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Modern dance as Lucinda Childs, whose rigorous conceptual base allowed Fenley to proceed with her own obsessions of endurance and speed. Hers was a deep cyclic need, she explained, to reconcile the two sides of the brain, and to make the bloodstream dance. Cyclic, because I have a metaphoric image of movement coursing through the veins, linking brain and muscle. A four-part work that includes trios, a solo, and a duet, all of seemingly infinite variety in style, tempo, and mood. Hemispheres links music and dance in a unique way. Long considered dependent on music, traditional dance followed where the music led; later, in the case of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, the two forms went their autonomous ways. In Hemispheres, music and dance have had a catalytic effection each other, resulting in an inseparable hybrid od unexpected rhythms and mood overlays. Anthony Davis, asked by Fenley to create the music for Hemispheres, produced a work that consciously elaborates an Afro-American sound while incorporating further references to both Eastern and

Western music. Over the course of a year Davis and Fenley explored and tested each other’s concepts of theatrical dance and concert music, as Fenley noted in the liner notes for the Gramavision recording of Davis’ music. This interchange with Davis has altered the very sensibility of Fenley's movement, softening the edges between one picture and the next and creating transitional phrasing for the dance, whereas earlier music such as the mixture of acoustic and synthesized orchestration composed by Peter Gordon for Eureka often kept the steady tempo of a clicking metronome. There was something about his acoustic music that allowed me to be more “acoustical" in my physical experience, explained Fenley of her collaboration with Davis. It allowed me to be more “natural" and more “primitive". Davis rhythmic density transformed her dance into a silent drummer, as he described it, adding to Fenley’s already complicated rhythmic patterns. For Davis, who was commissioned to compose a work that would, in Fenley’s words, co-exist with the dance, not drive it, it was an opportunity to realize the spatial relationships suggested in his own work through dan

ce, while at the same time creating what he described as a rhythmic structure as relentless as the dance. Both composer and choreographer rely on intricate counting systems to articulate their forms, but neither actually provided the other with a precise plan from which to work. In some sections the music was completed before the dance, in others the dance before the music, resulting in intricate phrasing that interlocks almost magically at certain moments. Engineered like an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, musical and dance components are matched with the same interest in oppositions found throughout Hemispheres, sometimes complementing, sometimes opposing each other’s forms, rhythms, and moods. For instance, Fenley’s overture for the second section, a complicated work entitled Telepathy, is performed in silence, with the dancers then being joined by the powerful beat of Davis’ music in full orchestra, matching the complexity of the choreographer’s counts with its own iniricate rhythm. In the third section. Eidetic Body, Fenley’s dance solo and Davis’ piano solo constitute an

intimate conversation between composer and choreographer in which visuel and aural images are juxtaposed, providing a lyrical calm amidst a work of rhythmic intensity. This exchange between two artists deeply fascinated by the complexity each other's working process has had an alchemical effect on both dance and music. For while each fully comprehends and respects the traditions of the others’ discipline, realizing at the same time the separate courses open for exploration, both Fenley and Davis acknowledge making great technical and conceptual leaps on the basis of the exchange. Commissioning Davis to compose for her dance is one way in which Fenley has forced herself not to rely too heavily on past work. Indeed, breaking rules and going beyond her own limits characterizes her working method. Another aspect of that method, her persistent layering of various traditions, is expressed not -only in her choreography itself, but also in her use of other traditional elements of dance performance-the costumes and the sets. The costumes for Hemispheres were not actually commissioned for the occasion but were selected by Japanese designer

Rei Kawakubo from her existing summer line. Kawakubo’s clothes bring a perfect monumental and stately character to the work. Above all, they are a frame for the physicality of the movement. They are big objects, says Fenley, “but when we move-and we’re moving fast-they drape around the body in abstract, sculptural forms.” Francesco Clemente, commissioned by Fenley to add to the work, didn’t produce a standard set or backdrop but instead provided the most unobtrusive of pieces. Respecting Fenley’s need for a plain background-t/ie movement is so complicated, and I don’t want to put any imagistic or narrative content onto it, she says-Clemente withdrew to his studio after watching several rehearsals to create a suite of 40 drawings. Printed as a multiple and gathered into four elegant portfolios (designed by Anthony McCall) of ten prints each, they were distributed to the audience at the Brooklyn Academy as mementos of the event. Hemispheres is an elaborate and controlled choreography of dance forms and fictions which Fenley has constructed with this incisive gathering of

collaborators and contributors. At the crux of Hemispheres is the development of the two dancers who perform the work with her, Silvia Martins and Scottie Mirviss, In the past six months they have undergone Fenley's rigorous training program, instigating their own gym routines to provide the store of strength needed for her nonstop motion, lending their bodies to her core of movement. Martins and Mirviss have learned the rigorous architecture of Fenley’s dance, but at the same time her process has provoked the emergence of their own dance personas. Sensual and exhilarating, the three together revel in the ritualistic quality and sheer pleasure of dance. These bodies, taut and powerful and as animalistic as athletes on a track, are what will propel Fenley to her next choreographic leap.

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