FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Keeps The Conversation Going
By Garth Grimball
On the opening night of the second weekend of FACT/SF’s 5th annual Summer Dance Festival, artistic director Charles Slender-White spoke about the importance of dialogue as a mission for the festival. Dialogue between artists and artistic dialogue between places. In addition to an excerpt of the previous weekend’s work by FACT/SF, 5 other artists were on the evening’s program, 3 local to the Bay: Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş, Zoe Huey, and Erin Yen; and 2 touring in: Summation Dance from Los Angeles, and Sophie Allen from Chicago.
Huey and Yen each created works that delved into one simple idea with repetition. In sister score Zoe Huey was joined by their sister Rose in a duet dictated by four prompts: regular, interlocked, flat, pinkies. Dressed in pink or blue separates, the sisters walked downstage in silence and emphatically whispered the four words. Their hands clasped and moved into the corresponding relationships. Hand holding developed into full body attaching and detaching as the siblings rolled on the floor saying the four words at increasing velocity to the point of abstraction.
Yen’s Run-On began with her inviting a member of the audience to sit at a table on the stage. Once the volunteer was selected the two had a brief check-in before they sat with their back to the audience and she walked upstage right to face them on a diagonal. The fun in watching this dance was guessing how Yen instructed the volunteer. She danced an accumulation of gestures and mostly stationary weight shifts and they responded with shrugs, looking right and left, and banging rhythms on the table. Like a run-on sentence, the dance didn’t so much conclude as resign to an ellipsis.
Flasher-Düzgüneş and Allen shared high concept works. Allen’s solo Hot, live and otherwise is inspired by anti-nuclear protests in England. Flasher-Düzgüneş was joined in performance by Maddy Bullard and Tamara Chu in ends of Axis, a trio highlighting the experience of mental illness.
Allen began dancing with a cinderblock. In a high ponytail and evening gloves, she cradled the block like a baby before spinning with it, at one point with only one hand, letting the centrifugal force command her relationship to the prop. A large hourglass was stationed downstage and a train of red ribbon layed horizontal upstage. The first half of the work had a sense of ritual before Allen removed her gloves, let down her hair and rollicked into spiraling floor work and deep second position plié. Del Medoff’s lighting design flashed red and Allen wrapped herself in the ribbon before returning to the cinderblock.
In ends of Axis the dancers sought and avoided light and visibility. They embraced and separated from each other. One dancer carried a lamp but rarely seemed to see the others. A projection of a body in outline danced across the cyc. After removing their baggy clothes the fluidity of the dancers’ spines anchored movements that were previously shapeless. A projection of trees seen through 3 windows illuminated the space and the trio exited together.
Summation Dance and FACT/SF performed excerpts from big-dancing group numbers. When will I be? is a sextet choreographed by Taryn Vander Hoop. The movement vocabulary evoked the workers in the 1927 film Metropolis—direct actions at a brisk, even tempo. The dance began with a voice over saying, “I’m not enough,” and, “I’ll never make it in the dance world.” I don’t know if Vander Hoop is externalizing insecurities, but When will I be? was a highlight of the program for its use of choreographic craft. Counterpoint, canon, unison, solos, and movement motifs were all employed. The dancers formed machine-like tableau, struck power poses, crumpled to the ground in head shaking to then slap the floor. The excerpt ended with a soloist removing their jumpsuit, ready to clock out.
Slender-White is committed to having a brat summer. Extra is danced to Charli XCX. And, the new FACT/SF merch is a replication of her album cover, replacing the title “brat” with the dance company’s name on the signature brat green in brat text. In this context, Extra reads less a dance choreographed to favorite music than fandom writ large via dance moves. Slender-White, Keanu Brady, Katherine Neumann, and LizAnne Roman Roberts entered in gold sequined jackets and red socks, paddle-stepping into formation. What followed seemed to be a collection of phrases from Slender-White’s Countertechnique classes interspersed with accumulating gestures. The dancers were beautiful. But as is common when choreographers are in their own work, Extra needed extra eyes on it that weren’t performing too. With extra eyes the ambitious unison work could race past the finish line.
In regards to a dialogue between dance scenes in different cities, I was struck by how the internet has collapsed time and space into one stream, at least sonically. Trends in every art form come and go. Fifteen years ago every other modern dance piece used klezmer music if the dance was aerobic or drones if the movement was minimal. But EDM/electrobeats has had contemporary modern dance in a chokehold for about a decade. Four-on-the-floor is the go to for dancey dances. More theatrical works rely on soundscapes of unceasing synth syncopated by bass throttles. Is its staying power a testament to an electronic primacy in modern dance? Or are we in an ouroboros of seeing dances online to electronic music, and responding in kind by uploading ourselves dancing to electronic music, feeding the pairing continuously back to itself no matter where we live?
Maybe answers will be found in next year’s Summer Dance Festival. The conversation continues.
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.
----
Related posts:
FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Dances Through Genre (Summer Festival 2022)
FACT/SF & DISCO RIOT Dance On Making (Summer Festival 2022)
Wholeness in "Split"
An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s “Diffusion”
Artist Profile: Charles Slender-White
Comments