s playful RECESS (2010), which is him making large multidimensional structures with his feet and hands, in a dancerly fashion, of a large roll of backdrop paper. Instant and unpredictable sculpture.

Following that was his Why Patterns (2011), with four dancers intermingling with droplets of Ping Pong balls that turn into a deluge of them. The dancers have to corral and dance around the balls, and eventually rid the stage of them. Like the music it’s set to (by Morton Feldman and Alexis Georgopoulos), Why Patterns, as well as RECESS, is highly minimalistic in terms of movement.

In all three works, props — paper, spherical objects, etc. — are similar to theatrical puppetry. Whereas in that case the puppet/object is a reflection of the puppeteer’s movement, in Bokaer’s creations it has a relationship to the dancer that’s not always controllable. But it always feels like an extension of the performer.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 4:11 PM with the headline "Pharrell’s dance/music collaboration a triumph for Soluna Festival."