Around the World and Back

A Traveling Show was the work Aszure Barton presented the last time her distinctive ensemble performed here in the city she calls home, in April 2008. And that could describe her life since then. She’s been keeping busy everywhere, and New York has seen dances she made for ABT (and ABT II) and The Juilliard School. But the steady flow of commissions has limited her time with Aszure Barton and Artists, which she formed in 2002—and the work she has done with them has been mainly on the road.

Busk, the new, hour-long work the company performs this week, has been something of a traveling show itself. Nurtured in Santa Barbara, and further developed at the Banff Centre in the choreographer’s native Canada, it had a September 2009 premiere at Sarasota’s Ringling Festival, before going on tour. But it will likely prove worth the wait. Barton’s juicy, expansive and unpredictable choreography was on view at a recent rehearsal. Four men bounded through a vigorous, playful quartet set to a robust chorus from Gounod’s Faust, easily combining the quirky with the virtuosic “You guys need to have a super-macho moment before you come forward,” Barton, a petite blond sprite, urges them at one point.

Barton’s joyful enthusiasm comes through loud and clear when she speaks by phone from the Hague, where she headed for two weeks to start a new work for the Netherlands Dance Theater—the latest stop of her traveling show. “I realized when I came here to Holland how familiarity and a language that you develop with dancers is invaluable. It’s always such an amazing adventure going out and working with other companies, and I absolutely fall in love with it every time. But it is a foreign marriage. You’re put in a room with a bunch of strangers, patted on the back and told, ‘Now make something—go!’ There’s always that awkward beginning; it’s starting and developing a relationship. These are life-learning obstacles, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

She pauses for emphasis. “But there is an ease with your own group. An efficiency, because there is an understanding. And the speed at which I can work is remarkably, ridiculously fast with my group. They’re all on the same page, and they all challenge each other that way, and their minds are just so smart and so fast. They have their own language—even among them, sometimes they’ll just go off into their own terminology,” she says with a merry laugh.

Busk, with a cast of nine, began with a delicious offer from Dianne Vapnek, who runs Danceworks in Santa Barbara. “She planted the seed originally. She said, ‘How would you like to come out with the company for almost a month, and create, with no pressure to do a performance?’ I said, ‘That sounds like heaven!’” (The Baryshnikov Arts Center, where Busk is being performed this week, has previously offered Barton similar crucial residencies to explore and develop her creative process.)

Heading west in early 2009, “We worked in the theater all the time, so that put us in a performance element right away. Working in that theater really set the piece on its course, and created a landscape for what developed. Also, just going out on the street and functioning in that city—there’s brightness and darkness there. There’s a gruff street life, and sparkling flowers and sunshine.” That led Busk to reflect “an observation of the contrast and synergy and finding darkness and brightness.”

Barton always incorporates an eclectic range of music, and finds the heart and soul in wildly disparate selections. Busk includes an intriguing mix, but the majority of its music is by Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin and The Kontraband, who were brought to Barton’s attention by none other than Baryshnikov himself, shortly before she was to depart for Santa Barbara. “We were talking about music in general, and he said, ‘I have to give you this music that I heard,’ and he ran up and got me Lev’s CD. I didn’t know their music before. I listened and right away my knees started going weak a little bit. It was completely at the heart of where I was. You know sometimes you just listen to a piece and you go, ‘I’m on the same page with this person.’” She soon met Zhurbin, a Russian-born violist, who was playing a gig in town, and “right away we hit it off. We had a meeting the next day, and we decided then that we wanted to collaborate. We haven’t left each other’s side since!” Busk includes earlier and new Kontraband pieces. Barton is thrilled that the New York performances will include the musicians performing live. 

“About two-thirds of the music is Lev’s. But there’s other music that’s integral for me, because it’s got that robust choral sound,” she notes. No doubt she has assembled the contrasting sounds in a way that forms its own whimsical yet persuasive logic—just as her choreography combines an array of seeming movement non-sequiturs with a stylish assurance and deep intelligence into something that possesses its own innate, revelatory logic.

Aszure Barton & Artists

Dec. 17–19, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-868-4444; $25.