sarma

I guess I've never seen Raymond Johnson dance alone before. I left the concert he shared with Ze'eva Cohen -the Cubiculo's first fall dance performance- with an overwhelming sense of eyes staring blackly at the audience. Whether by coincidence or design, the three solos he performed all had to do with a man's image of himself and the calculated way in which this image was offered to others. We played the others, and Johnson defied or cajoled or seduced us or threw us to the lions with almost unnerving coolness and intelligence.

He's a good dancer with an exceedingly straight spine and a brusque kind of strength. His face looks like an African mask, carved and rubbed into smoothness with oiled fingers. But this same face can look bleak, demoralized, very young. In the beginning of his solo, "Black Dance", he strides firmly in a circle, looking straight ahead, like someone who knows eyes are watching him, but is, God damn it, not going to look back. At the end of the dance, he's reclining like a lazy, but watchful lion; his minute, but arrogant beckoning gestures seem to say, "you come here!" to an invisible crowd, or perhaps, "Just give me all you've got, baby, and fast." In between, Johnson shows a series of moods and attitudes from coquettish to defiant, but he doesn't dwell on any of them. All his ideas are blended into one seamless dance, and the roles are so dexterously assumed and discarded that you're not even sure you've seen some of them.

He's also cool in his ridiculously titled "Tuesday's Tempered Terpsichore" -a short, minimal, slow-motion jive. To a blast from Count Basie, Johnson walks into a spotlight and slowly, decadently melts into dancing. Almost too cool to move, he makes each tiny jerk, each blase gesture quiver disdainfully off his spine. Sometimes he looks like a depraved windup toy; perhaps it used to say "fuck you", but that part of the mechanism is broken.

"Feathers", a solo made for Johnson by James Waring, is as fascinating and as inscrutable as most of Waring's pieces. "Feathers" is dedicated to Barbette, a trapeze artist of the '20s and '30s who wore women's clothes while performing and took off his wig for the curtain call to show he was a man. Johnson appears in a short, gleaming tunic patterned with horizontal bands, and a gilt crown that curls down from his brow and forward onto his cheeks like spitcurls. A l'Egyptienne. Something about the two-dimensional "archaic" attitudes make me think of the nymphs in Nijinsky's "L'Après Midi D'un Faun". Certain dance phrases are repeated over and over, as precise as the Mozart music that accompanies them. Johnson attacks the movements harshly, holds them for a savage pause, and then wilts. He leans backward extravagantly, threatening us with a fall into darkness from the height of a tightrope. He's strong, but curiously wistful. At times, his tilted chin and drooping waist seem to evoke the way a whole generation thought women ought to be.