Amazing, Daring, But Something's Amiss

These dancers amaze. Drew Jacoby, a  very tall, very powerful ballet dancer and her partner Rubinald Pronk, a shade taller, a lot looser, and even more flexible, wowed a Jacob’s Pillow audience last week with a glitzy program merging ballet and modern dance.

   Jacoby & Pronk, as the two call their dance enterprise, are perfectly paired in size, skill and temperament. They are large, muscular, showy and swift. They move remarkably, sliding together and apart, leaping, shifting, stretching and countering each other’s weight.

   Amazing.

   But distant. Their focus is riveted on being watched.

    Between the six dances performed by Jacoby and  Pronk — with a little help by Victor Mateos Arellano, Shirley Esseboom, David Hallberg and Leo Mujic — short films ran, I have to figure, for technical rather than artistic reasons. These twitchy little episodes gave the dancers time to change and resume regular  breathing. In one, Jacoby, then Pronk, up close and singly, make faces and wedge each other out of the frame. Cute and, well, telling.

   Both of these dancers left  important companies — Jacoby, Alonzo King LINES Ballet; and Pronk,  Dutch National Ballet —  and founded their partnership in 2008. With no board and no managers, the two perform and do for themselves what any company must: Raise money to pay for  choreographers, rehearsal space, ballet class, physical therapy, pointe shoes, costumes, music, lighting, travel and marketing. They have built a very smart website to make friends, publicize their performances and collect donations. And they have gained plenty of attention in the press. These are dancers sans frontiers. Unique. Brave. Which is why it’s sad that their dancing is so empty. Yes, they do the classic moves. Gorgeously. And they do all kinds of tricky stuff: spastic riffs, their butts out and knees and toes turned in, clawing moves and cringe-making extentions by Plonk, that look horrifically like stunts. But in the end, the two, so skilled, so powerful, so brave, fail to get it across.

   Long on strength, and technique and tricks. And short on art.

   It’s not enough to amaze. Dancers have to move the people watching them, too.