Dazzling duo Nugent + Matteson come to RIC BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

For their annual winter concert, the Rhode Island College Dance Company invited the New York-based duet company Nugent+Matteson for a residency in early November, during which Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson choreographed a new work for the RIC dancers. The resulting piece, Fare Thee Well, will be presented on Friday, December 3 at 8 p.m. in Sapinsley Hall at RIC, along with performances by Nugent and Matteson.

Seen in a run-through last week, Fare Thee Well is 11 minutes jam-packed with movement by 10 dancers, whose timing must be hair-trigger precise so that one dancer’s kick or another’s handstand doesn’t connect with the stride or glide of any other. Similarly, if a dancer is going to jump over another on the floor or a dancer is going to link arms to lean into a deep plié with another dancer, then each of them has the responsibility to be in the exact spot at the exact moment to make it all happen with fluidity and grace.

"We were working as a community in this dense piece, with everyone becoming more and more dependent on everyone else’s movement," noted Matteson in a phone conversation from New York. "We worked with complicated phrase material, and the process was in collaboration with the dancers."

Matteson and Nugent have developed something they call "pinpoint partnering," in which the partners in a duo will match a body part from one to the body part of the other, the simplest example being nose-to-nose. One segment of Fare Thee Well couples the 10 dancers into five duos and, based on a list of 30 possible body parts from Matteson and Nugent, the RIC dancers came up with their own combinations.

The duets are sequential, only slightly overlapping, so that the audience has a chance to absorb the many different ways the RIC dancers have chosen to run with this concept. Choosing to connect certain body points can determine a turn or twist, a drop to the floor, or the support of one dancer by the other. Some of the more unusual contacts from these dancers are chin to thigh, foot to thigh, knee to knee, chin to ankle, head to abdomen, and butt to butt.

"There’s something quite oddly intimate about these meetings, these ways of having a physical dialogue," Matteson explained. "We also took phrase material that we had created from that pinpoint material and added an element of quirk."

That "quirk" begins with the quick nods the dancers make as they enter the stage and with their repetition of the word "good" to accompany those gestures of approval. At one point, the dancers improv off "good" to shout out other words, such as "awesome," "stupendous," "wonderful," and "great."

The dance is set to the music of John Dowland, whom Matteson calls "a pop star of the 16th century," a renowned composer of lute songs and airs. Elements of Renaissance dance and Baroque stylings are evident In the exaggerated bows and curtsies that the dancers make to each other and in the arm poses they strike.

"There’s a formality that is almost overdone that gives an absurdity to the situation they’re in," Matteson confirmed. "We are working musically but trying to undercut or move at a quicker rhythm and somehow undercut the sentiment of Dowland’s love songs."

If all of this sounds remarkably complex for a college dance company, that’s because it is. Several of the dancers mentioned how challenging this project had been, partly because the movements are not ones they were accustomed to or had been trained for. They are, nonetheless, enthusiastic about what they’ve learned from the process and from the themes of "community, relationships, persistence, trying to do our best and acknowledgment" that they identified in Fare Thee Well.

No doubt they will also learn — as will the audience at RIC — from the works that Nugent and Matteson will bring to this concert. The two have been dancing together for five years, in both improvisations and set work.

"We challenge each other in the ways we generate material, and we’re fans of each other," Matteson reflected. "We’ve grown together, and in some ways, I almost go from the outside/in and Jennifer from the inside/out. That keeps us on our toes and leads us to ways of working creatively."

They will perform a new work, titled Fortune My Foe, which is a complete 11-minute piece but will eventually be expanded into an evening-length duet. Another duet, Step Touch, was acclaimed by New York critics when it was presented last spring, and it involves almost constant partnering between Nugent and Matteson, including a lift when Nugent holds Matteson aloft as, bird-like, he whirls and dives.

The last work is a 25-minute solo by Matteson called I Simply Live Now, choreographed by Peter Schmitz. In it, an urgent personal journey is documented, with one segment even done on crutches. The music, a mix of Schubert strings with shouted lyrics from Tindersticks and the Used, underscores the themes of disjunction in the piece.

"It’s a great challenge to put on duet and solo evenings," Matteson confessed. "But we’re not plateauing — we’re continuing to grow."