We came, We saw, They conquered
By Todd Courage
The world premiere of Social Movement, a new collaborative work crafted by Molly Rose-Williams & Co., unfolded at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley on November 17th. The evening was a strange triptych of sorts: three distinct parts, only two of which were directed by Rose-Williams, claimed space and time within the event. The taiko drumming ensemble, Jiten Daiko, kicked off the evening in a ground level studio adjacent to the lobby. Spectators were invited to have a drink and socialize until the performance began. Soon enough drums were resounding and the bodies that beat them were symbiotically moving into and out of a triangular play space wherein they hopped, and sweat, and pounded, and whooped, and shared joy. The vibrancy and the happiness of the performers’ faces were as satisfying as the very drumming itself. It was as if the act of enacting music art fed them viscerally which their faces displayed, and which registered with us as ecstatic, and that we in turn reciprocated in spirit. The way in which the drummers moved perilously close to each other was every bit as much dance as it was music making. Their choreography was deliberate and functional, as every rotation served the ritual: a collective effort and a great preamble for what was to come.
Upstairs, in a larger spacious “white box” – outfitted with a new set of bleachers for improved sight lines – an energized audience obediently took their seats, convivial and cooperative. People seemed to know each other; a social anomaly specific to the Bay Area modern dance scene. This communion of souls had a socially adhering effect that read “support” even before Molly Rose-Williams stepped out to greet us. Then she did.
The first note I made was “infectious smile.” Her presence gave renewed dimension to “you had me at hello.” Before that, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. My only reference to Ms. Rose-Williams were three pieces of her writing I had read: a dance review for another group; a press release for this show; and a "preview piece" she’d authored leading up to the event. All three were thoughtfully composed manuscripts put down by a deep thinker, analytical but not overwrought, and astonishing in their insight. “Wow!” I thought, “Who is this person?” Rose-Williams stepped into the performance quadrant with a warm and knowing smile. She welcomed us and then took us through an exercise in laughing: she’d strike a goofy pose and we’d laugh, and then again, and then again. The unpredictable nature of the drill was as funny as the game itself. And so we laughed. This simple tool did a couple of things: it relaxed us, and it diffused some of the seriousness that can accompany viewing dance – a constipated characteristic of regular dance-goers in the hopes of maybe “getting” whatever deeper significance there might be to get. She would have none of it. By "un"preparing us, she would allow the dance to unfold more freely, an unadulterated happening stripped of its vanity and acquitted of any baggage that a title like Social Movement might conjure – after all, we were in Berkeley.
She exited, the lights shifted, and a dancer entered through one of several visible doors. They exited as another dancer appeared from behind yet an alternate door. Doors opened and closed with conviction, dancers came and went in well-considered "randomness." There was something very beautiful and compelling about this weird co-mingling of diverse bodies. Three women and one man arrived and withdrew in varying ways, sometimes connecting, often not, a sporadic glance or furrowed brow, a wondrous constellation of moving parts. A quiet solo by Galen Rogers added an additional layer to the ensuing tableaux and the occasional comedic gag – dancers stuck in a door jamb a la The Three Stooges. How this dance began was odd, and fun, and recalled the stuff of any modern art museum anywhere: pristine and provocative and exceedingly sparse. We were disarmed and ready.
The performers’ costumes were not so much “costumes” but disparate separates that felt self-consciously casual. But like so many things in life, their garb assumed diminishing status in the interest of more complex revelations: people living with other people and what happens when that happens. As the "opt out" nature of the “doors section” waned, the famed Beatles song Come Together bled into the space.
I wish that I had not known the in-studio exercises that the group used to generate movement material that Rose-Williams had already so generously disclosed in her preview piece (“Flocking,” “One Move Story,” “Head to Ground”) because, while a “workshoppy” aesthetic is gritty and engaging, a choreographer runs the risk of preempting immediate meaning when the viewer already suspects the rabbit in the hat. Everybody loves the satisfaction of connecting the dots, but more satisfying is the subjective determination of making those connections. All of these anti-surprises were patently forgivable, however, as I watched the director sitting off-stage, laughing gleefully at what she was witnessing. Does she know something I don’t? People laugh prompted by two things: the unexpected and what they expect. I sensed that this was an amalgamation of both. “Come together, right now, over me,” the Beatles crooned – and Rose-Williams laughed, and I watched her laugh, and all was right within this little world somehow.
Next, I’m not sure why a Greek folk classic spilled from the speakers except to maybe say, “Here we are together, right now, dancing.” What a great way to address the director’s gnawing artistic inquiry: “What might bodies moving together teach us about the actual labor of social movements?” Some of the looseness of the earlier section stepped aside for one of the stronger segments of the evening as the proficient quartet fell into staggered patterns of unison, peppered with some deviating variations of twos and threes. The formality of these subdivisions anchored the piece in traditional dance-making and said something about honoring what and who historically had come before us, a type of social movement, although now different; change affected before our very eyes.
An adage laced with poignant trembling gave way to the reintroduction of the “doors” motif, this time less “Judson Churchy” and more “Hard Day’s Night,” sped-up and comical. Theme and variation. Brilliant. There were samples of blatant slapstick, and other times when funny and crazy alchemized into intellectual zingers. Chelsea Boyd Brown confronted the audience with just one such phenomenon. Her impeccable timing underpinned a bit where she engaged the audience with a series of off-the-wall questions, imploring a show of hands. Chuckling, we indulged her. Later, she revisited this theatrical technique, but more profoundly. “Talk to me after the show!” she hollered as the cast dragged her back into the performance rectangle. Even madness has its lighter moments.
What followed was, once again, beautiful and strange. Phrases of gestural solos suggested existential surrender enhanced by a coy Ky Woodward-Sollesnes alluding to her genitals in a most modest and innocent way. This component of the evening felt somewhat improvisational within a loose frame while a sort of “dance off” transpired between the four. Phrases involving shoulder stands drove a floor section toward an emergency exit door stage left. There, the artists built living sculptures with their bodies, stumbling and grunting under each other’s weight – a wacky comment on the ingredient of the accidental in a lot of art making. One final tenuous balancing act moved the entangled foursome like a messed-up centipede across the floor in front of us – a veritable movement social.
The punctuating gem of the evening was a solo performed by Rose-Williams titled Soliloquy. A short type of “reverence” soon busted out of itself into a frenetic flurry of space-taking. How the choreographer claimed the floor as her own shed light on the relationship between her intellectual self and how she lives in her body. The success of this virtuosic investigation was contingent upon the same mind and body in synergetic dialogue. A scream initiated shifts in idea as Rose-Williams physicalized her inner-workings: how a sharp mind translates bodily. A queer one-leg balance became a reiterative theme, and only until I reread her press release did I understand why I associated this with the circus arts. She had trained and performed under master circus trainers from eleven to eighteen years old. Such rigorous rearing informed her whole solo. Before long, her theatrics led us into a yet smaller cosmos: one with a warm sun, and some friends, and a loop of somersaults, and a small earwax castle. She infiltrated her audience, offered us pieces of her. We took them and blessed them and returned them, all of us fuller because of mystical correspondence. This kind of social movement spoke about the role of the individual involved in the momentum of a pivotal cause in the way that a snowball exponentially multiplies in size relative to exposure to more of itself.
A repeating frenzied movement clause left us speechless and her breathless. Once she had spilled it all, she rested as a recuperative meditation in front of us, her chest rising and then hollowing, her breath reduced to nocturnal crickets. In the end, she delivered what I thought to be the zenith of the evening: a shrug, a wistful smile, a saunter away, and one last door closing. But she wasn’t gone – because we could still feel how she happened to us, a prescribed agreement. A social movement.
Todd Courage (MFA Dance: Creative Practice) is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance scholar. Other influential interests include Art History, Literature, Food Culture, and Philosophy. He is currently artistic director of courage group and continues to build a diverse repertory of work in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Related posts:
What is Social Movement? by Molly Rose-Williams
One Good Quote: Social Movement
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