Under Fabric and Around Sculptures, Dancers Respond to Art

Dance is notoriously impermanent. Perhaps as a reaction to that, more dancers have recently been making installations, viewable for days or weeks and only occasionally brought to life — “activated” is the usual term — with performances in situ.

There is, however, another tradition of interplay between dance and visual art. A choreographer responds to work by someone else, creating movement around something static, less to blur categories than to create a conversation between artists and mediums. Last week I saw two veteran postmodern choreographers mount stimulating examples of this: Jodi Melnick at Carvalho Park in Brooklyn, and Annie-B Parson at the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley.

Melnick was responding to “Spirit Playground,” an installation by the Swedish textile artist Diana Orving. It’s a room-filling, semi-translucent web of organza silk and jute, nebulously suspended from the ceiling at many points and shaped like cotton candy stretched and twisted by the fingers of a giant. The work’s form appears organic, especially since long seams give the fabric a vascular ribbing, increasing the resemblance of parts to tulips or roses.

Sara Mearns, the New York City Ballet star, danced alongside Melnick. As in their previous duets, there were intimations of a teacher-student relationship, but amid the two-toned textural duality of Orving’s silk and jute, the two dancers’ contrasting qualities took on dynamic equilibrium.

Melnick is essentially micro, her small motions absorbing in their subtlety. Mearns is gloriously macro, her tiniest movements somehow magnified for opera-house distances. For audience members hugging the gallery walls, watching the line of her body tip in penché arabesque felt like looking though a telescope at something right under your nose.

Rarely touching the installation, the dancers moved around, through and under it, together and apart, to a sound score by James Lo. Was it in reaction to Orving’s forms that Melnick’s arched, languorous posing approached the curvature of Odissi dance? Beneath Orving’s clouds, the dancers’ side-by-side swaying seemed more wavelike. At the end of the 30-minute dance (to be reprised on Aug. 8), they were splayed across the concrete floor, faces down but holding hands, as if woven together.