Review: Conditions Critical

The Globe and Mail

1992

By Robert Everett-Green

Music and Dance Critic Toronto

Each of the four works on Monday’s opening program formed a different type of marriage between music and dance. The most intimate had to be Conditions Critical , a work by choreographer Martha Carter and composer Pierre Tanguay. Two men and three women (the Marta Marta Dans troupe) performed the score and the choreography simultaneously, chanting or rapping on chunks of suspended glass that that also formed the environment for the moment. Music and dance appeared as emanations of a single impulse, so that one sometimes completed a thought that had been initiated by the other, without any consciousness that a boundary was being crossed.

The work’s forbidding emotional climate took off from the paradoxical nature of the dangling glass: fragile yet dangerous, transparent yet capable of barring the way. Carter’s movement encompassed march -step ensembles that looked like pumped up versions of TaiChi, but also solos of the most narcissistic kind. The concluding scene neatly summed up the work’s resonant contrasts. One dancer retired to the back of the stage, stripped, and pressed her body against a large shard of rippled glass, while the other four huddled oblivious in the dark, rattling handfuls of crumbled safety glass as though throwing dice.