There was a moment Friday when I wished the Institute of Contemporary Art had scheduled “Harbor” for matinee rather than evening performances. It would have been something to watch Liz Gerring Dance Company perform this world premiere against a backdrop of marine and avian traffic in Boston Harbor. After all, Gerring used that backdrop for inspiration as she created her piece. But maybe all those boats and gulls would have been distracting. Certainly there was enough to look at between the dancing and the JACK Quartet’s live performance of the score, John Luther Adams’s “Waves and Particles.” Not to mention Jennifer Tipton’s subdued lighting, which would have washed out in daylight.
“Harbor” has had a long gestation. It was developed at Summer Stages Dance @ The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston at residencies in 2020 and 2022. Although Gerring’s usual practice is to start with the movement and add music later, “Harbor” began with its score, which was commissioned by Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston, Liz Gerring Dance, and the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Adams, whose orchestral work “Become Ocean” won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music as well as a 2015 Grammy for best contemporary classical composition, took a previously written percussion piece and turned it into a 50-minute string quartet that premiered last November in Asheville, N.C.
At the ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, the JACK Quartet — Austin Wulliman, Christopher Otto, John Pickford Richards, and Jay Campbell — was seated downstage right, in a pool of Tipton’s subdued lighting. The shades were drawn against the back wall, so there wasn’t any harbor vibe, only glimpses of the water through the side windows.
“Waves and Particles” is written in six discrete sections. Three buzz furiously, as if a universe of insects were thrumming. Every few seconds the players pause for a moment, perhaps listening for cosmic noise. The other three sections are slow, lulling, evolutionary, with mysterious oscillations and glissandos suggestive of humpback whales. One could imagine that the buzzing sections represent particles and the lyric sections waves of light or water. There’s no progression; the piece ends as it began.
Gerring’s choreography for her six accomplished dancers similarly eschews narrative; it doesn’t even follow the contours of the music in any obvious way. Her vocabulary draws on ballet but also on yoga, with a bit of gymnastics floor exercise thrown in. McCall Atkinson starts it off by striding powerfully past JACK, bending forward from a deep fourth position, suggesting a yoga pose that the dancers will repeat over and over. It’s one of many moves Gerring will repeat. Forward lunges. Jetés. Kneeling and backbending and crab-walking. Running into slides. Arabesque penchée. Turning 360 degrees in arabesque allongée. Standing frozen with one knee raised. Hands flickering in invitation. Two or more dancers moving in concentric circles, but in opposite directions. Grand battements to the side. Sprawling face down on the floor and raising a leg in attitude. Fifth-position port de bras.
There are a few signature moves: Brandon Collwes running stiff-legged, Kennedy Adams hopping backward, Mariah Anton rolling furiously on and off stage. But the dancers rarely touch, and even their interactions tend to break off quickly: Unison will dissolve into canon and soon everyone is doing his or her own thing. One moment Anton and Truth Colón are forming an arch with their hands; the next, Anton is turning cartwheels. Or Anton will dive into a deep arabesque penchée only to have Cemiyon Barber swoop in and carry her off. Adams, Atkinson, and Barber create a humorous tableau when they converge in a crouch, looking like three Red Sox infielders going for the same ground ball.
Colón and Collwes pair up from time to time, but that doesn’t last; neither does the line the dancers form perpendicular to the audience, when it seems we might get a group statement. Colón concludes the piece on her own, upstage; like the music, her movement stops rather than ends. It’s been a dance of waves and particles, but there’s no safe harbor in “Harbor,” only the endless churning of life’s ocean.
HARBOR
Performed by Liz Gerring Dance Company and the JACK Quartet. Choreography by Liz Gerring. Music by John Luther Adams. Lighting by Jennifer Tipton. At Institute of Contemporary Art, Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, Friday.
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com.