Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre‘s first live performance of Ana Maria Lucaciu’s Long Ago and Only Once delivered a privileged glimpse of what choreographer Annie-B Parson calls the “groove . . . like dance heaven” that evolves from long-term artistic collaborations. For Parson, this groove is a relationship between a choreographer and her dancers. It also perfectly describes how the “Terminators,” as the Terminus dancers playfully call themselves, moved together on stage Saturday to bring the poetry of Lucaciu‘s innovative, expressive vocabulary to life.
The dancers were supported by a creative team that crafted a mutable, timeless “no place,” the once-upon-a-time of fairytale. Lucaciu and Jimmy Joyner designed simple costumes in muted colors. The set design by Ben Rawson and Heath Gill comprised fluorescent strip lighting mounted at the top and bottom of movable pale gray walls, and an original score by T.M. Rives combined electronica with horns, strings, guitar and found audio.
Within that setting, Lucaciu’s choreography drew together the universal and the particular to create scenes resonant with narrative potential: collective experience of the uncanny, jokes, chance encounters and missed connections between both people and objects, striving, contemplation and information overload.
Then the dancers, like all good storytellers, activated the imagination, inviting the audience to join in a game of mapping personal experience onto a scaffolding of symbols and archetypes.
As individuals, the dancers were grounded and strong, aware of the lines they created, down to toe- and fingertips. Collectively, each was finely attuned to the others as if they were part of some gorgeous, super-human, collective organism.
The artistic partnership among the company members and even the guest artists who performed in Long Ago and Only Once was forged through years of shared experience at Terminus and Atlanta Ballet and collaboration on outside projects, and it is layered with bonds of long friendship, and even, for Laura Morton La Russa and James La Russa, marriage. For second-year protégé Anna Owen, dancing with an ensemble with that kind of history presented a potentially daunting challenge. She rose to the occasion with self-assured grace.
At rest, or during the pedestrian early moments of Long Ago and Only Once in which the group was observing, investigating and wondering at some strange occurrence that set the lights flickering and the air buzzing with white noise, she seemed totally — almost, but not quite, lazily — relaxed. She had just the barest hint of a slouch in the slight inward curve of her shoulders and slope of her long neck.
Like flipping a switch, though, when dance began in fits and starts to emerge from everyday movement, Owen could shift, seemingly without inertia, into sequences that reconstructed the lines of neoclassical ballet from crisply jointed isolations in the limbs and sinuously fluid torso contractions. Her timing and spatial awareness were superb; her stage presence — poised yet somehow insouciant at the same time — drew the eye.
Other outstanding performances included John Welker’s lovely duet with a humble house plant early in the piece. Jackie Nash, over the course of the hour-long show, delivered a touching and humorous portrayal of the performer’s cycle of nervous anticipation, punishing self-doubt, hyper-preparation and complete exhaustion. Morton La Russa was, as always, an electrifying presence, and her long solo in the second half was sublime.
Christian Clark and Rachel Van Buskirk took the stage in a duet, also in the second half, exemplifying the genius of Lucaciu’s choreography and the potent alchemy among the ensemble. The two began standing upstage right, in silence. For the audience, it was like observing an argument with the sound on mute. Van Buskirk gestured and talked at a passive Clark, who occasionally half-turned to gesture at something downstage left.
Van Buskirk, as if to bring Clark’s attention back, pulled him toward her, then brushed him off and pushed him away. He put his upstage hand on her shoulder, and then, in a movement that was both unexpected and deeply intimate, she placed her chin against his wrist and drew it down his arm, across his collarbone and down his other arm until he caught her cheek against the back of his upraised hand.
As they began to dance together and the music started, individual gestures conveyed sorrow or discontent. Slashing motions to the other’s knee or torso from both dancers hinted at anger and violence. The languorous, guitar-forward score, expressions of tenderness and comfort, and lifts that suggested playfulness and complete trust combined with these fractious elements to suggest a narrative arc. Like a geometric curve plotted by connecting multiple points on two intersecting lines, the shape of a relationship emerged as if by magic from these individual moments.
In a previous interview with ArtATL, Lucaciu said waiting — for a plant to grow, for the punchline of a joke, for the performance to start — is the primary theme of Long Ago and Only Once. While the dance film of the work was released in 2020, audiences have been waiting for almost three years to experience it live.
Saturday’s show rewarded patience with a beautiful farewell from Nash and Morton La Russa (both are leaving the company), a breakout performance from Owen, who is also moving on, and a reminder that dances and companies may have long lives but each live performance has an existence of its own, ephemeral in the moment but unique, with the potential to endure in memory long after.
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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.
