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The Uses of Diversity
By Deborah Jowitt
Richard Daniels trained as a pianist. You might have guessed that from his solo dance concerts at the Flea. His sensitive accompanist, Steven L. Kantor, opens the evening by playing Paula Kimper's Three Waltzes à la Chopin, and the new Thirteen Anniversaries shows Daniels's musicality as a dancer and choreographer. He has set the brief solos to some of Leonard Bernstein's pungent, seldom played ''gifts'' to friends on special occasions.
Daniels, who returned to performing in 1995 after a 15-year absence, has a craggy face with a noble profile and a body that emphasizes strength and clarity rather than flexibility. He performs the solos gravely and with great sensitivity—almost as if he were haunted by the music, dreaming it. He celebrates Bernstein's fast-paced jazzy tone with leaps and grabs at the air, and executes big thrusting gestures when the composer turns to histrionics. But I'm oversimplifying; Daniels's responses are always nuanced.
He finds many ways to create gentle variety. He removes the jacket Caroline O'Brien has designed, later the pants. Clifton Taylor's fine lighting alters the mood. Sometimes Daniels visits the piano, hanging over it, listening to Kantor. To a piece that begins with Copland-esque chords, he stops to play a few notes of the top part, and he ends sitting on the floor, leaning his head back against the musician, as if the two were fusing.
For Uncharted, choreographed by Daniels for the magnificent Keith Sabado, Kantor plays Schubert's Impromptu in C Minor, op. 90. Sabado's dancing has only gotten deeper over time. Daniels has provided variety—mad leaps, unexpected staggers and falls, pensive stridings, moments of opening out, then clenching in. Sabado's able to do almost anything with his body; what's gripping is that he seems to see invisible things around him, and makes us sense thoughts flitting through him, transforming him.
Daniels also performed Christopher Gillis's moving 1993 Landscape, made for Gillis's sister Margie while he was dying of AIDS. Lest we forget.
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