Variety Shows  An Older, Wiser Margie Gillis Glows Anew  People
have compared the Canadian Margie Gillis to Isadora Duncan. I
can't see it. Gillis's early flower-child solos could evoke
Duncan's spontaneity and expressiveness, but not her soft power.
Gillis has always projected inner tensions, a sense of
withholding even while giving.  In her arresting program at the
Joyce of recent and new works, she dances like a thoughtful
survivor. She turns Irene Dowd's Thrall, a gentle interplay of
dynamic changes, into a meditation on possibilities. For her own
Meditation, she wears a beautiful swirling dress by Anne Dixon,
and what's essentially a skirt dance to Ellington music becomes
a memory of flowering. In Blue, she sits on a chair, while a
sweet Leonard Cohen composition (sung on tape by Jennifer
Warnes) scratches at her—causing her to slump into despondency
by fluid increments, then startling her into alertness. In Loon,
curled over, a tuft of her long red hair spraying out, she keeps
her face hidden at first,