Frankie Lee Peterson III and Julie Crothers. Photo: Garth Grimball
From Blog Director Jill Randall:
Today I would like to share a review of the recent project MidCentury Blue(s) - by artists Garth Grimball and Heather Stockton - through multiple voices sharing about the work.
When I can, I invite two writers to the same performance to both write about their experiences and impressions. I am honored to have Bhumi B. Patel and Sarah JG Chenoweth sharing here post-performance. In addition, I link to the One Good Quote project and the 8 audience members who shared impressions. So, we technically hear from 10 audience members. Plus, if you attended MidCentury Blue(s), you can still add your comments through One Good Quote here.
Thank you for diving in today as we ask some bigger questions about race and intention. There are many goals at hand here - reflections and feedback for the artists; content for audience members to grapple with alongside the writers; images for those who did not attend but want to catch an ounce of the experience; and allowance for the work to linger and instigate dialogue.
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Seeking the Subversive Blue, a Reflection on Wax Poet(s)’ MidCentury Blue(s)
By Bhumi B. Patel
For me, the work began when I entered Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. I was invited to walk around the downstairs studio gallery, lit in blues and whites, where a television screen played Balanchine’s “Agon,” a table was covered with books about color and hue, and a program of the evening’s triptych was written (in blue) on the mirrors. Point taken, MidCentury Blue(s) has something to say about blue.
As the intimately small audience was welcomed into the space, the lighting design, created by Jessi Barber, morphed and shifted and evolved. We took our seats, and feeling almost like I was in an aquarium, I sat back to see what was to come. What struck me as I sat down was the re-envisioning of a familiar space. Many of us know Studio 1 at Shawl-Anderson intimately, whether we’ve taken class, taught there, performed, or have been in the audience before, and seating the audience in the round changed how I was able to experience a space I know well.
The lighting became dramatically stark white, and just as quickly faded into black. One dancer, Frankie Lee Peterson III, entered the space, sat down, and began to move in silence as the lights transitioned back into white: either an absence of pigment or a presence of all light. For me, there is something striking in the narrative outside the movement of having a black performer dance in an all white costume while doing an incredibly white movement form. Has this dancer literally and figuratively put on whiteness? I wasn’t sure how to understand this, or even if it was intentionally done. As a person of color familiar with the act of code-switching to fit in, particularly in dance, I wonder what pressure other dancers feel to code-switch to assimilate to form and how that might be intentionally subverted, particularly in a work where transgression carries importance. The dancer ended as he began.
The lighting waved and trembled and changed to orange, a complementary to blue. A second dancer, Julie Crothers, entered bathed in orange light, covered in an orange garment. She began moving, flowy and cascading, and slowly added a verbalized, fragmented story. She spoke of drawers and secrets, but I lacked context. Where are the three drawers of which she spoke, and why does she seek a place to hide her secrets? In a way the section feels like a different universe than the previous and I can’t seem to reconcile where or how they are meant to meet.
Finally, we came to the section titled “Blue,” a reference to Yves Klein and George Balanchine, the work of whom inspired this piece. Peterson and Crothers jest with one another to create movement that they perform together, an obvious explanation of what it looks like to give dancers agency. As we are engulfed in a thick, rich, saturated blue, the Shawl-Anderson Youth Ensemble joins the two dancers on stage creating a whirlwind, a chaos, a swirl around the duet in the center that has turned from the comedic externality to a warm, sensual intimacy. It was juicy but gentle, sweet but sultry. I was taken out of the work by the choice to use the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, because despite understanding the reference to the title of the work and how a quintessential piece of Blues music speaks to the era the choreographers wanted to evoke, I couldn’t discern a deeper necessity for or an intention behind this music so it left a taste of uncertainty in my mouth.
While the dancing was lovely and lush with humor and agency, for me, it is not radical to have two classically trained, skinny dancers, though of different races, dancing together as it was for Balanchine, in 1957. Further, I found myself confused by an overwhelming sense of heteronormativity, surely unintentional given the queerness of the co-directors of Wax Poet(s). As a viewer, and as an artist myself, I’m still seeking the radical and the subversive in this work and wondering what subversive, radical dance looks like in 2020, when it comes to race, class, gender, ability, body type, training, sexuality, and religion, and what it has the potential to do if allowed to run wild to its most transgressive limits.
Frankie Lee Peterson III. Photo: Garth Grimball
Bhumi B. Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist who creates intersectionally feminist, multidisciplinary art to explore the contradictions of her inner landscape where she is brown, queer, working class, and a woman. She works from a trauma informed, social justice oriented perspective. Her work traverses dancing, choreographing, curating, educating, writing, and scholarship. She earned her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her MFA in Dance from Mills College. Patel is on faculty at West Valley College, Lone Mountain Children’s Center, and Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. Patel’s work has been presented at SAFEhouse Arts, LEVYsalon, Shawl Salon, max10, Studio 200, Molissa Fenley and Friends, Summer Performance Festival, RAWdance's Concept Series, PUSHfest, and the first Queering Dance Festival. Patel has curated “fem(me),” a performance of femme-identified, radical queers, for SAFEhouse Arts and the National Queer Arts Festival since 2017 and has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, and the first Dancing Around Race Zine. To move through the world as a queer artist of colour, the pursuit of collective safety is both an act of labor and of necessity. Creating is her way of coping with the world at the moment.
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Orange is Not Blue: A Response to Wax Poet(s)’ MidCentury Blue(s)
By Sarah JG Chenoweth
On Saturday I saw MidCentury Blue(s). On Tuesday afternoon I stared at a cloudless, powder blue sky long enough that it became thick and enormous, and I dove right up into it and swam around. Sometime between the two events I read a lot about color – photons, auras, dyes, emotions – and that it, being only our perceptions of certain lengths of energy waves, has frequency and amplitude, but (in physics terms) not really thickness.
For this show, Garth Grimball and Heather Stockton were motivated by Yves Klein’s exclusively blue paintings and George Balanchine’s “Agon” (lit in pure blue). These post-war era modern works sought to topple cultural and/or personal frameworks. Klein’s blues, especially those that used human models as “living brushes” to move paint across canvas, challenged traditional notions of what painting is. “Agon” was overtly sexual for 1957, and the pas de deux featured Arthur Mitchell, the first principal black male dancer in New York City Ballet (and later co-founder of Dance Theatre of Harlem), partnering with Diana Adams, a white female dancer. Comparably, Grimball and Stockton cast the same racial and gender identities in their show: Frankie Lee Peterson III, a black male, and Julie Crothers, a white female.
MidCentury Blue(s) gave color design first rank. The show was comprised of three danced sections titled “white,” “orange,” and “blue.” But, there was a prologue – a long trio of just lights. Blue coursed over the marley, arcing into the wall and away from an approaching wash of white. Orange followed, surging through audience clothing and an empty floor. The colored lights, composed by Jessi Barber, took their turns spreading and shrinking through the space. One wall had a caterpillar-like design of reflective, triangular tiles into which light deeply poured and, as it does, glowed back. I watched the blazing caterpillar for a long time. Shades of celeste, aquamarine, and royal crawled in ombré across its contours. Then in canon, white chased blue, tile by tile. And black trailed the white, until all the tiles and all of the room were dark.
Some footsteps. Then white light expanded into the darkness to pool down over and around Peterson, sitting, holding his knees in the middle of the room. The white is emptying; I’m clear and ready. Peterson wore a white crop top and tennis-like skirt, made of some material that seemed like a mix of cardboard and cotton – bulky and stiff – so unlike his nimble body. Materially speaking, the effect was complimentary. Each highlighted the other’s unique articulations: Peterson’s suppleness made the costume appear most rigid; the costume’s rigidity called attention to Peterson’s elasticity. Because of Wax Poet(s)’ strong emphasis on “Agon,” I was primed to notice how he was dancing with/in a blaringly white environment. Is this the homage? Or is it the movement? He sprung smoothly from floorwork to balletic balances. He barrel rolled his torso – opening chest and collarbone to the beaming lights then pulling the shoulder across to overturn his facing – hanging limbs and head from the back-bottom ribs toward the earth, then rolling the opposite shoulder toward the lights again, and again, flipping downward. His rib cage like a bowling ball whump whump whumping down a lane, he rolled. And quickly, billowy. These rippling moments were disrupted by stationary moments: Peterson in a deep lunge, one leg oh-so long, the other frogged so that the sit bone could balance atop the heel, one arm curled in front of his torso, the other lengthened down to his side. The wrist coils to flair a couple fingers…and then he’d flow again.
When Peterson exited, a rectangle of pumpkin orange dropped onto the floor. It revs me up; I’m curious and expectant. Crothers, her toes just kissing the outer edge of orange, wore something akin to a sailor pant and a tight, mesh long-sleeve top – both vivid orange. Her peachy skin almost fused with the orange light and costume. She absorbed the mesh top like a peel. How does orange fit into the greater scheme here? She stepped into orange and danced around its perimeter. Pulling something imaginary and heavy down, pulling something open. She told the story of a trundle she could pull out, a special nook it would create, and that in the nook she could invent secret worlds. She seemed to be improvising, freely associating story and movement. The exact story seemed irrelevant. It’s the task that mattered – her lightness around what did or didn’t happen, her devotion to continuing. She, unlike Peterson, simply did not stop. One slithering movement gobbled up the next, but each maintained its coherence. Each lucid and discernible. There was a curve in her spine that spiraled all the way down through her hips. She was in a wide forth, the back foot inching the ankle bone to the floor. All of her and all of the orange were simultaneously soaring and rooting – swelling but holding form. She rocked it back and forth. The rocking, the pushing from foot through pelvis to foot, created a lasso in her spine and hips, as if the joints were jelly. The lasso lurched through and out her arms in a repetitive jolt, which she allowed to toss her into the next movement and the rest of the section.
Spent, orange and Crothers withdrew. Blue returned. And so did Crothers and Peterson, this time in sapphire tunics. The blue soothes me; I’m here. They danced the following and final section together. Was this the homage to “Agon?” Or to Klein? Maybe both. This duet was part-rehearsal, part-performance, part-creation. They rehearsed a couple moves, checking in with one another about the details: “Isn’t it ‘uugh’?” “No, it’s more like ‘shwaaa’.” In the moment they added on new material to the phrase, and went back to the beginning to show how well they got it – a bend with a sigh and an upward tip of the chin, two wide fee-fi-fo-fum stomps, tuck the shin for a tight roll to sit, find each other, THEN three. Sharp. Looks. The task was real, but they were casual – laughing at inside jokes about the moves, egging each other on to get it right, congratulating each other for spontaneous choices they found satisfying. Crothers has a communicable chortle. They reminded us not to be fooled, that this was live and transparent: Peterson gets the wrong cue, and she tells him, “No, no! Keep going.” Crothers directs Peterson to do an impossible dinosaur-like waddle, and Peterson pauses, “Really, Julie?” It was clear that process was the performer here. I lost blue.
The use of humor and lightness provided an intriguing deviation from the solemnity of the mid-century works that inspired this show. The modern era seems to have taken itself so seriously – I think black turtlenecks and harsh, stolid corners (a generalization, of course). Contrast, or what something isn’t, is one of my biggest takeaways from MidCentury Blue(s). I mean, why include orange? Other than it is so decisively not blue. And white is not color (or all of them, depending on perspective). Improvising isn’t choreographed, but gives more voice to performers. Lights and color are not bodies, but can without a doubt perform. Grimball and Stockton’s focus on blue, orange (its complement), and white seemed to do more for the colors themselves than a radical reinvention of norms or practices. And it’s fuzzy to pinpoint Klein or Balanchine in most of the work. So, in some ways, I was left confused and wanting – I struggled to see the toppling of dominant structures that the historic works achieved in their time, and the mood and content shifted drastically from section to section. But I can make sense of things by thinking about contrast. Each entity highlighting the specific strengths and articulations of its counter.
So, after all the joshing and the effort to show their choice-making, Crothers and Peterson met center center, and rested neck to neck. The lights dimmed. It was the most delicious part of the piece. Silky blue came back to me. Sapphire tunics, sapphire atmosphere, sapphire me, sapphire flesh on flesh. I wanted them to stay forever, sculpted but sentient. I remembered that the lights had been working, heating, breathing into the space just as much as the dancers that evening. Somewhere toward the middle or end of each section, a down pool would sneak on to a corner of the stage or blink between beats of music. It had gestures, movements, and a story all its own.
The sculpture gave way to movement, Crothers and Peterson softly shifting – a palm here, a lean there – into each other. The Shawl-Anderson Youth Ensemble entered one by one to fill the room. Dancing by the dotted light of their iPhones, the ensemble swayed and swirled their way to tightly surround Crothers and Peterson. The groups’ spines waved, and they circled their arms in unison above and around the central duo. It was like some mid-century synchronized swimming dream. Eventually, they orbited center and ran out. Crothers and Peterson slowed to stillness. Blue soaked the space, fading.
Julie Crothers and Frankie Lee Peterson III with the Shawl-Anderson Youth Ensemble. Photo: Garth Grimball
Sarah JG Chenoweth is a dancer, teacher, and writer. Here in the Bay Area, she has performed with Nina Haft & Co, Vella & Merrell Dance, Rogelio Lopez & Dancers, Fog Beast, and Hope Mohr's Bridge Project. She has taught dance in colleges, studios, high schools and elementary schools, and currently teaches teens at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. Sarah writes for In Dance, Dance Teacher Magazine, DIYdancer Magazine, and Life as a Modern Dancer. She holds an MFA in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and a BA in English Education from Illinois State University.
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*Please note that these reviews only reflect the opinions of the writers (Bhumi B. Patel and Sarah JG Chenoweth) and not that of Blog Director Jill Randall or of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, the venue for MidCentury Blue(s). Life as a Modern Dancer publishes many viewpoints on dance performances. To add your voice to the conversation, leave a comment below or add to One Good Quote here.
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