If you’d rather watch a ball game or gymnastics or anything athletic besides a dance performance, Scott Wells is the choreographer for you. He prefers to work in loft spaces for intimate crowds, but there’s nothing coterie-ish about his imagination or his daring or his virtuosity. If the folks at Pixar or Disney created dances instead of animated films, their work might be a lot like Wells’s.

He works in what’s called contact improv, an art-sport spawned in the 1960s that, though not widely known nowadays, generated a good half
of the innovations taken up by all contemporary dance, even ballet. It fused the moves of Aikido, gymnastic tumbling, and nonpartner social dances like the twist with the logic of the counterculture’s “happenings” into a free-flowing urban folk dance. At first glance, a contact “jam” can look like half-stoned people rolling around on the floor, bouncing off walls, and riding each others’ bodies like grown children playing horsey, with no rhyme or reason. But anyone can see that the good dancers seem to soar and flow fearlessly, like waves, and that everyone seems to be having a very good time.

In fact, I think Steve Paxton, a gymnast-turned-star-dancer with the MerceCunningham company, once said that he came up with the notion of contact improv because he wasn’t having enough fun performing
Cunningham’s relentlessly technical, chance-arranged moves. He figured if you were going to go for radically rethought dance, let it have more mood and momentum to it, and no star performers.

More people do contact improv than watch it—in their free form and zeal they remind me of Deadheads—but it is a complete technique with fantastic potential for grace and showmanship. It’s all about mutual support and overcoming the fear of falling. The dancers move fearlessly at a wall, the floor (indeed, they use a wall as if it were the floor), or a person just as cartoon figures hurl themselves heedlessly into the side of a building. Once the dancer has made contact—with finger, toe, elbow, head, whatever—he or she immediately moves sequentially through each joint and into
a sideways roll. In other words, it’s a technique for cushioning impact, relaxing amid strenuous effort, and moving quickly into another position as seamlessly as Keanu Reeves does one of his computer-assisted Matrix stunts, except that Wells is doing his thing in real time and space right in front of you.

Kids would love contact improv, in part because no notice is taken of the forbidden zones. (PG-13 alert: head may contact crotch; hand may touch breast or butt.) In practice, of course, the dancers respect each others’ modesty and try not to make such contact; still, if it happens, there’s no foul. Contact-improv etiquette
is elaborately casual, and Wells sometimes makes wickedly funny use of this.

The problem can be making it all interesting to an audience, but Wells is a master at that. Early postmodern dancers put off the idea of pleasing the audience in order to deal with other questions first. The reason many people avoid modern or postmodern dance is that it can seem pretentious, or worse, prosaic, or even worse, incomprehensible. With Wells, I never feel that way.

At the same time, his dances aren’t obvious or stupid, and when they are gimmicky, they always justify themselves as the perfect use of that gimmick. Once he had everybody throw Frisbees to a rapturous duet from the French opera Lakmé, and in another dance, a girl did a handstand on a guy’s shoulders and walked upside-down across a ceiling planted with plastic flowers. Deeply musical, Wells’s dances are also imaginative, witty, and often hilarious. They make me think of the visual effects the animators came up with to echo Robin Williams’s wild ad libbing in Aladdin.

As in sports, and to be expected with such athletic dance, people get hurt sometimes. I once saw a stunt that failed painfully; the piece, a chess game come to surreal life, had flying tackles in it, and one dancer slipped on some water (which was part of the show but not in that spot) and pulled his calf muscle. He finished the piece and limped offstage.

One of the dances in this month’s show, which celebrates Wells’s 15 years in the Bay Area, is a remake of “Home,” his first big success. The premise is that some teenagers are lounging around a suburban house changing stations on the radio, and a string of cartoon-tinged dances—to music by artists from Rachmaninoff to Jane’s Addiction—depicts their fantasies. Wells uses a core group of dancers plus others, and I am so glad that boy wonder Kegan Marling will be dancing; he is reason enough to go see the performance. The loft of this guy—in one stunning move he can spring like a whippet from a deep crouch, fly over the back of a sofa onto the cushions, and melt into a supine, “Beulah, peel me a grape” pose.

Wells creates the kinds of effects that Hollywood has to use trick photography or animation or computer graphics to get. And everybody knows the fight scenes, car chases, and space battles are choreographed. Even major-league football is a mix of choreography and improvisation. The moves are set and practiced, the plays have names (“quarterback sneak,” “Hail Mary”), but once the ball is snapped, things happen, and “Hail Mary” rarely goes as planned.
Wells choreographs his dances like that. A new dance called “Wrestling with Affection,” which uses eight men, takes masculine behavior into an area many younger men want to investigate: “seeking soft paths,” as the yoga people say, instead of using hard, coming-on-strong moves. He loves to play with form and explore the shades of difference between teasing and fighting. One part of the dance actually looks like football practice: three men lined up across the middle of the floor facing three others, who run at them and knock them down. The first time, the runners jump at the last second (it’s a pretty ballet jump, arms high overhead).
The guys on defense absorb the shock by stepping sideways and then skittering back a few steps and sliding to the floor as if they’d just stepped on a banana peel. Next go-round, the defensemen catch the runners and toss them back in the direction they came from; this time, the runner has to jump up rather than at the guy and be ready to relax into a fall.

Wells, in short, has something to say about athletics, violence, masculinity, and competition; also affection, passion, loyalty, and the pursuit of perfection. His dances are complex—they have a satisfying shape to them, like a well-made box—but they’re all different and never come out the same way twice. Running, jumping, rolling, falling, floating: his work uses quotidian moves in timeless and fascinating ways. 

 

paul parish is San Francisco’s dance critic.