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 "my beloved comet" by Maurya Kerr.
“my beloved comet” by Maurya Kerr, performed by Alex Carrington & Chelsea Reichert. Photo courtesy of FACT/SF. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Take 1 - from Molly Rose-Williams:
The third piece of the evening returns to me in poetic moments and a felt sense of rigorous duration. It began with two dancers traveling downstage like lopsided mirror images of one another. They were identical in tone, speed, and cadence, but one crawled while the other walked. Slowly, steadily, they continued towards us with focus so sharp and wide it could’ve sliced through to another dimension. Then the lights went out.
They came up to illuminate a neck-to-neck duet, the two dancing with and around one another, in spite of one another. In their unbreaking connection, I felt a sense of deep intimacy, and also challenge and tension. Lights out.
The piece continued this way. Pools of light in the dark, moving snapshots of something at once eternal and instantaneous. The relentlessness of the images, and moments of darkness between, lent a kaleidoscope effect to my experience as I watched. Overhead, Ben Juodvalkis’ unforgiving soundscore - as relentless and rigorous as the movement in its range of tones, moods, and effects, but consistent in the droning quality of something that never came to a close - lent a dystopian quality to the universe I saw unfolding onstage. I found myself leaning very far forward.
The sound of the dancers’ labored breathing and the neverending soundscore became my last felt vestige of time. Moments of darkness like black cocoons seemed to traverse something much larger, while the dancing itself became fractal - at times enormous, at times minute, but always with a razor sharp focus. Their two bodies fit together with shapes both organic and mechanical. This juxtaposition was echoed in the soundscore (at one point wind became a helicopter became the ocean). An unusual virtuosity accumulated like layers through duration as their unceasing intimacy - impersonal, unromantic - continued to unfold in the face of their own exhaustion.
Near the end of the piece, the lights came up on dancer Chelsea Reichert moving on the ground like a dying fish - tension wracking her body and her focus never wavering. In that moment, I felt as if her humanity had been slowly eroded over time like a rock under the constant flow of a powerful tide. The dancers finished by moving backwards in the way they began, this time parallel to instead of towards us, as if nothing had changed except for the orientation of the universe that continued to shift on its axis.
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Take 2 - from Todd Courage:
The evening’s third offering was Maurya Kerr’s my beloved comet, an investigation into wonderment and what complex social forces might limit or prohibit that. The piece felt experimental; a courageous endeavor. Fourteen sections, short and shorter, for two dancers, showcased Ms. Kerr’s current concerns both socially and artistically. As a viewer, letting go of any prescribed narrative seemed key to the success of the work. To experience this episodic piece as independent movement studies, or many small duets, invited the audience into the unfolding of an artist’s process, sometimes clear and flowing, sometimes unresolved and less certain. To see Ms. Kerr’s intellectual exercises in this context was fascinating and, frankly, wonder-inducing. What initiated this choreographer’s growing concern for time and how might that be represented in the dancing body? What power might stillness hold in relationship to an expectant audience? Might the urgency of the choreographer’s message – slow down – be somehow related to the comet she alludes to? Or do we metaphorically grab its tail in a last ditch attempt to escape the world’s madness by yielding to the hypnotic nature of what we see? And, of course, how can one ever really not construct social meanings from two interacting bodies? A phenomenological quandary.
Each section possessed its own aesthetic character punctuated by blackouts: a decelerated crawl, the exploitation of physical weight, posts and lintels, slowly orbiting celestial bodies, spatial opposites, underwater plant life, breath and its expressions, repetitive rotations, pendulous migrations, running and falling, whipping spirals, and romantic intimacies. I began to imagine myself walking through adjoining galleries in a museum, stumbling across each looping vignette at my whim, lingering in some, moving more deliberately through others, finding connections, analyzing parts, questioning some decisions, endorsing the artist’s perseverance. Ms. Kerr presented a confrontational movement dialogue addressing unhurriedness, change, personal risk, and permission.
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.
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