Dance Magazine
April, 2006

Lori Belilove & Company: From Russia With Love
By WENDY PERRON

Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation, New York, NY, January 12-14, 2006

Lori Belilove is arguably the best, most devoted Duncan interpreter in the U.S. When she performs Duncan’s dances, you see the glorious sweep through space, the oppositional skips, the swooping torso. You see the emotional range from breathy joy to seductiveness to earthbound despair.

The setting was an intimate salon, the type that Isadora might have held in her early days. On display were 17 dances; the dancers wore billowy tunics, and many of the piano pieces were played wonderfully by Matthew Ward. Of the company members, Beth Disharoon seemed to best embody the qualities often associated with Duncan: womanly lyricism, full-bodied buoyancy, and arms moving with the fluency of a river.

Four of the dances, made between 1921 and 1924, commemorated Duncan’s association with the Soviet Union. In Varshovianka, a young woman in red galloped across the space brandishing a flag, then mimicked being shot. As she lay dying, she passed the flag to a newcomer, who galloped and brandished just as fervently. This happened five times, making the fervor of revolution and the futility of war equally clear.

Other dances were not narrative, but projected a strong mood. In Bacchanal (ca. 1908) three women in garlands skipped and swirled giddily until they toppled on one another in exhaustion. In Death and the Maiden (ca. 1916), another garlanded young woman concluded her dance by hurling her headpiece to the floor. The juiciest and most edifying dances were those that Belilove performed. Her slightly severe face is totally believable theatrically. Her body is probably more disciplined than Duncan’s ever was, which gives her a contemporary look. And yet, one can glimpse in her face, hands, upper chest, and legs flashes of Arnold Genthe’s famous photographs and Abraham Walkowitz’s drawings of Duncan, lending the illusion that one can for a moment touch that time.

Perhaps the most moving work was Hope (ca. 1915), in which Belilove stood strong above a prone, despondent child, then coaxed her into life (pictured left). When the child (Hayley Rose Brasher) raised her head, the woman was looking upward, not at her. But then the woman got the child to rise by making gathering motions, and the two created parallel Grecian-urn shapes with their arms above their heads. The triumph of womanhood? The renewal of hope? The merging of art and culture? In any case, the dance’s restraint generated an emotional power.