gunslinger cool, fuzzy and warm

Steely-eyed, gunslinger cool hung thick in the air Friday evening, as six women of Your Mother Dances took on Elizabeth Johnson’s Burn into the Wick. They stood eye to eye with the music, Heart’s Barracuda, Tell It Like It Is, and Crazy for you, with a gentle guitar music providing relief in the prelude and an interlude. During those quiet moments, Meg Zintek, Paula Biasi, Christal Wagner, Beth Engel, Jaimi Patterson and Sarah Bromann stretched without dropping their tough, rock chick personae.

They conveyed the mindset without caricature. They regarded the audience, very nearby in the cozy Studio Theater in UWM’S Mitchell Hall, coolly and frankly. No phony smiles, here, but no affected snarls, either — just confidence, independence, easy strength in their collective and individual demeanor. I can’t think of a female archetype for them; if they were men, you’d place them somewhere between Brando and Gary Cooper.

But they are women and brazenly sexy, on their own look-you-straight-in-the-eye way. The whole package exactly captured the stance of the music. I had forgotten how bold and fiery Heart, led by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, was, and how sophisticated in its extended songs. Johnson honors them and their terrific music on their own terms, with a suite of aggressive, unapologetic, beat-driven dances.

When some hack tries this for a music video or awards show, it’s almost always boring and vulgar. Johnson is no hack. Inventive movement, spun off from jazz and rock dance style, astonished at every turn and thrilled at every other. In one bit, all five dancers crouched, flung their arms back like wings, and charged the house in a flying wedge. I would call one move a duck walk, but it was more circling crow hop from a deep crouch, with one arm extended as a pivot to the floor. How does Johnson think of this stuff?

In each song, she introduced several motifs, which she re-ordered, refaced and varied. You could see the logic of it, and she expanded the logic to the piece overall. Certain motifs stuck around and showed up in subsequent sections, so the dance as a whole accumulated structure in rolling snowball fashion.

Burn into the Wick is brainy, but it’s also aerobics gone wild. Meg Zintek, Paula Biasi, Christal Wagner, Beth Engel, Jaimi Patterson and Sarah Bromann ripped through it with a blasé ferocity that exactly fit the attitude. (Yeah, I’m frickin’ amazing. What’s it to ya?)  All six were spectacular, but Wagner burst the thermometer. Her brief solo in Crazy for You opened with an impossibly fast and forceful chain of turns ending in an explosion of steps and gestures. Rock and roll and shoot out the lights, Christal.

That’s one side of Elizabeth Johnson. Friday, she also showed a warm, tender side in 2 Good 2 Last, to a 60s-vintage Harry Belafonte Christmas album. Johnson, Maryhelen Wesner, Steven Moses and Andrew Zanoni responded the lilt of the gentle beat. They words prompted ingenious transitions leading to naively literal tableaux. In my favorite number, Belafonte lands on the refrain, “Where sweet baby Jesus sleeps” (or something like that). Every time, exactly on that line, the four settled instantly and easily into a creche tableau, and every time a different dancer played Jesus. Not a whiff of irony wafted about any of this; the humor was gentle and the sentiment heartfelt.

A different sort of Christmas cheer arose from a 15-minute excerpt from David Parker’s Nut/Cracked, a funny, campy treatment of novelty tunes based on Tchaikovsky’s score. Johnson produced that show in full in 2008, and I hope she’ll be able to stage it again some time. It would make a great late-night holiday show Downtown.

Choreographer Luc Vanier, Johnson’s spouse, contributed his latest version of Triptych, to Chris Burns’ nifty, twitchy, percussion/metalophone score. A David Lynch dream-scene vibe permeates this piece, as Steven Moses and Sarah Bromann engage in a weirdly tense, closely partnered duet. Meanwhile, Patterson, Engel and Zintek dance sensually around them, like some lingerie-clad corps of black swans. Sexy.

Sara Hook, Johnson’s mentor and friend, adapted Beau Geste as a solo for Johnson. She’s dead, but still dancing. A Mozart piano sonata plays. A radio show intrudes; an announcer outlines Johnson’s career, and then interviews Hook about her late protege. Choreographically, the dance is haphazard, but it serves as an armature for Johnson’s priceless reactions to her own obituary. Funny.

7:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday, Dec. 17, 18 & 19 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Dance Studio Theater, Mitchell Hall 254, 3203 N. Downer Ave
. Tickets are $25 reserved, $20 general admission, $15 for students and seniors at the door.