“I wanted to see the John Jasperse piece at La Mama but didnt have money for a ticket, so I offered to write about it,” I texted Jodi Melnick, performer-collaborator in the piece– who once generously, and perhaps regretfully– gave me her phone number while she was my dance teacher at Barnard College. Given the piece I was about to see, sending this message felt dramaturgically sound. John Jasperse’s Tides is a rushing choreographic landscape that centers themes of movement quality and dance lineage, featuring dancers Cynthia Koppe, Maria Fleischman, Jace Weyant, Vicky Shick, and Jodi Melnick, with tlighting design by Ben Demarest, and sound by Hahn Rowe. The work opened the 2025 La Mama Moves! Festival at the Ellen Stewart Theater from April 10th-13th.
The piece begins with a line of four dancer-collaborators emerging from upstage. From left to right: Koppe, Fleischman, Weyant, and Shick, all performers intertwined in various commingling legacies. Fleischman and Weyant were both students of Jasperse and Melnick, and Shick and Melnick share a long collaborative relationship coming up as almost contemporaries in the august period of downtown dance in New York City. The cast members embody a web of movement contexts far beyond themselves.
As the piece unfolds, the dancers– dressed in blooming black robes– charge towards us. They move with a sense of momentum and subtle defiance. Meanwhile, a silhouette looms upstage, center. I recognize the unmistakable shadow– Melnick, still yet full of movement– against the wall. As the first wave disperses, Melnick approaches. She arrives at the foot of the audience. Her gaze is sensuous and ominous, perhaps prophetic, and in any case, consuming.
I watch Melnick and think of a section of the Robert Frost poem, “The Most Of It”, when a creature emerges from a coastal wave:
“As a great buck it powerfully appeared/
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead/
And landed pouring like a waterfall…”
Melnick performs a pulling gesture, convincingly extending the length of her spread. It morphs into a pointing finger, directed at the audience. Have we been discovered? Reprimanded? Accused? Regardless, we’ve been accounted for, and the piece sets off.
Tides proceeds with fluid and weighted momentum. Rowe’s score, full of drones and gongs, accompanies this progression. There is a sense of flood, measured not biblical. Fleischman and Weyant bound throughout the stage in florid diagonals, moving in and out of synchronization. One gesture makes itself known over and over again, linking the dancers’ rolling shoulders to an ankle joint. I know that my guest Theo Armstrong and I will attempt this on our way out of the theater, trying to make sense of the conglomerate in our own bodies.
In the procession, Jasperse sacrifices no shape. Fleischman and Weyant sneak upstage and tuck themselves slowly onto the tops of two white podiums, like twin statues. Later, dressed by a semicircle of light, Schick and Melnick fold into, over, and through one another. I think of origami techniques as I watch them: swivel, pleat, crimp, petal, sink. They gaze at each other– heads nestled in elbows or laps– or at the audience. I think of guardian statues. I think of mythos. They move downstage. The audience is audibly tickled when Melnick slips a hand into Shick’s pocket– un clin d’oeil at two legacies. I watch this tender duet and think of the form, epic, or the Latin version, epicus: a journey poem of massive proportions.
I marvel at other ephemera. Koppe, with the precision of a boxer, tessellates and contorts into muscular geometries. Her power is stark yet fluid against the white walls of the set. If water is a paradox of force and delicacy, Koppe has embodied this contradiction. Later in the piece Fleishman reshapes this motif, sprawling and contracting as she moves downstage. My guest taps my leg and points to Melnick. She splays in a modest straddle downstage, rotating in many directions. Then I see it: her right pinky toe, boldly reaching to the marley. No digit left behind. Other details come to mind: Koppe’s sequined shorts accentuating her movement; a moment of a techno-catwalk in Rowe’s score; hints of pink in Demarest’s lighting design; the final gesture– replicated on each body– one hand gently protecting the eyes from a light, or a beam of some kind.
During the post-show talk, Jasperse and the dancers discuss making meaning inside of abstraction. Jasperse’s voice breaks as he mentions the loss of his father, which occurred right before the making of Tides. This intensifies the stakes for me; not only is the piece born of movement lineages, but also bloodlines. From this precipice, many other threads emerge: alien-time of grief; the not-so-scrapped idea of hexentanz (re-emerging several times during the chat and becoming somewhat of an in-joke for the audience); the legacies of Sarah Rudner and Trisha Brown. Melnick raves about a video of Rudner that the cast waxed over in the dressing room. A question arises: what responsibility does the muse have to gesture? This makes me wonder how generational differences in training, in approach, and in sub-culture affect the interpretation of movement passed-down. I think of my community’s insistence on expansive definitions of gender: more gossamer web than opaque binary. I think of the ways that this both ripples from and diffracts with movement legacies handed down to us, destabilizing the muse-creator dynamic. I think about how dancers embody a continuum, and dance many other lives in each other’s bodies.
Jasperse recalls beginning the rehearsal process with these elements in the water. He shrugs, remembering this period and says, “Okay, I guess we’re starting”. Here we are already, prepared or not, caught in a beginning Jasperse seems to suggest. Context urges us onwards.
Musing about the vagueness of dance, Jasperse later says, “Dance resists congealing to any one thing. It’s constantly slipping,”. He chuckles, continuing, “If I wanted to be precise, I would write”. I’m not sure that language is necessarily less slippery than movement. I think of a line from the Frost poem, “What it wants/ Is not its own love back in copy speech/ But counter-love, original response”, the narrator cries, calling out to the world and hearing echo upon mocking echo. I turn the phrase over and over in my head on my way home from the performance, unable to locate a definite crest or trough.
Perhaps sometimes language is solid, certain, and perfect. “Yay.”, Melnick replied to my text just after I had agreed to write this piece, “but next time if you ever need a tic, plz just ask”.
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