LizAnne Roman Roberts. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Image description: Dancer stands downstage in a performance space lit bubblegum pink. Dancer wears a sleeveless button up shirt, dark shorts to her knees, and white socks. The dancer is slightly arching and looking up to the ceiling.
Wholeness in Split
By Sarah JG Chenoweth
For FACT/SF’s Split I walk through the bowels of CounterPulse. Dark and fantastically quiet, the first hallway presents a soft towel on a wooden bench nook cut into the wall. Next to it, a placemat, a card with my name hand-written on it, and my drink of choice. I am charmed. What a personal touch. I sit. Pop the top and feel the fizz cut my thirst as a throng of portraits meets my eyes. The people in them are close to me, literally—the hallway is narrow. They range in gender expression and race and age and declaration: laughing, staring, peering up, glancing sideways. Each one has some kind of patchy reflection of themselves superimposed on the same photo. Like they are caught in a prism, self upon muddled self. Portions of their own face or body are mirrored at indiscriminate angles. But instead of feeling disjointed, the fragments and fog declare a completeness: they are more than straight and center. I am stuck with one face. Eyes I know. A person I know, have moved with. I think they are beautiful. The faintest smile. Just the corners of the eyes squint—otherwise totally still. In this photo they watch me patiently, exactingly, insistently. They are waiting for me to catch up to the wisdom I should already have, the right relationships I should already be in.
My host (here to usher me from room to room) interrupts our silent conversation and softly directs me to the next space. A pitch-black booth behind a lavender curtain whose bottom has been rippling with nearby filtering air—the only movement in these smooth halls. My host explains that I can put on some headphones and control sound levels. The host is calm. Reassuring. Slow and kind in their body and volume. They close the lavender curtain. I sit again. This time across from three iPad screens. I watch a series of mini films of faces submerging in water. My point of view is from the bottom of the container, and I see the people explore their mouths and eyes and cheeks as they plunge in and out. Some talk or scream, and bubbles dance out and up from both sides of their lips to a surface I know is there but I cannot see. Some grin widely with full teeth and squeeze their eyes shut. The film flickers from one person to the next, from just bubbles to just faces. Sometimes all three iPads show the same face, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes, like the portraits, the faces overlay, coincide, recede or advance from one into another. Also like the portraits, it’s a digital echo that so accurately/hypnotically captures the sensation of a very real and a very complicated, refracting, bending identity. I am not often grateful for digital representations of human distinctiveness. But here I feel the wonder of a face literally inside of another face—a self that is diverting and returning. Fractions of self added to self, beautifully illustrating the sometimes severing nature of psycho-emotional realities. I can’t remember what the sound was. Their voices maybe? If so, muffled to obfuscation. Music maybe? Something droning or murmuring only to sink me into the mouths (moustache), eyes (tight and wanting), cheeks (ballooning), and bubbles (hasty dancers).
My host returns. They’d warned me I had only about five minutes in this watery world. It’s fine. I’m in a trance. The next phase of this experience I know to be its culmination. I am wanting but sedate. I feel held. I didn’t think that after this baffling and dehydrating year I would respond so well to solitude, to sparseness. But, this is potentially the most quiet, still space I have been in in eighteen months. Even sitting alone at home there are a thousand things to snatch my attention. The limitation of stimuli (other audience, a large space, colors and light, sounds fighting sounds, jabbering internal monologues) is a gift. A gift of clearing and rinsing. Of immersion. My own submersion. Into this softly, deliberately crafted art and experience. My host walks me down a longer hallway. My shoes click in near emptiness. They explain that I will go alone down another hallway, turn, go up a few steps. A chair will be waiting for me next to a single, lit lamp on a small table. If I need anything, shout or knock loudly on the table. I am so in. Buzzing.
The lamp turns off. I am held. In darkness and in their craft. Black curtains hang just to my left and just to my front, delineating the stage space from my space, which is small. I feel safe. I am wrapped. Behind a plastic barrier not three feet in front of me—that I barely believe is there—lights come up like rising steam. I begin to see a retreating corridor created by walls of soft white fabric, back lit with soft pinks and oranges and yellows: warm sunsets and warm flesh. One dancer.* They start stingingly close, and I am lapping it up. They find my eyes and we lock in. I feel the corners of my eyes smile. They cannot see my mouth. I wonder if they can see my delight. Slacks with a few pleats cut off at mid-knee. Boxy, billowy button up shirt with a collar and no sleeves. Socks. Limbs. Pining limbs. Growing limbs. Rotating in and out, in and out, searching for something deep in their sockets, then flicking something away. Femur loose and free to glide open and closed, swiveling and squeaking the ball off the foot on wood below. The set narrows to a single, small, not quite door-sized opening upstage, just like a perspective drawing from Art 101. The white floor cascades in three tiers back into the non-door as well. Two small tables with two clear bowls of water anchor each side of the top, closest tier. The dancer centers, heightens, and authenticates the space. Though they are limber and strong, their work and their need here are not smooth or linear. One movement is pruned in mid-action to give rise to an opposing one… slickly sinking grand pliés truncated by a spring upright into a tight parallel, fingers curled and stiff, head cocked backward toward the right shoulder. A series of flowing revolutions are cut off to stare firmly at me, dancer paused deep in a lunge, limbs dangling. Then back up, palms stretched wide over hip sockets. The disruptions in the movement sequences offer the same sort of splintering of self that the photos and films did. They are splitting and whole at the same time, erupting into an attitude turn and leap from something inside shoving them sideways, then erect again, stern.
LizAnne Roman Roberts. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Image description. A solo dancer performing in a white space lit bubblegum pink. The space has three descending performance platforms, and the dancer has her hands on the top tier and feet on the second tier. Two small white coffee tables flank the dancer, with a clear glass bowl on each of them with water.
The mood is serious. I am taking it seriously. There are three sections. To enhance each respectively, there is silence, some kind of instrumental hum, and some piano in a minor key (or at least it sounds dissonant). Over the course of the piece, the dancer makes their way from downstage with me, through the canal, and out the bottom tier. I notice that the entire set of Split—the winding hallways, the small dark rooms, my being solo—mimic the dark nooks and the singularity of internal landscapes. I all of a sudden wonder why we generally do dances that are about internal shit in such outward environments. At some point the dancer goes to the water and rubs it on their face and arms. I think of the conjoined iPad faces in the water. Water has a way of refracting and changing our perception of a form. Things can look distended or sliced, depending on the angle, the light, the ripple, the arrangement of the atoms. Shapes and selves bent yet bathed. The dancer begins to speak. The text is poetic, unorganized, and pointblank in its delivery—not conversational but decisive: jagged thumbnail scraping skin; pushing and pushing against a brick wall; car driving down the hill without anyone in it; it was me [them] caught in a distant tree like a balloon. It is patchy and dreamlike, parts of stories or realities or perceptions. Until the moan. Toward the end of our time together, the dancer moans. A long, long, animal moan. The moan rams and revs through their body while they brace in a bent plank position until the moan is ready to be done. I think of labor. A birthing of wounds or past selves who knows what. And afterward, before exiting out of the not quite door-sized opening, the set goes nearly dark. The dancer, only a shadow now, rolling through liquid joints, limbs floating.
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I’ve never felt so important to a piece, so integral to a performance. Not only were the dancer and I so selectively relating (you can’t not relate to them), but also I was so fucking delighted to be there and relating in that way, to have it all be for me. Not “for me” as in “I’m special” or it’s “about me,” but for me because I was the only person there. I felt taken care of in the prep-work and execution, but not treasured. Which is great. I was solo but not alone. It was still quite shared. I left in a slow, low stupor. Huh. I didn’t want to release what it felt like to be so inside, so narrowly and so powerfully absorbed. Nevertheless, traffic and texts took me right back out.
LizAnne Roman Roberts. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Image description: Photo of the dancer's upper body with a dark purple and black background. Dancer's elbows are bent and her right hand is reaching up while the dancer looks down at the right hand. Left hand is on her thigh.
*LizAnne Roman Roberts was the performer for this iteration. Four dancers rotate through performing during the run of Split: LizAnne Roman Roberts, Samuel Melecio-Zambrano, Katherine Neumann, and Charles Slender-White.
Sarah JG Chenoweth is a dancer, teacher, and writer based in Oakland, CA. But on her favorite days, she sings Gwen Stefani songs with her 3 year old, Wyatt.
Related posts:
An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s “Diffusion”
Artist Profile: Charles Slender-White
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