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! Let’s explore the opening piece in the festival.
Joy Davis and Eric Mullis. Photo courtesy of FACT/SF. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Take 1 - From Todd Courage:
The program opened with “Halidom,” a duet choreographed and performed by Joy Davis and Eric Mullis. As Del Medoff’s single downspot illuminated the upstage right corner, the two dance artists emerged slightly staggered, in white tops and pants, feet firmly planted, while their arms carved an entrancing figure-eight design. Infinity, I thought. How beautiful. This looping motif, while existing then and there, still managed to mysteriously destabilize this viewer’s relationship to time and space. The effect of the opening arm pattern hypnotically invoked ancient observance, sacred and essential.
Their snake-like arms diverged from unison to dialogues of complementary tensions, and soon the two were engaged with each other in strange and poignant variations of kinespheric tracing, more arms radiating from an animated epicenter, spoking outward like rays of energetic light. What could this mean, these strange and wonderful shifting tableaux?
The lights ultimately divided the space into two separate worlds. Stage left, Mr. Mullis walked in small circles, his mouth opening in increasing agony and his hands growing in a type of contracting suffering. Ms. Davis’ parallel world was calmer, gentler. She moved with deliberate fluidity in contrast to the expanding horror of Mr. Mullis. Their accompanying planes of existence felt less like a metaphor for chaos and order, and more like equal parts awe and cataclysm.
It cannot be refuted that their dance was indeed a dance, but it was so much more. Their interminglings assumed the stuff of ritual: a special place and time, transformative action, but we as officiants. The physical language moved beyond two dancers dancing.
---
Take 2 - From Molly Rose-Williams:
“Halidom," created and performed by Joy Davis and Eric Mullis, began with wintry, ethereal lighting. Two figures upstage right moved in unison, a swooping gesture that sliced the air in front of them with a ghostly precision. I was mesmerized for a few moments before the image of their gestures crystallized into legibility as figure 8’s, the symbol of eternity. They kept moving.
Maybe it was the cool blue lighting, the ghostly spacey soundscape, or the austerity of their durational movement that occurred with no visible tonal, energetic, or emotional change - I found myself transported to an arctic landscape. The figure 8’s continued, slipping in and out of perfect unison, identical figures interlocking at odd angles – horizontal, vertical, and every angle in between, incremental like a clock that never arrives at a certain hour but ticks in perpetuity.
The gentle insistence of repetition without emotional charge felt like an offering, or simple observation. “Can we peel back the layers of qualification or meaning we ascribe to the experience of living and simply exist?” their dance appeared to ask. Nonetheless, even without any particular destination, I felt an imperative in the insistence of the continued, deeply grounded, yet ethereal duet.
Eventually the mirage split. The lighting changed as an orange glow grew and cleaved into two pools of light – one round and rich, and the other angular, and duller. In the round rich pool, Eric Mullis stepped slowly in a circle with his hands out front, legs low and bent, and mouth agape, as if offering, pleading, questioning, all with the same unemotional insistence that gave the piece such an imperative tone. The contrast between the deeply emotive image of a wide mouth with the blank energy of simple steps that continued always in a circle struck me deeply, evoking imagined scenes of ritual and sacrifice. For me, it contained both a recognition of how minute we are within this vast universe, and how vast we are within our own experiences of it.
While the interlocking slicing infinity signs and the nearly crouching circular procession with mouth wide open both struck me deeply, much of the rest of the piece slipped from memory as soon as I saw it, as if the surface of my mind was made smooth by the lack of punctuation or musicality in the dancers’ relationship to the phenomenological. But even as it slipped away, it left a clear impression in a plane just outside the realm of language. I still feel it as a space at once vast, intricate, and imperative.
------
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.
Molly Rose-Williams is a Bay Area artist and writer. mollyrosewilliams.com
Comments