From Blog Director Jill Randall:
It has been a wonderful experiment throughout the past year, diving into dance criticism and reflection on this blog platform. What are the various new angles and approaches to writing about performances - before, during, and after? We are exploring this with artists, audience members, and writers alike.
This week you can read our latest take on dance criticism. Two writers share their reflections on the four pieces of choreography in the 2019 FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival. How might the same performance be viewed through different eyes? How might their perspectives layer to offer a unique opportunity for reflecting on and celebrating the work they write about?
Please join us! Today we reflect on "BackstitchBack" by Charles Slender-White.
"BackstickBack" by Charles Slender-White. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Take 1 - from Molly Rose-Williams:
The piece began with amber light streaming down the back wall to illuminate a line of five performers dressed in ornate, old-timey dresses and rompers. They moved with simple gestures in shifting groups of unison - sometimes all five together, and other times in groups of two or three mirrored figures. Layers of music, and a voice speaking the lyrics of “These Are The Days” in a deadpan tone offered a compelling audio backdrop. A single performer soon left the wall to deliver a lyrical performance downstage, and then returned to join the back line.
The five fanned out, filling the stage and executing sweeping, graceful movements with formal lyricism and high skill. Chime-like voices in the audio track began counting from 1 to 6, then 1 to 8, alternating back and forth between the two counts with a cyclic regularity. The cycling numbers, lingering sentiment of “These Are The Days”, and (to my eye) old-timey costuming painted the piece with a tone of nostalgia.
Then a man’s voice like a minister delivering a sermon layered into the soundscore over a violin. “Sometimes at the end of the day we need a story to relax,” he intoned. He launched into telling a story about a man and a woman sitting on a bench. The woman kept asking the man for reassurances of his love for her, and he kept providing them. Dancers Amanda Whitehead and Keanu Brady moved forward to interpret the story with more formal, lyrical choreography while the entire stage continued to constantly remake itself as all five moved through intricate, interlocking patterns.
I was struck by many of the elements in this piece - the costumes, the lighting, the soundscore, the impeccable skills of the dancers, and the interplay between ensemble and individual - but I wasn’t entirely sure how to read the whole, especially in relation to the love story that to me felt somewhat gendered and stereotypical. Specifically, I wasn’t sure where this tone of nostalgia was meant to land in relation to the story, the costumes, and the formal movement, which together evoked for me a sense of restrictive institutions and times past. In light of this reading, I found myself not enjoying the airy, lines-for-days dancing and intricate patterning in the way that I think, given a different handful of elements, I would have immensely.
Take 2 - from Todd Courage:
Charles Slender-White, Artistic Director of FACT/SF and the producer of FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival, was the last choreographer of the evening to unveil his latest creation "BackstitchBack." The piece opened in visually arresting Slender-White style. Mr. Medoff’s lighting produced two giant luminous arches wherein resided five bodies. These dancers, four women and one man, stood in stoic profile against the bare upstage wall à la bas relief, each with one palm affirming the dark concrete, feet parallel. Two dancers wore dresses. All wore blood-red socks. Slender-White’s penchant for design was as much on display here as his passion for dance. I suspect that he doesn’t limit dance solely to the category of “performing art,” but in fairness, appreciates the potential conversation of all things perceivable and the attending chance for great beauty. Past works, like this one, have attested to his interest in sculptural statement and the echoing impact that varied visual textures and layers can provide.
Intermittently, dancers began to break away from their source of origin, moving downstage in minimally advancing variations, challenging the proximity of their audience, only to retreat upstage again, tag up quickly, and then re-engage with the open floor and each other. A separate couple remained attached to the wall where they performed a slow, tactile duet in unison. It was at this point that a juxtaposition of opposites began to take shape. Billed as “the first iteration of Slender-White’s diptych on the looping nature of memory formation and memory loss,” this part of "BackstitchBack" could have symbolized one or the other of these phenomena, or a composite of both simultaneously. Either way, the choreographer’s gift for counterpoint grounded the work in craft and idea. At its strongest, the piece assumed the spirit of an abstract morphing movement collage, solos becoming duets, evolving into trios. At times the disparate nature of the many moving parts was reminiscent of a Greek chorus as a foundation for more specific bits and pieces that happened in and around it. Form and relationships seem to be additional passions for Slender-White. His uncanny ability to blend and synthesize complex patterns is dizzying and how his spatial configurations related to the aural element of excerpts from Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach curiously supported the dancing. “Just lean into it,” he offered when asked about his use of the now-famous score. While watching, I took his advice and emerged deeply satisfied. “My love for you is higher than the heavens, deeper than Hades, and broader than the earth. It has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love for you.” The audience succumbed to the breathy tonality of Glass’s text as we watched the dancers curl away from us in fetal stillness, a developmental posture, and yet so quickly forgotten as new memories crystallize.
Molly Rose-Williams is a Bay Area artist and writer. mollyrosewilliams.com
Todd Courage is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance scholar. He is currently artistic director of courage group and continues to build a diverse repertory of work in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Comments