Megan Lowe Dances Finds Partnership In Just A Shadow
By Garth Grimball
Megan Lowe is prolific. In the past three years her company, Megan Lowe Dances, has produced or participated in 10 unique performances. On Friday night, Lowe and collaborators premiered Just A Shadow at the Joe Goode Annex as part of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s 27th annual United States of Asian America Festival. Just A Shadow is a series of six duets on the theme of loss and healing.
Lowe dances in every duet as collaborators rotate in and out, each bringing their own creative/dance modality: contemporary dance, site specific, vertical dance, turf dance, contact improvisation, and live music. Unfortunately the variance in form doesn’t equate to a variance in dynamic. All of the duets live within a similar moderate tempo. An issue common when choreographers perform in their own works. Being in the dance feels differently than watching the dance.
Lowe and Frances Teves Sedayao opened the program with Silhouette accompanied by 4 songs performed live: two original Lowe compositions, one by Sade, and one by Doris Day. Sedayao and Lowe were separated by a mobile semi-opaque screen. Ray Oppenheimer’s lighting design blended silhouettes and shadows creating a sense of liminality. Sedayao and Lowe mirrored each other in reaches and weight shifts before abandoning the screen to make contact and sing together.
Sonsherée Giles began There’s a Storm Inside walking along the cross beam of the Annex as Lowe scattered branches on the floor. After a brief duet on the beam, Lowe sang “There, There” by Radiohead, much of it while balancing a long branch on her head. Giles danced a solo that was the one breakout moment from the evening’s moderate tempo. Enclosed in a circle of the branches, she collapsed and regenerated at exceeding velocity like a timelapse of a fallen tree composting into fresh growth.
Living in the Now with AJ Gardner and Us with Shira Yaziv were playful in tone. Gardner is a turf dancer, and his clean glides across the floor juxtaposed Lowe’s modern dance weight shifts, creating a stark relief in the relationships to the floor. Yaziv and Lowe were blindfolded, alternating and together, while doing advanced contact improvisation lifts, falls and rolls. All the while talking casually as friends as if throwing oneself into another person is as common as sharing a laugh.
A Quiet Space to Dance With with Roel Seeber upped the ante in defiance of gravity. Lowe and Seeber were harnessed to lines attached to the ceiling. They soared through space, remarkably avoiding collisions but still wrapping and unwrapping as counterweights. The duet began and ended with a motif of the dancers passing each other like two pendulums. Their grace made the measure of time velvety.
Lowe was joined by Josh Icban in the performance of their original song “Vendor of Dreams” and “Because” by The Beatles. The full cast came together for a reverence that referenced the previous duets with a sincerity germane to the overall elegiac theme.
Having had many opportunities to see Lowe’s work in the past three years, I am of the opinion that her most successful choreography exists outside of the traditional proscenium theater. Lowe is a tackler of obstacles. Her choreography looks at gravity and says, so what? In site specific locations, she can make you see familiar objects and relationships as springboards of untapped potential. In a theater, in the absence of physical obstacles, the invented challenges cannot offer the same glimmer of insight.
No matter the location, to see Lowe perform is to witness a performer with an abundance of trust, trust in herself, trust in the environment, trust in physics, and trust in contact.
Experience Just a Shadow yourself during its second weekend at Joe Goode Annex June 7, 8, and 9. Tickets are $0-50, with no one turned away due to lack of funds.
Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.
Comments