Rago refashions masculinity in ‘Manifold’
Beginning with a satiric analysis of male gestural codes and ending with a life-affirming solo of remarkable physical and emotional freedom, choreographer Patrick Damon Rago’s new, evening-length “Manifold” has a lot to offer beyond the surging, hyper-gymnastic movement style Rago honed while a member of Stephanie Gilliland’s locally based company, Tongue.
Collaborating with writer-performer Gregory Beirne and four male dancers, Rago filled the stage of Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica on Thursday with pieces finding trenchant comedy in patterns of conformity -- especially when it comes to fashion -- but also feelingly expressing the risks we all face when reaching out to others. Spontaneous, colloquial, informed by American improvisational gamesmanship, “Manifold” translates Rago’s personal style into a savvy, accessible performance idiom.
Middle-class white guys who fake black street style are one target of his ridicule, but Rago is sensitive enough to see the need for acceptance motivating this kind of pretense and to express it in an easygoing duet with Nick Heitzeberg. A longer, more serious encounter with Chad Michael Hall develops inventive partnering ploys as well as depicting the sense of isolation that men can impose on themselves.
Virtually unmanned in logo-dominated pajamas, Vincent Hederman is the evening’s primary fashion victim, Evan Hart Marsh its resident rebel, trying to maintain his own look while the others adopt every costume change he makes -- accompanied by recordings of sheep.
There’s not a lot of pure dance on view, but one quietly sensational quartet without Rago early in the program reveals his Palindrome company’s spectacular technical control through a display of weightless, pressureless, lyric gymnastics. There are low, smooth vaults as well as unison choreography in which falling can be slow and rising effortless, and brief solos with no taint of aggression: Say hello to millennial dance masculinity.
Throughout the evening, Beirne turns up in the guise of a self-realization guru, a character as irresistibly sleazy and overconfident as Borat, especially when he delivers ghastly, language-mangling analogies on behalf of what he calls “a colossal sense of I.”
Unfortunately, Rago takes this delirious cant seriously enough to rebut it in a speech that nobody needs to hear -- the only time that “Manifold” goes off-kilter.
Otherwise this is a consummately skillful and endearing evening of contemporary movement-theater.
*
‘Manifold’
Where: Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica
When: 8:30 tonight, 3 p.m. Sunday
Price: $15 and $20
Contact: (310) 315-1459 or www.highwaysperformance.org
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