Life as a Modern Dancer

GUSHing Stories, Joe Goode Performance Group’s Virtual Platform Experience

GUSHing Stories, Joe Goode Performance Group’s Virtual Platform Experience

By Garth Grimball

 

Imagine a platform. What do you do on it? What is your body doing? Does it feel spacious? Or is it contained?

Imagine a virtual platform. What do you do on it? What is your body doing? Does it feel spacious? Or is it contained?

May 26-31, 2020, in the era of COVID-19, Joe Goode Performance Group produced the virtual festival GUSH. Originally meant as a 3 week live-in-person experience, GUSH transformed into a physical-distancing adherent weeklong Zoomfest featuring works and discussions by Joe Goode, Gerald Casel, and NAKA Dance Theater. GUSH is a “scaled-back, virtual platform,” the festival site informs us in bold. Expectations adjust accordingly. Like all virtual platforms we are subject to the limitations of the frame. Those four angles that democratize access and dictate content.

I attended 7 of the 10 festival events. I missed a movement class led by Goode, the opening virtual dance party and the closing feedback session with local artists. This is my first review since the coronavirus pandemic; my first review of an online dance experience, or, an online experience made by dancers. This assignment came from my editor with an interest in what audience engagement feels/looks like in shelter-in-place. In two of the seven events I was able to see the number of attendees. The in-time barometer of engagement that translates either interest or internet connection. The loneliness of my solitaire engagement is the foundation for my perspective on audience engagement. 

Two of the events were performances in the way we conceive of live dance, NAKA Dance Theater’s BUSCARTE and Joe Goode Performance Group’s “Queer Realities.” BUSCARTE is an ongoing research and performance project contemplating the 43 forcibly disappeared students from Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 2014. The version performed as part of the festival utilized the limitations of a virtual platform intentionally and unintentionally. Performed by NAKA Dance Theater’s co-directors, José Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, the duet exists in a space-time collage. Navarrete and Kajiyama’s bodies move across backdrops and backgrounds from the reality of where they stand in their respective physical spaces to the irreality and surreality of a virtual void. Their use of texture and depth is painterly in perspective making. Navarrete moves behind a semi-translucent plastic sheet. He’s a shadow bleeding through another layer of separation. Photography and visual imagery fill the screen. There is music and voice over. For the voice over there are sign language interpreters (present in every festival event). In Zoom you never know where your box is in proximity to the tetris of shifting action and attendance. During BUSCARTE the visual primacy of interpreting was in flux. Sometimes at the top of the screen, other times at the bottom, the screen relationship between the “performance” and the “interpretation” became a meta commentary on translation. Within a virtual platform there is less control of the relationship between the viewer and the performer. Yet, there is an added opportunity to expand what it means to see and define performing. The limitations in format support creating new visual languages and meanings in dance making.

Joe Goode’s “Queer Realities” is an anthology of excerpts highlighting his mission of exploring queerness and queer lives. Each lasting a few minutes, Goode selected monologues and a dialogue from his archive (2002, 2009, 2012, 2017, respectively) and repurposed them to fit the digital medium. Archives take on new meaning in pandemic realities. Rather than being reproduced as a strict re-creation, archives are activated as a supply to meet the demands of the virtual experience. Goode is known for his subtle humor, and I appreciated the physical comedy present in the quartet Traveling Light. Each of the four performers begin hyper close to the lens; a mishap or misinterpretation common to video communication tools. A blur of epidermis abstracting bodies. The final monologue, When We Fall Apart performed by Goode, is an inventive interplay of weight. As Goode speaks, a framed bust in front of a photograph of clouds, he places sticks and stones (again, humor) in front of him obscuring our view. Within a digital landscape we must imagine the tactility of the objects for they could be as mutable as the clouds.

The majority of the festival was conversation based. Casel led a workshop as part of his ongoing project Dancing Around Race, addressing systemic racial inequality and discussions on alternative futures. He also moderated a behind the scenes look into creating Not About Race Dance, sharing clips of rehearsals and insights from the collaborators and performers. NAKA Dance Theater hosted two conversations: addressing femicide in Mexico with Rosa-Linda Fregoso and members of Mujeres Unidas y Activas and a dialogue with Omar Garcia, a survivor of the student massacre of September 26, 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. Goode, Casel, Navarrete and Kajiyama all shared letters written to their respective aesthetics. GUSH was a storytelling experience. Ethnography, interview, conversation, dialogue all present as living qualitative research on being and moving and embodying. Storytelling necessitated by a global pandemic. Dialogues on and within the context of racism and racist murders destroying black and brown lives and spirits. Within the many Q&A sessions there was the tension of a desperation to connect, to share and be together again, and questioning the value of a performance festival when we are taking to the streets to demand and enact justice and change.

Language is critical. Language is limiting. One of the things I love most about dance is its separation from verbal language. A way to be and express without talking. Words are necessary to galvanize, to inspire, to build movements. Words are monetized, branded, stripped of their original intent, hollowed out by repetition. I missed the final session of the festival to attend a march for George Floyd. Before the march students from Oakland Technical High School stood on a physical platform, shared their stories, demanded justice and led 15,000 bodies in a peaceful protest against police violence. A platform, real or virtual, is crucial for connection, for change.

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA.

 

 

Several GUSH events and dances made for the festival are now available on demand on Joe Goode Performance Group's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuLoZ40ELMMEmzfw6QJK0EQ.

Redefining Solo

 

Redefining Solo

By Sima Belmar

What: From One to Many: Six Solos Shared

An online performance premiere and artist Q&A featuring six commissioned choreographers presenting brand new solos made in their homes for this time of physical distancing to the music of composer Michael Wall.  

Who: Works by Melecio Estrella, Molly Heller, Molly Rose-Williams, natalya shoaf, Liv Schaffer, and Erin Yen

When: May 2, 2020

Where: On YouTube and in domestic spaces with access to internet and a capacity for navigating Zoom

Why: What, you’ve got something better to do?

 

Ding dong! The Zoom bell rings. I appreciate the effort to sound like a real doorbell. 

Clickety click clack clicky. The sound of Jessi Barber, our fearless virtual stage manager, furiously fielding questions from audience members about how to get to the show. 

… … … Me, muted, trying to get attention from the faces I know by waving and mugging. Even if someone is waving back at me, I can’t tell.

Clickety click clack clicky. Me using the chat box to connect with friends.

“We shut our doors on March 13.” Shawl-Anderson Dance Center Artistic Director Jill Randall welcoming us. “How can we keep making art and supporting artists?” Jill explains how she reached out to composer Michael Wall for music to springboard solos by six invited artists, culled from prior, current, and visiting artists-in-residence.

100 people on the Zoom call!

There’s Chingchi Yu sipping tea against a backdrop of (real) Redwoods. A woman I don’t know looks cute in her Princess Leia headphones. Andrew Merrell! I love your Donna Summer hair! Couples in bed, drinking tea or water or maybe schnapps. Melecio has a cat statue seated among crystals.

The artists introduce themselves. The introductions will be my program notes.

Molly Heller, in Salt Lake City, was supposed to be in residence in May at SADC. Describes her solo: contrasts, writing and movement, body/architecture, ease/resistance, buoyancy/density, and something else I miss. Something about the desire to desire and the relentlessness of wanting.

Molly Rose-Williams with a new buzz cut asks “what it means to play when I can’t play in community or in contact.”

Erin Yen, self-described “emerging dancer and dance-maker in the Bay Area,” explores the idea that “movement arts are essential in the movement and technology relationships to come.” She performs in a warehouse in San Francisco against a backdrop of animations by Coal Rietenbach.

natalya shoaf is excited to share through this “weird and necessary way to communicate.”

Liv Schaffer. I think she talked about space. I had stopped typing to listen more carefully for a second. Look where that got me.

Melecio Estrella dedicates his piece to Nancy Stark Smith, one of the founders of contact improvisation who died on May 1. Many if not most of us did not know she had died.

Michael Wall, also in Salt Lake City, tells us he has been collaborating with choreographers remotely for 15 years, first by mailing VHS tapes back and forth, now on his iPad. Wall sings the praises of Instagram—glad my teenager isn’t listening. Points out that we couldn’t have this many people in the SADC theater. Asks the artists in the audience what they need from a musician/accompanist during these times.

We wait in awkward silence for someone to unmute themselves or be unmuted, a warped version of the talking stick. Meanwhile, I text with an audience member who is keeping her video off.

Jessi informs us that Zoom has limited the meeting to 100 but there are others trying to get it. I envision legions of dance-lovers storming the virtual palace.

Jill asks us to jump over to YouTube. The show is about to start. Ooh, so cool! It’s counting down with groovy music—by Michael Wall?—and some colorful graphics. The big countdown from 10 begins and I count along with it as if I’m in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

I wish I was in my bed watching on my laptop but I need two computers. I watch on my desktop. I type on my laptop. Usually I’m scribbling illegible notes on the backs of programs in dark theaters. I’m excited to be able to capture so much and also wonder if this is a good thing. 

The house lights in my imagination go down.

 

Dance No. 1. Molly Heller’s Falling. Molly stands in what looks like a living room cleared for the performance. Behind her, against the wall, lean two large, square, black canvases with “before” written in white on one and “after” on the other. Right above her head hangs an enormous lamp that seems like an old school beauty salon overhead hair dryer frozen in mid descent. She’s in black and barefoot. There are exposed outlets and a piece of furniture that do not seem to be intentional parts of the scenic design. She raises her arms and twists on half point, lands on her heels, a torso and arm dance. Heller hovers between the words, dipping into their diagonal spaces, crossing into one, then the other. Before. After. Before. After. A clear and compelling mover. There are lots of presentational gestures, reaching and retreating, and gorgeous head-tail connection. Her flow morphs into staccato hopping and I start to notice the repetition of balled fists, put-up-your-dukes gestures, and facial changes that move from ferocity to disgust to sickly sweetness, a whole world of expression. I am drawn in by the contrast of movement precision and face dancing.

Dance No. 2. Molly Rose-Williams’ Today or Tomorrow. Outside. A chain link fence enclosing a schoolyard. Two signs. One reads “Reserved for Principal,” the other advertises the company that built the fence. Tree, fence. A jogger runs by on the sidewalk that runs perpendicular to the fence. The birds are loud. Molly pops up behind the fence under the Principal sign. Molly climbs. We see her arms and torso but not her face. Bicyclists go by. Molly climbs to the top of the fence. Now we see torso and legs. Pedestrians glance over at her as they pass. Molly hangs over the top of the fence, balancing at her hip crease. With a finger, she traces the words on the sign, her feet dangling and kicking lightly, slightly, a leisurely paddle through liquid sky. She walks sideways across the fence, one foot at time, two feet at a time. Two women walk by. One gestures as if to move something from right to left. Wall’s music whistles with slow guitar that gives me a telenovela feel, which really works for me. Molly tries to touch both signs at the same time, with a foot and a hand, with each foot. She is a curved shape in burgundy. Like Heller, this Molly too suddenly hops, two feet across the fence’s middle bar. She comes to the wide pole nearest the sidewalk and shimmies down. Molly hits the sidewalk. Done. Molly calls this a game. I call it an exploration. Is there a difference?

Dance No. 3. Erin Yen’s Taking In. A warehouse space with an unfinished wood wall, a tarp floor, and Yen in yellow track pants. There’s a lone office chair in the back corner. A rectangle of light creates her shadow. The rectangle of light is a screen across which a red blobby circle swims. The released, acrobatic movement feels improvised but not necessarily in response to the shaking vertical lines of light that trap her face and torso. She looks hunted, haunted, her long ponytail whipping against red mountain ranges that turn white. A fluid mover whose big movement stops and gets micro, fingers rubbing together. The animations shift from yellow square on zebra crossing to purple disk. Shapes move, Yen moves, humans are shapes? Suddenly, a word appears, upside down and backwards so I can’t read it. Yen sits cross-legged breathing, while a fire burns behind her. She strikes poses—martial arts, The Thinker. Her dancing and Wall’s music seem to suggest that her body is a piece of technology among others, particularly when she’s twitchy. She comes close to the camera and gestures around her face, repeating a phrase that involves slicing, catching her hands. The repetition doesn’t clarify the story for me. The affect is sweaty, disturbed but not terribly, somehow coherent but hard to name. A paint can drips red, the red blob returns. Yen runs and leaps in and out of frame. The dance ends with Yen on her knees, vigorously swatting at some invisible nuisance getting in her way.

Dance No. 4. natalya shoaf’s Shift. shoaf sits facing the camera in a room lit by fairy lights. It is night and there is an orchid. We see only her torso at first. Arms rise. The tone feels serious, not quite ominous, maybe a little bit witchy. A dance of upper limbs in relation—head and arms, hands and face. Sensual. Her hand pushes down toward her head, the space feels like it’s closing in. shoaf reaches toward the camera, bows her head, disappears. She crouches like a fairy tale crone and then, legs—strong and bare. Like Yen, there is twitching but then a languorous pose like a pinup, an arabesque. The music is minimal. There are books on the floor, postcards on the wall, city lights outside. shoaf upends herself, looks around. Is she being pursued? Possessed? There is instability as the room presses down. The room is bigger than the enclosure she creates by staying close to the camera. She strikes poses an artist might want to draw. I feel inside a hot summer night as shoaf breaks and contorts a balletic leg. I love when her face comes in and out of view as her body deconstructs classic female figures. Her face contorts as Heller’s did, as Yen’s did. Something is going on with the face. Modern dance face is gone. Where did it go? (Good riddance.) Also like Heller, there are muscle man, bicep flexing gestures. What are we fighting against? Sometimes shoaf looks like a college student in her dorm, other times like something wilder.

Dance No. 5. Liv Schaffer’s Cagebird. First, just a hardwood floor, partially illuminated. Photos cascade to the floor to a deep organ (accordion?) sound. Black and white photos, color photos, an elderly couple posed for a portrait, a wedding cake, a person with a tennis racket, time and place stamps on a photo’s flipside. Liv’s shadow appears in the lit corner, then her feet and cuffed green pants, green hoodie. She starts arranging the photos without showing her face. I marvel at her scalp, the strings of her hoodie dangling. She slows down at a portrait of a man in a suit, sepia print. She strokes her chest and lets something go. She is kneeling in a heart chakra dance. She closes her eyes, opens them to look at her hand. Melancholia and loss, her body shifts like a typewriter, hiccoughs echoing the twitches of the earlier dances. The camera is above her so she looks like a supplicant to a higher power. She draws a circle around the photos with her fingers then lies down on top of them, her nose touching the side of a woman’s face. She shoots herself across the floor disrupting the organization. She moves in and out of the frame. The music finally tugs hard enough that I start to cry, just a little. Her pelvis resisting gravitational pull with taffy pull makes me cry a little more. She’s like a child alone with photographs. I was a child alone with photographs. I’m getting it right in the solar plexus now. Liv nears the camera, a stack of photos in her hand. We now see them close up. Is that Liv as a child? Is that my aunt Mildred? Who are these people in the catamaran, on the steps in the house Brady Bunch style, at the shore? Are they here? Are they gone? Balloons and birthday cake. The back of Liv’s foot lifts from the floor with froggy suction feet, treading and swiping so we see the underside and the articulation. That nearly does me in. The light in the room changes, it presses Liv down beneath it. Prone she lays. She rolls, caresses her face, her neck, her collar bone, pushes herself across the floor and out of the frame again. The last thing we see is her hand. Is that a cello? Gone. 

Dance No. 6. Melecio Estrella’s House Plant. Ah, Melecio, in your yellow tank top in a taupe-colored room in front of a gray curtain hanging from a white doorframe, making us laugh. Face dance: pondering, smiling, pandering. Your jaw works, your eyes blink. You show us a white watering can. You pour water into a small mason jar, toast us, take a sip, nod, take another sip. Your lips are working, you look at us—you know we’re watching you! Then, boom!, your heads bobs down and dramatic heartbeat footstep music rises. You bring your hands to your face and, what? Ha! Another set of hands come up. But it’s only funny for a second. The four hands smear all over your face. Whose fingers are those going into your mouth, exploring your teeth, palate, inner cheeks? All that face touching really knocks the wind out of me. I think about hand sanitizer. Your eyes are closed in this sensual and somehow macabre dance. Silver or platinum wedding bands glint. You stand up and we see your floral print shorts. In front of the curtain, you are, I believe, improvising. Looks like Gaga. Looks like Authentic Movement. Again, the typewriter body, a little robotic. And then every part of you is undulating, torso, arms, fingers, rib cage, undulating with hiccoughs. Is that a clock ticking? Are you being swallowed by the energy that courses through you, forcing your head to nod, your arm to get stuck behind your back? Who’s in control here? I can’t keep track of what body part is in charge—arms follow spine, legs follow arms, knees give into wingspan. And then you burst through the curtain—I had expected this at the beginning of the dance but by the time it happens, I’d forgotten and was surprised. The curtain drops, revealing a dark room full of house plants. The leaves become the hands that smeared your face. They massage your whole body. You luxuriate in the leaves. The plants dwarf you then eat you alive, a vernal quicksand. All of this and then “Amazing grace.” You disappear. Black out.

 

We return to the Zoom meeting and the silent applause of 112 participants erupts.

Jill moderates the discussion. People post questions to the chat.

Michael Wall: “Don’t think about trying to copy what we’ve done before. What are the tools we have now? What’s unique to this? None of the things we just saw could happen on a stage with very little budget.”

Molly Rose-Williams: “It doesn’t feel like a solo in the theater because the act of performing feels like a collective effort.” I stopped typing and lost the exact words, but she talked about the fact that unfolded cell membranes would cover the earth 4 times over. She wants to go in and unfold into huge space, to “allow small spaces to unfold into their vast magnitude.”

Molly Heller: “I felt quite distant from my body. It took time to find a relationship with myself.”

Liv: “All of you seeing into my home both in the video and on Zoom.” “Viewpoints audiences haven’t had to see me from before.”

I have been asked to watch an inordinate amount of dance content lately and it’s too much. But this event asked me to commit to a time and a place. I didn’t know I needed that. I didn’t know I missed that. I think we need things like this: a dedicated time to gather to watch together at the same time. To feel beholden to the community. To be held by a container of time.

Shawl-Anderson is my community. Executive Director Rebecca Johnson held up a picture of Frank Shawl, reminding us that Frank and Victor are always with us. They showed up. We all showed up.

 

Sima Belmar, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the ODC Writer in Residence. To keep up with Sima’s writing please subscribe to tinyletter.com/simabelmar.

Creating a New Model and Landscape for Dance Criticism and Dance Reflection: Honoring Artists' Voices and Offering Multiple Viewpoints

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

Right now I am knee deep into this topic. A few years back, due to a twindling dance writing community in the San Francisco Bay Area, I started getting into dance previews, reviews, and audience feedback platforms on this site. Today, I want to propose my latest vision for the whole package. Please join me, and please leave feedback and further thoughts as a comment below. Thank you!

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Sources of concern:

Dwindling dance writers and platforms for dance writing; overdependence on a few dance writers in the community; issues of power, voice, and dialogue within the current dance artist/dance writer relationship 

Vocabulary of the past:

Dance criticism

Dance review

Dance reviewer

Vocabulary we seek now:

Dance writing

Dance reflection

Dance in review

Dance writer

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The New Choreography for Dance Writing: Six Options

These are all options! Nothing is mandatory! One or two of these might be of most interest to you for your upcoming project. I just want to lay out the full array here. 

I share this specifically looking at what I can do and can offer through Life as a Modern Dancer. (While LAAMD primarily writes about SF Bay Area performances, we are completely open to more writing about dance performances throughout the United States.) In addition - please, anyone - take these ideas and run with them! Here's to more dance writing...

Option #1 (previews):

As I have been playing with for a few years here on the site, there can be a series of previews for a project. I like to give an artist several questions to respond to on their own time, or we can meet in person. Most of the answers are first-person. I also ask a few questions for the collaborators to answer. Let's give voice to both the choreographer AND the dancers! I am also happy to publish first person essays by artists as a form of performance preview.

Or - a dreamy idea - would be to have the dance writer coming to the performance do a preview interview/post as well! (I have yet to pull this one off for LAAMD but aspire to.)

Here are a two examples with choreographer Amy Foley:

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 4 Days until Let Slip the Witches with Bellwether Dance Project

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 3 Days until Let Slip the Witches with Bellwether Dance Project

And, two first-person essays with choreographers Lauren Simpson and Jenny Stulberg:

Building a Dance Company: The Pre-Company Stage (Part 1 of a 3-Part Series) - with Jenny Stulberg and Lauren Simpson

Establishing Simpson/Stulberg Collaborations: My Biggest Challenge So Far - By Lauren Simpson

Option #2 (press release):

Choreographers, please still write an old school press release! This is a starting place for many well-intentioned community members, from the person writing calendar listings in the local paper, to the dance writer who will be taking the time to attend your show next week and wants to know a bit more, to the college professor prepping their 25 students who are coming to your show. (Post the press release on your website; share press release via email.)

Option #3 (working with a dance writer):

This is a very personal decision. Do you want to seek out a dance writer who will come and write a reflection of the project? Are you okay with the published word by one person, and the fact that you won't get to preview the writing? (Totally a valid choice, and obviously the one that has happened for decades now....)

OR...considering a platform like Life as a Modern Dancer...would you like to find a writer who would attend your show and then meet with you during the week right after the show closes? This would be a dialogue and short interview, which leads to a written piece. This gives voice and power back to the artist, and it hopefully opens up a deeper dialogue for artist and writer alike.

The artist and writer would have to agree upon the final details and process here. Will the writer share with the artist a draft of the writing, or will the artist only see it when it goes online or to print? (Thank you to writers Molly Rose-Williams and Sima Belmar for expanding my thinking about the artist/writer relationship. Option #3 came out of conversations with Molly and Sima.)

Option #4 (audience feedback and responses):

Would you like to be a part of the One Good Quote platform, where audience members can share their thoughts and impressions post-performance? "Democratizing dance criticism," as artist Mariah Steele once said....

Option #5 (artist writing post-performance):

I am wanting to expand dialogue and reflection in 2020, and wanting to offer more artists the invitation to write a post-performance essay/musing/reflection shortly after a show closes. What did you learn and see? How did the work change once it was live in front of an audience? 

Here is an example from the site, with artist Jenny Stulberg:

What Now? - By Jenny Stulberg

Option #6 (Linger Project):

Instead of asking one dance writer to attend your show, what if we asked a few writers or colleagues to be game for this writing project? We would ask 3-5 people to attend and then reflect on the performance.

-Within 24 hours of the performance, each contributor writes 1-4 paragraphs about the performance. Initial impressions, feelings, and reactions. All writing is shared within one post.

-Then, for the following 3 months, I would reconnect with the group of writers. Each month, they would write one new paragraph about your show. What lingers? What images and questions remain? This means that each writer would share thoughts 4 times in total, and there would be 4 posts about the performance.

The Linger Project is a beautiful way to see how art stays with people. (Disclosure = this form costs the most to do, as it is honoring the time of 3 to 5 artists and paying a writing stipend to each of them. The more monthly supporters through Patreon, the greater the potential to run Linger Projects throughout 2020. Thanks for considering this.)

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In conclusion:

Whoa! That's a lot of writing about writing. But, it feels comprehensive and covers many angles. What do you think? What do you value and want to see in 2020?

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Breaking Down with KWENTO

Catherine Liu. Photo by Andy Strong.

Breaking Down with KWENTO

By Garth Grimball

KWENTO’s Break, a premiere directed and danced by Catherine Liu, artistic director, with an ensemble cast, opened at PianoFight on Jan 31. Break is dance theater. A medium of synthesis that few can get to show and not tell, rather than show and tell and tell and tell. Break explores the “most traumatic experience with [Liu’s] own mental health” in a mostly linear format of scenes progressing through introduction, climax, and resolution.

In Break the dance, theater, pantomime, and monologues are additive without being associative. The parts do not alchemize into a new whole but connect to each other like train cars heading in the same direction. What does an attitude turn have to do with a knife? How do we connect acrobatic lifts from a gurney to fear of abandonment? Each form of artistic expression seems to share a conceptual basis but not connective tissue. The moments of dancing are brief and used as relationship building between characters or as scenario like a scene of Liu attending an audition.

Liu has a director’s eye and sense of timing. No scene outstays its welcome. Whatever the mode of expression the plot moves forward at an even pace. She is a committed performer. In a monologue as internal dialogue Liu acts out a conversation with her inner depressive voice navigating self-worth. There is no shying away. It’s uncomfortable and it’s supposed to be. This is Liu’s story so it’s difficult to get a sense of the ensemble cast as more than collective supporting characters.

The most successful moments are the simplest. In a hospital visit scene Liu and Melanie Harvengt play the hand-slap game. Liu goes through a variety of emotions each time her hands are slapped. The brief moment communicates so well the incredible weight and energy of performing “normalcy” for others when you’re feeling anything but yourself. Later the ensemble wears lab coats and pelts an endless supply of prescription bottles at Liu as she stands in disbelief. I cannot think of a more perfect representation of searching for a doctor who will hear you and finding a medicine that will work for you.

We put a lot of pressure on art to give meaning, to transcend, to speak truth. Creating honest work is often most memorable. Liu’s honesty stays with me. An honesty that will hearten others on their mental health journeys.

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, California. He is the co-director of Wax Poet(s), company member of Dana Lawton Dances, and performs regularly with Oakland Ballet.

Catch Break at PianoFight February 7 and 8, 2020 at 7:30pm. Get tickets here.

Still Lingering: Reflections on “Action Potential," Six Months Later

Shira Yaziv and Megan Lowe. Photo by Sebastian Arrua.

Still Lingering: Reflections on “Action Potential,” Six Months Later

By Molly Rose-Williams

On August 27, 2019, I saw Megan Lowe Dances’ production of “Action Potential” at the Athletic Playground in Emeryville, CA. The site-specific work was directed by Megan Lowe, and created and performed in collaboration with Shira Yaziv and Sonsherée Giles. The evening featured live music by Girl Swallows Nightingale (Marica Petrey, Mogli Maureal, and Travis Kindrid) with lighting design by Dylan Feldman. 

I found out after watching the show that it had been created largely in response to a life-threatening assault and home invasion that Megan, her partner, and roommate had experienced months earlier while saving two strangers’ lives from an enraged attacker. The program notes described the creation process as an opportunity for Megan to continue to “process the trauma [of the event] and move forward.”

In the months since seeing “Action Potential,” I have found that moments from the show continue to resonate for me. In this piece, I take a cue from the origin story behind the “Action Potential” itself to reflect on what sticks with me 6 months later.

 

Megan is on one side, Shira and Sonsherée on the other. A rectangular slab of hard foam the size of a small refrigerator groans between them as they pitch their bodies towards one another. Their feet rip along the floor as they fight for purchase, legs like tree trunks with roots that seek the Earth’s iron core. Hands and forearms slap the mat as breaths wrack their bodies with ragged heaves. Over and over they careen at the mat. 

Until this moment, the show has felt predominantly playful to me. At times curious, joyful, sentimental, and tender, they have painted the space with sweeping acrobatics, bounced off the walls, swung between monkey bars, and flown through the air from dizzying heights. Now I feel my body tight, unnamed emotion welling up my throat.

Flashback twenty minutes before, I was squirming with delight and the excruciating discipline of staying seated while Megan, Sonsherée and Shira flew between monkey bars. From the monkey bars, they slithered up to a loft above the door where we came in, and began jumping off the 15-foot drop onto a giant squishy mat, their bodies hitting the foam with satisfying, muffled smacks.

Before that, I remember glimpses of hidden bodies under a rolling door, just the legs and calves sticking out as the metal slowly folded upwards until three whole humans were revealed. I remember the band throughout, filling the space with sound so textured and robust I almost felt I could eat it, lead singer warbling soulfully. The musicians seemed attentive to every movement on stage. The energy between dancers and musicians was contagious.

There are moments I think I remember but can’t be sure of: Did Megan scale the 2x4’s bolted to the wall above us only by her fingers? Were Sonsherée’s legs sticking out of a cubby when we passed through the changing room from one room to another? Did the bass player do a front flip off a mini trampoline at the end?

I know there was a mini-trampoline--more satisfying thumps made by squishy mats well-used. I remember bodies running to launch off the trampoline and fly through the air with a sense of saliva-worthy weightlessness. I remember the empathetic urges zipping through my body, craving to fly with them.

I also remember Megan alone on the stall bars (a set of vertical bars like a wide wooden ladder attached to the wall), a rare solo in what was otherwise a solidly ensemble show. In my memory, it came just after Megan, Shira, and Sonsherée fought tooth-and-nail to hold their ground on either side of the refrigerator-size foam block. Like a balloon inflating and deflating at the same time, Megan climbed the stall bars with the weariness, grace, and intensity of someone who doesn’t know what to do except to keep going. In pinky-red light, she wound in and out of the wooden slats to arrive hanging upside down, and then continued to move, as if feats of such athleticism were quotidienne, as if her body might unwind something the rest of her was not yet able to. 

Eventually she jumped. Another matted landing. She looked at us for what felt like a long time, as if we were only just beginning to scratch the surface; as if the entire show had been the prologue to the real story. 

In the months that followed, I have remembered mostly the intensely-physical, curiously-playful, delightfully-weighty rigor of the physicality that formed the heart of this show. The moments above are the ones that stuck most strongly in my memory. Learning the story that prompted the show’s creation has made me wonder what I might remember were I to see the show again, and undoubtedly has shaped the light by which I regard my memories of my first viewing. But for now, I am content simply to recall how good it felt to see Megan, Shira, and Sonsherée fly around the Athletic Playground with all the weight, spirit and power of real-life superheroes. 

 

Molly Rose-Williams is a Bay Area artist and writer. mollyrosewilliams.com

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Modern Dance in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2019, as Captured Through 21 Dance Performance Reviews

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

Back in 2012 when I began Life as a Modern Dancer, I did not initially envision it being a site for dance reviews and dance criticism. But as the site grew and changed each year, the need arose for a new platform for dance criticism in the Bay Area. I am thrilled to be able to host this, and I am so grateful for my incredible roster of writers, including: Sima Belmar, Bhumi B. Patel, Todd Courage, Molly Rose-Williams, Garth Grimball, Sarah JG Chenoweth, and Michelle LaVigne.

Please note that we are toggling between various words here on the site: dance criticism, dance reviews, reflection, and response. 

I thought it would be fun to review each of the 21 dance reflections published in 2019 and to pull one section from each. I hope that you will click on the links to read some of the pieces in their entirety. My heart is full reflecting on all of this beautiful work that was made and shared throughout the year in the Bay Area.

With these segments of writing, as with all dance reviews and criticism, the goals are many fold: some words offer a recap, some phrases paint a picture of the project for those who did not witness it, and other sentences pose larger questions about the field and artmaking. 

And, if you are a college professor teaching a composition/choreography course, here's an idea to consider. What if you used these 21 reviews as reading material in a course? What can we learn about the choreographic process, and the audience experience, through reading these essays? How do we describe what we are making? Let me know if you give it a try. 

Thanks for reading!

Dazaun Soleyn and Hien Huynh. Photo by Hans Holtan. Photo courtesy of Paufve Dance and its event 8x8x8.

Paufve Dance's 8x8x8 (Jan 24, 2019 at The Uptown, Oakland)

This is an unusual review, as it has 8 writers responding to the 8 dances. A section from Aviva Rose-Williams' writing:

I receive this performance as a gift. It is planned, ordered, well-thought out. Hours of studio time weave themselves through the performers’ physicality. Thoughts emerge as momentum. Sound. The environment and its audience are wrapped around these delights, coveting them, witnessing them, giving them reason to exist. Creating a space in which they can resonate. Finally.

Though the presentations hold their own valuable wonders, I experienced 8x8x8 this year like most 1 year olds experience birthdays. Nothing could snag my attention and get me more reeling in excitement than the colorful, crunchy wrapping. An audience practically humming with energy, I was taken with how powerful the simple presence of witnessing can be in terms of justifying a piece of art’s existence. How the mass of people ironically adds to the intimacy, how the exposure in-the-round can create such a feeling of shared experience.

I leave in deep question within my own practice about the strength and necessity of others to create a framework in which my work can resonate, in this top-secret collaboration. 

Anna Greenberg with ensemble in Kristin Damrow's Impact. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Kristin Damrow & Company: Impact (January 31-February 2, 2019 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, San Francisco)

Reflection by Molly Rose-Williams

Where the chorus deepened and texturized as the piece progressed, the principal dancers coalesced into solid archetypes, each defined by specific, caricatured movement. Anna Greenberg, the dancer at the others’ feet in the opening image, began to stand for me as an evil queen. Where she went, the chorus in black seemed to follow. She held dominion over them, physically and energetically manipulating them to do her bidding, which more often than not included oppressing the other principal dancers through physical obstruction and domination.

Was the chorus an externalized manifestation of her power? Magical shadowy subjects? Human subjects oppressed by an unjust power structure? Or some other metaphor exposing the dark sides of power? The explicitly narrative interactions between dancers, the archetypal roles they played, and cohesive, albeit nonlinear, plot made me lean towards literality in my viewing.

Over time, I decided we were seeing a series of flashbacks to explain the dramatic opening image. My questions kept me fully engaged like a good story - primarily, how had the queen gone from all-powerful monarch to the defeated figure from the opening? Why and how had she come to hold dominion over the others? And how had that dominance been lost?

Katie Faulkner: Divining (February 14-16, 2019 at ODC Theater, San Francisco)

Reflection by Michelle LaVigne

...the last tableau with all four dancers leaning back on their forearms, staring up at the sky with expressions of wonder. This last scene offers hope. Hope that our bodies, for all of their faults and fits, know something about being in the world. Faulkner’s faith in the body’s resilience offers a way of seeing the future not as an object, but as a process of discovery.

The work on display in Divining - choreography, lights, music, dancing - raises important questions about how we we face the future and offers hope in the form of moving, breathing, and wondering bodies. We are definitely not alone - all we have to do is find a welcoming elbow, look up at the sky, or just breathe.

Rogelio Lopez & Dancers. Dancer: Kevin Gaytan. Photo: Ryan Kwok

Rogelio Lopez & Dancers: Dicotomía del Silencio (March 16-17 and 23-24, 2019 at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Berkeley)

Reflection by Molly Rose-Williams

If reckoning is a sensational act - a surrender to past, present, and future converging in a single, visceral moment - then Dicotomía del Silencio gives form to that sensation. The newest work from Rogelio Lopez & Dancers is based largely on Lopez’s exploration of past traumas, and what he calls in his Director’s Note “a need to organize and contextualize” his experiences growing up in Mexico with a “heavily Catholic faith influenced family.” In this deeply personal process of sense-making, Lopez has shepherded to expression not just the concepts that order his chaotic past, but the very sensations from which those concepts arise. The result is a haunting, awestruck, and searching prostration before a realm of visceral truths.

ka-nei-see | collective and Cat Call Choir: Nevertheless (March 7-10, 2019 at Z Space, San Francisco)

Reflection by Sarah JG Chenoweth

In the beginning of the piece the movement, as necessitated by the theme, felt more contained and writhing than some of Chianese’s past work. Various soloists seemed to dance inside of themselves, twisting and squeezing perpetrators’ badgering out of their bodies. As the piece progressed, the movement became more extended and explosive. Correspondingly, the dancers became equally more frayed and more powerful—the exhausted, “persisting” survivor. 

Amy Foley: Let Slip the Witches (April 4-6, 2019 at ODC Theater, San Francisco)

By Sarah JG Chenoweth

What followed was irrefutably badass. For the next almost hour, these sister witches shook, twitched, lunged, and leapt their way into a different dimension. As technical as they were wild, the women showed the resolution of the most tenacious beast. Their goal? To create a tempest, or maybe a public outcry. It could have been an ancient fertility ritual, or a funeral rite. Repetition of simple movements and walking patterns gave it the tone of a folk dance. But it was also a knockout modern dance piece, packed with arduous contemporary movement and skill.

Vella & Merrell Dance

Vella & Merrell Dance: Lipstick Lumberjacks, Losers, and Leapfrogs (May 11-12, 2019 at the Humanist Hall, Oakland)

Reflection by Molly Rose-Williams

In describing my experience of the show to others, I have found that queer theory offers a useful framework for greater precision here; if “queerness” can be understood as a willingness to see taboos broken down, or a realm in which binaries are no longer relevant, then “Lipstick Lumberjacks, Losers and Leapfrogs” for me felt like a physical investigation of the act of “queering.” The works ran the gamut, from a manifesto on the radical potential of platonic intimacy urging us to “use emotionality as a radical tactic against a society which teaches you that emotions are a sign of weakness;” to an absurd and stunningly precise romance between a pair in striped shirts, berets, and glue-on mustaches; there was a joyful surrender to the physical release of punk rock, a depiction of modern queer love with dialogue so stereotypical and hilarious it was difficult to hear over the laughter, a tortured case of unfulfilled desire, and many more equally absurd, tender, and incise visions. Throughout, I saw a playful, but insistent line of questioning: What range of experience can we make room for? What forms of expression can we honor? How vast, inclusive, and beautiful can this shared life be?

Peiling Kao: One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives (May 24 and 25, 2019 at Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco)

Reflection by Sima Belmar

Peiling Kao lived in the SF Bay Area for many years and now resides in Honolulu, HI.

Over the phone after the show, Kao back in Honolulu, Kao told me that she has been thinking a lot about a question Gerald Casel has asked about whether a dancer’s body can be colonized by choreographic intention. “There are different ways to examine whether or not choreography is a colonizing force,” she said. “I don’t think of dance training and technique as colonizing forces necessarily—it’s a process of learning. We have to deal with power, as Gerald and I discussed post-show. If the commission comes from me, can we say I’ve been colonized? During the process, I felt like I was giving the power to those choreographers. I bow myself down, you tell me what I need to do and I will do my best, I’ll try again and again. In a collaborative process, a choreographer might see me as an equal power in the process—I’m giving you power and you’re also giving the power back to me.”

Lili Weckler | Unhinge: SiStars Strange & The Shatterer of Worlds (May 25 and 26, 2019 at the Fort Mason Chapel, San Francisco)

Reflection by Garth Grimball

In addition to “choreographic rock opera,” SiStars Strange & The Shatterer of Worlds describes itself as “punk” and “queer.” The most non-normative quality in this show has nothing to do with gender or boundaries or performance theories. This show is earnest. Earnest feels radical and unbound. Earnest melts away irony to reveal heart. Weckler is open and genuine in her art-making, and she invites her collaborators and the audience to be the same. The success of the art in reckoning with “environmental, political, and social unraveling” is questionable. But sounding the alarm with guileless energy and a rallying guitar riff is heartening. There’s nothing minimal to it.

The Anata Project: BIG SALT (May 30-31, June 1, and June 7-8, 2019 at the Joe Goode Annex, San Francisco)

Reflection by Garth Grimball

BIG SALT develops with detailed craft and smart editing. Visual metaphors and relationships morph and eclipse. Dancers lean, fall, grasp, and throw each other, exploring when support is a burden and when feeling someone else’s force is the remedy for being weightless.

Molly Heller: Heartland, Woodland Creatures (July 13, 2019 at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Berkeley)

Reflection by Garth Grimball

Molly Heller is a Salt Lake City-based artist and Visiting Artist at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. This performance was her third at SADC in recent years.

Shuffling over and through each other to form a casual ring around the performance space, we audience members mirror the set pieces in the center of the dance floor: islands of moss and flora. Jenny Stulberg, perched above us in open attic space, swathed in fabric, poses like one of Michelangelo’s Sibyls. Molly Heller, Marissa Mooney, Brian Gerke, and Nick Blaylock huddle in the faux island and explode out in solos of angles and syncopation. Michael Wall leaves the accordion for electronic beats. Pulsing rhythms expand the space. Heads and bodies bob along. The dancers strut back and forth and in circles, sometimes quickening to a trot or gallop, off-kilter enough to never be walking, jogging, or running. The movements are specific, grounded. Each body seems to quake in response to another in frivolity and frenzy.

Joy Davis and Eric Mullis. Photo courtesy of FACT/SF. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival: The works of Joy Davis and Eric Mullis, tinypistol, dazaun.dance, and FACT/SF (August 15-17, 2019 at the Joe Goode Annex, San Francisco)

For this festival, we asked two writers (Molly Rose-Williams and Todd Courage) to write about the festival. We segmented the writing into 4 posts:

On the choreography of Joy Davis and Eric Mullis

On the choreography of Dazaun Soleyn (dazaun.dance)

On the choreography of Maurya Kerr (tinypistol)

On the choreography of Charles Slender-White (FACT/SF)

An excerpt from post #3 about Kerr's work, written by 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.

Queering Dance Festival: FROLIC, Program A (September 19-22, 2019 at the Waterfront Theater, Berkeley)

Reflection by Todd Courage

A solo by choreographer Audrey Johnson, titled "towards is no longer a direction.," was its own condensed gem. Refreshingly, a short jazz riff by Yves Tumor swelled in the darkness before Johnson’s solo body emerged bent over in an orangey-crimson wash. Silence. “The body marks its spiral in space,” she begins by saying as she turns toward us. This already feels like an investigation into a living body perceiving its own animated experience, the miracle and irony of contemplating oneself. Dressed casually and deliberately in an amber camisole and black sweats, she lingeringly feels her responsive body with her hands: the backs of her legs, then her feet and ankles, shins, pelvis, stomach and ribs, upward across her breasts, sternum, and neck, and purposefully across her radiant face and black hair. Her voice supplies the only sound, a spilling chain of statements all commenting on the potentials of a body in space. “It being the spiral,” the artist says, “It being myself,” all the while reaffirming the surfaces of her own body, both front and back, again and again, a kind of Merleau-Ponty-ish theme. Johnson’s text refers to the flesh as the pace of her diving and uncoiling quickens. Over and over, faster and faster, the dancer’s motion reiterates the urgency with which life is lived in these consciousness-carving vessels of experience called bodies as her narration rolls calmly forward. “But I digress,” she says after wandering into a random topic (but not really) about the dynamics of a relationship. Suddenly, as if she were channeling Trisha Brown, Johnson turns her head to the left, breaking from the established pattern while seamlessly introducing another. She undulates backwards. A counter-clockwise running theme unfolds joined with an improv flute jam that took me back to the tracks of French movies in the 70s. Johnson slashed and sewed huge circles with growing speed and intent. Women’s vocals came up as the dancer moved through her explorations unabashedly. As the music faded, she persevered, morphing, breathing; a pace of remembering, the site of return.

Stephanie Hewett in the Queering Dance Festival, Program B. Photo by Lydia Daniller.

Queering Dance Festival: FROLIC, Program B (September 19-22, 2019 at the Waterfront Theater, Berkeley)

Reflection by Garth Grimball

The final work on the program shares a beautiful symmetry with the first, at least formally. In “Sam Cooke Wasn’t Gay” Stephanie Hewett uses ritual, voice over and lip sync to examine artistic process, intersectionality and cultural hijacking. As Hewett crawls into the space her recorded voice informs us that the work is unfinished. A narrative device that risks a blamelessness by way of apology but evolves into a meta commentary on process and ownership; on the definitions of queerness and the living of queerness. Hewett walks the perimeter of the space rolling and unrolling the legs of her pants. We learn of her injury fears, love of techno, and how “feeling inspired is the new falling in love.” She is falling inspired but subordination taints inspiration. Black techno co-opted by white space. A black man, one of the greatest vocalists of the 20th century, shot and killed by a white woman. Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” starts to play and Hewett erupts in sinew and stretch across the dance floor. In a deep second position plie, fists to her heart, she stares directly at us for the first time mouthing the lyrics. The confrontation is striking. Hewett exposes her body, her ideas, her process, but rarely her look. The ending is the most unfinished part. The music stops and we learn the original plan was to sing the song herself, but time and money got in the way. Instead, she invites us to sing-along with her. We do. It’s messy and awkward and queer.

Davalos Dance Company: Borders, Spaces and Brown Eyes (October 5 and 6, 2019 at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Berkeley)

Reflection by Bhumi B. Patel

Today, our attention turns to the ways in which our differences today define, strengthen, and afford us an unapologetic authenticity to challenge the racist hegemony of our contemporary cultural moment. And certainly, this work made me see each performer on stage, and made me continue to dream of the world where we aren’t valued by our ability to assimilate. Set in six sections, the work travels through an emotional landscape examining the breadth and depth of how each member of the company has come to know, understand, and love their brownness.

Hope Mohr Dance's The Bridge Project in Signals from the West: Bay Area Artists in Conversation with Merce Cunningham at 100 (November 8 and 9, 2019 at ODC Theater)

Reflection by Garth Grimball

Ten artists were selected to participate in a residency with Rashaun Mitchell and Silar Reiner, former Cunningham Company dancers, to create original works, and four dancers were cast to learn and perform Cunningham repertory. That’s 11 artists’ works plus collaborators sharing an evening to honor/complicate/respond to the legacy of one man.

What is a legacy? And what is it worth? It is easy to reduce Cunningham’s creative voice to systems. Chance operations - I Ching, Solitaire, flipping a coin - guide his choreographic craft. This democratic, formalist method is equal parts impenetrable and inviting. It is what it is. It refuses to submit to the tyranny of narrative. Cunningham technique is precise and exacting. This is why the work is so ripe for interpretation, so fecund for collaboration. All of it is there. 

Nina Haft & Company. Dancers Rose Huey and Rogelio Lopez. Photo by Yvonne M. Portra.

Nina Haft & Company: Precarious Pod (November 15-17 and 22-24, 2019 at the Joe Goode Annex, San Francisc0)

Reflection by Garth Grimball

The program informs us there are fewer than 10 vaquitas remaining on Earth. We are killing them, drowning them. We the creators of precarity. Haft and dancer Mallory Markham create a sublime solo of isolation. The choreography is beautiful and tightly constructed. Bathed in a large down pool of light Markham wriggles on the floor, slowly makes her way to standing and articulates every movement and every body part with clarity. She radiates a bodily awareness born out of solitude. 

patelworks: divisions the empire has sewn (November 16-17, 2019 at Finnish Hall, Berkeley)

Reflection by Molly Rose-Williams

Perhaps the most evocative element of the work for me is the fact that I never land. I am herded from place to place, never settling for long before being shepherded to the next nebulous experience. The work exists in pockets of bound displacement. The entire time, the large white screens circle the center of the hall, and just beyond, I see a beautiful table set with white linen, china, and white branches adorned with tiny sparkling lights. The scene evokes for me the compelling promise of something better but always out of reach. 

What’s To Come: An Evening Spent at Juilliard’s New Dances

This Great Wilderness by Jamar Roberts. © Todd Rosenberg Photography

What’s To Come: An Evening Spent at Juilliard’s New Dances

By Phoebe Ballard

 

Part 1: The Show

This is my favorite environment. The lobby is abuzz with excitement: parents visiting from out of town, friends from neighboring departments, members of the dance community affiliated with academia and beyond. Patrons who simply know ‘Juilliard New Dances’ is synonymous with an-evening-spent-admiring-exceptionally-talented-young-movers. This show, the first New Dances curated by Dance Department director Alicia Graf Mack, features new work by renowned choreographers Amy Hall Garner, Jamar Roberts, Andrea Miller, and Stephen Petronio.

This is my favorite environment because this night is about the undergraduates. The undergraduates who spend their days and evenings in the studio - soaking up everything they can. Tonight (and yesterday, and tomorrow, and Saturday two times, and Sunday) they finally get to share. They get to be relished. They get to be applauded. They get to perform.

I can’t imagine how much excitement vibrates backstage.

 Sight & Sound by Amy Hall Garner. © Todd Rosenberg Photography

Sight & Sound by Amy Hall Garner

The show opened with Sight & Sound, choreographed by Amy Hall Garner and performed by the Class of 2023. A shimmering, bronze, rectangular bar spanned the width of the stage and hovered about twenty feet above the floor. Underneath, as the slow glow of the lights revealed, lay the 24-person ensemble methodically entangled in a rippled patchwork. A centipede made up of bare limbs and black covered torsos. It was a striking image I could not shake for the rest of the work. Everything brought me back to that defiant stillness.

Sight & Sound was pushed forward by rich changes in light, the cyc turning golden or blue or red, propelling the bronze bar to move up or down and instigating a novel physicality in the dancers. Against the stirring sound, the dancers' bodies reverberated and moved in what felt like silence. Perhaps their bodies were quieted by the rich live music of Joel Wenhardt. Their ferocity, however, was not quieted - darting out at me with agile grace. Dancers swept in and out of the space, running, connecting, enveloping themselves in daring feats of movement. Intimate partnering and piercing limbs darting out in all directions. These feats were underscored by small skitters manifesting in the legs and sometimes rippling through the arms. Each time these sparks of movement took place, my mind leaped back to the centipede image from the beginning. Under this ever-shifting bronze horizon, the dancers expanded to become larger than life (without making a sound).

This Great Wilderness by Jamar Roberts. © Todd Rosenberg Photography

This Great Wilderness by Jamar Roberts

Next was This Great Wilderness, choreographed by Jamar Roberts and performed by the Class of 2022. As the curtain rose, the cold lights made the body-filled space feel hollow. Eerie but compelling - twenty-two powerfully bare beings were arranged meticulously to frame the center of the space. The rich rhythm of a live saxophone echoed through their bodies, making it clear there was not a note of music, not a single body part, that was unaccounted for in this choreography.

I found myself searching for narrative, perhaps because of the title, perhaps because of the eerie almost mysterious nature of the staging and the lights. Were they in a forest? A supernatural rendering of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? I was compelled by the choreography – was drawn to the exactitude of it. Each dancer inhabited their dimensionality with piercing precision.  There was something important about the center; they kept coming back there. I saw their silhouettes but also saw each rib, saw the capabilities of both. The dancers operated in separate universes, were beautiful but interchangeable. They formed a mass movement choir, people kaleidoscoping in and out of center, growing smokier and smokier until the stage went dark.

Desde by Andrea Miller. © Todd Rosenberg Photography

Desde by Andrea Miller

Desde, created by Andrea Miller in collaboration with the dancers of the Class of 2021, stole the show. The instant the lights came on, there were gasps from the audience. An LED ring of fire hung in the middle of the stage, swimming in a sea of fog. From this fog emerged dancers flanked in straight lines as they traveled downstage and disappeared, honing the pulsing rhythm of Nicolas Jaar’s music in their grounded bodies. Primal, powerful and rhythmic vestiges of phrase work metamorphosized from line to line. They lived in the bend of their knees, the floor of their pelvis. I could have watched this beginning the whole time.

The piece progressed, and the pulsating rhythm of the music dissipated into a soundscore of shattered glass. These lines evaporated into just two dancers on stage. They remained ephemeral creatures, the same ones who had emerged from the fog. Intimate feats of partnering ensued, tangling the limbs, contorting one body upside down into the empty space of another. They were tethered together, a directness in the extreme capacity in which their bodies performed. The Gaga-like movement vocabulary left me leaning forward the entire piece. The movement was so powerful, so researched, I was not searching for anything else. I just wanted to keep living in the warm suppleness and agility of the dancers’ bodies.

It ended the way it began, but instead of moving away from the ring of fire, they moved towards it, this time submerged in fog. Headed back to wherever they came from.

#prayerfornow by Stephen Petronio. © Todd Rosenberg Photography

#prayerfornow by Stephen Petronio

Finally, a piece for the seniors. #prayerfornow, created by Stephen Petronio, began with three dancers laying downstage, each placed far in front of narrow black chalkboards. In silence, three dancers emerged from the walls upstage and each wrote a word: ‘#prayer,’ ‘for,’ ‘now.’ Surrounding these bolded words were encouragements written by classmates, audience members, teachers. The entirety of the piece would be framed by these walls, the seniors moving in and through this world of support.

Petronio’s history as a Trisha Brown dancer was evident in the movement. The release packed a punch, pendulous in nature and quality.  As the stage populated with dancers and sieved to just a few, I was drawn to the unpredictability of the spatial patterns. I could not predict what would come next, was intrigued by how the dancers continually found new pockets to populate.

The orchestral drone and bleakness of the grey costumes countered the supportive nature of the walls of encouragement which so warmly opened the piece. This juxtaposition perhaps spoke to the state of ‘now’ (perhaps why we need a prayer). I desire more in where this piece went. About halfway through there was a stillness that made me see differently - all bodies onstage, not moving, just being. Watching each of them move made me excited for where these seniors will go next – their skills and knowledge of modern dance strongly intact.

Part 2: Moving Forward

I am a huge proponent of dance in the sphere of education, a huge advocate for dance programs in universities, colleges, and conservatories as perfect training grounds for entering the ‘real’ world as both dancers and people.

This show allowed the opportunity to think not about curriculum, not about faculty, not about what pedagogies are used in the classroom. This show allowed the opportunity to watch the dancing, to think about the students, to think about their talent, curiosity, and intellect. Knowing these students are about to enter the ‘real’ world is exciting. Their talent is extraordinary; their performance ability uncanny.

I think back to the lobby, the way it buzzed with excitement and curiosity. I think about the way that same buzz was palpable on stage as well. A fervent excitement shared by students, faculty, and audiences alike. It is a privilege, I assume to make and to work in that large, deep sea of talent displayed on the Juilliard stage. Of course, an undergraduate setting provides nurture in the way the dance field doesn’t always. But this nurture is what jumpstarts the confidence to ‘make it work’ when they move forward. The skills they learn in this environment are irreplaceable. Group works with as large a cast as demonstrated this evening are rare outside of academia, but provide skills that fold into what is needed to work in more intimate processes - navigating space, personalities, creativity, confidence, and so much more. 

I can’t help but think - this is a collegiate level show, but here people sit, right next to Lincoln Center, enjoying a professional level evening of dance. We are all excited for these dancers to enter the real world. But, when you think about the caliber of this show, the choreographers they worked with, the people in the audience – haven’t they, in a sense, already entered?

We are the better for it. 

 

Phoebe Ballard is a movement artist, educator, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. A teaching artist at Dancewave and public schools throughout the five boroughs, she hustles between different writing, administration, dance-making, and teaching engagements in NYC and NJ. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018 with her BFA in Dance.

Reflections on "divisions the empire has sown" (pateldanceworks)

 

Reflections on "divisions the empire has sown"

By Molly Rose-Williams

 

Part I: One Reflection on “divisions the empire has sown”

I get to the show early. Or at least I think I have. When I walk into the Finnish Hall basement I’m met with an aromatic wash of freshly-brewed chai tea and fried dough, and I immediately doubt that I’ve come to the right place. These are smells of home, not a dance show. I have a moment’s regret that I won’t be able to stay. 

“Are you here for the show?” A woman emerges from behind a counter to my right wearing an apron. She’s carrying a tray of steaming flatbreads. “I’ll check you in.”

It turns out the food is free. The flatbreads are parathas stuffed with blue cheese and they flake on my tongue like craggy layers of moist, doughy heaven. There are two kinds of chai, both homemade and magnetically sippable--spiced esophageal hugs. By the time it’s 7:30pm, the rest of the audience has arrived and we’re all happily sipping chai, nibbling parathas, and blowing on screaming-hot samosas fresh from the fryer.

It strikes me that of all the ways to enter a show exploring the long history of colonization and the Partition of India, this positively jovial scene is not the one I would have imagined. The single sobering note among the merriment lies in papers spread among the tables where we sit. They are newspaper clippings and infographics describing historical details of colonization and the Partition. As I read, I realize some of the details have been cleverly changed--they read more like withering satire than real news. It can be very hard to tell these days.

A few plaintive notes on the piano, and the soulful crooning of sonic composer Rachel Austin transitions the babbling scene from prologue to show. “Where were you when it all came down?” she warbles as chatter dies to murmurs, softens to silence. “Where were you looking and what were you looking for?” A single dancer emerges from the crowd to paint her body through the space. Five more performers, dressed in salwar kameezes pour in, rolling one on top of the other. The mass of bodies oozes across the floor towards the piano. 

I swallow my final bite as the performers assemble in a line with their backs to the room. They begin marching in slow motion as Austin continues to sing: “A menagerie of grief...Oh sweet heart of mine, where have you gone?” Back and forth, back and forth they go. And one by one, bodies fall. The fallen lie where they land. The march continues. The marchers hold one another close to fill the gaps left by those who have fallen.

The scene dissolves into a slow, shifting duet between two dancers on a bench, while the remaining four crawl to the staircase beyond. Out of sight of the audience, they climb the stairs, then tumble down. Over and over, we hear their bodies’ muffled thumps. My sides ache in empathy. 

Finally, the performers emerge from their hauntingly insistent stair phrase, and en masse, we migrate to the main performance space upstairs. The cavernous Finnish Hall is lit with soft lighting; large white screens rigged off of 10-foot PVC frames circle the center of the space. Over the next hour and a half, the audience is invited, ordered, and physically compelled to move around the space, always at the direction of the dancers or Director Patel herself. We are split in half, quartered, and separated into ones, twos, and threes to witness different dance events unfold in all corners. An impressively rich, varied, and at times overwhelmingly insistent soundscore textures the entire experience with ambient nature sounds, children playing, street scenes both quotidian and raucous, a recurring transit station, a single woman singing, silence, and always the sense of movement--movement of some scale everywhere.

The physicality unfolds primarily in two timbres--quiet and monotonous, or rough and insistent. I see a waiting score, time stretching interminably as two dancers sit on the long bench and rub their faces in their hands; a plaintive attempt to escape, as one dancer scales the wall to pour half her body out an open window, before slithering back in to resume a pendular pacing; and a cringe-inducing thrashing score between a wall and a table in which three dancers bang into one another and their surroundings, flinging their legs onto the table again and again while my heels ache in my shoes. Mostly the dancers appear alienated from one another and from themselves, and in general, the movement language appears only partially intentional, as if pulled from a wide variety of improvisation scores and finalized under a general umbrella of discomfort, constriction, and disconnection.

Perhaps the most evocative element of the work for me is the fact that I never land. I am herded from place to place, never settling for long before being shepherded to the next nebulous experience. The work exists in pockets of bound displacement. The entire time, the large white screens circle the center of the hall, and just beyond, I see a beautiful table set with white linen, china, and white branches adorned with tiny sparkling lights. The scene evokes for me the compelling promise of something better but always out of reach. 

I’m both relieved and disappointed when the partitions are finally removed and we are ushered towards a sea of chairs facing the table of white. Though I’m relieved to arrive at a legible destination for the first time all evening, I’m disappointed that the irresolution and placelessness I’ve experienced so powerfully thus far should resolve all of a sudden. Was there something I was to understand about what unfolded in the previous hour that suddenly allowed us to arrive at this previously unreachable place? The performers exit the space and we are left for a few long minutes in absolute silence--the first lasting silence of the piece--during which I transition from relief at the respite from constant noise, to amusement at such a long silence, to impatience at a dance that seems to have no end. And then the performers return for a finale of cup-sipping, table-banging, and dish-breaking. 

When the final teapot hits the floor with a crash, I understand that this is the end. I feel full, but incompletely sated. The structure, production, and soundscore of the work were stunning and impressively cohesive towards fleshing out such a complex and nuanced theme as colonialism and Partition. But I’m craving greater specificity and intentionality from the physicality. I wanted to see the violence of the macro themes not just referenced, but finding some form of specific physical voice through the bodies of the dancers on stage. How might the physicality go beyond echoing broad themes to make clear choices that reflect how the specific artists creating the work view, understand, or experience them? I wonder if it was the intention of the artists to produce an unquenched craving for a physically-specific point of view.

We leave the same way we came in. The parathas are all gone, as are the samosas and chai. But the warm smells remain, mingling in a complex wash of flavor and memory that follows me as I walk out the door and into the cool fresh air of another November evening in Berkeley. 

Part II: A Reflection on the Reflection

In the days that follow, I keep returning to the question of why I so deeply craved a greater sense of physical clarity in this work. I see physical language on stage all the time that seems anywhere from partially-researched to completely arbitrary. In many cases, I don’t feel the thirst for specificity so acutely. I also struggle to put more precise language to the question of what I mean by “clarity” in this case. What struck me as “unclear”? What might greater physical clarity have looked like? 

For me, physical clarity is when movement communicates as a language of its own. It is found in movement that exists because it communicates in ways that no other languages--written, spoken or otherwise--do or can. Through physicality itself, it prompts the felt experiences that serve as prerequisites and conduits to meaning-making. Like language, physical clarity can look (sound) many different ways. There is no form or style of movement that is innately clear or unclear. Its component parts, like the sounds that form any spoken language, can be composed into myriad different meanings. So it involves aesthetics but is not in itself an aesthetic concern. 

I try to imagine what I might have seen or experienced had I witnessed only the movement of the piece, without any of the production elements of set, props, sound, or forced migration. A handful of physical moments immediately stick out: the opening tableau of a line of people marching, while one by one they fall; the sound of bodies falling down stairs; a person slithering halfway out a window before sliding down to the bench below; three people writhing and thrashing while they slam their heels on top of a table; a duet with delicate, precise hand movements between two dancers sitting back-to-back on the floor; all six dancers standing on a bench, shaking and leaning forward in anger while they yelled at imagined demons of their past. Each of these moments evoked a feeling, sensation, image, or sense of something--in many cases, some form of empathetic pain in my own body--through the physicality itself. The experiences they evoked were often beyond words, but they were tangible and immediate. For me, this makes them excellent examples of moments of “physical clarity."

Overall, however, the movement in the work never coalesced into the solid language I craved. Beyond the moments above, I have a hard time remembering the other movement choices in the work. When I put together the physical impressions that lasted for me, they feel like isolated experiences operating side-by-side as opposed to words, fragments or phrases that combine towards building larger sentences or paragraphs of meaning. To be clear, I am not suggesting that clarity only exists in a work when it can be neatly expressed with words, or that “meaning” in a work of art is fixed, objective, or even necessary for the work to hold immense value and power. I am reflecting though, that in this work in particular, I craved a sense of the physicality expressing something that developed over time, built on itself towards something that couldn’t be communicated with the other elements of the work. 

From the moment I walked into the Finnish Hall, I felt swept in an aromatic embrace of the sense that someone had considered my experience deeply. The depth of welcome I felt intensified the emotion I opened myself to while I read the newspapers and infographics on the tables. It heightened the empathetic resonance I felt as the dancers punished their bodies on stairs, tables, and with their own thrashing movements. The sense of displacement and disorientation of constantly moving through the space felt like a satisfying doorway into deepening my understanding of the larger themes of violence and senselessness. 

But the lack of clarity in the movement displaced me in a different way. It prevented the work from landing in my body and served as a barrier to locating myself in relation to the much larger dynamics that served as an inspiration for the piece. These were dynamics I wanted very much to understand. As much as I wanted the piece to land inside of me, it slid off my back the moment the applause ended. The dancers bodies moved to a tune that felt parallel, but not integral, to the larger container of the show, and so my own body remained impermeable to the realities it referenced. 

I realize my depth of craving for physical clarity is in response to the work, but also reflects my thirst for resolution to the cognitive dissonance that my privilege seeds in me on a daily basis. As I left the theater that night, I was hungry to feel that perhaps I might have a new way to make sense of how such a placid November evening in Berkeley might coexist with such a violent and unjust history/reality halfway across the world. I was thirsting to feel the places in which these paradoxical realities already intersect inside of me, and perhaps have a new lens with which to make sense of their friction. I was hoping that if I could find a new way of orienting within, I might be one step closer to finding the next step without. It’s a tall order to place on a dance piece I see. But when you arrive at a dance show and feel at once you have been welcomed into a strangers’ home, the possibility of finding new ways of healing wounds sown for so long by alienation and oppression feels distinctly, humanly possible.

pateldanceworks in
divisions the empire has sown
a new immersive dance theater work by Bhumi B. Patel
Performed by Chelsea Brown, KJ Dahlaw, Danielle Galvez, Daria Garina, Katherine House, and Jordan Wanderer. Music composed and performed by Rachel Austin.

 

Molly Rose-Williams is a Bay Area artist and writer. mollyrosewilliams.com

Reflection+Response: Sensing Habitat in Precarious Pod

Photo: Yvonne M. Portra

Sensing Habitat in Precarious Pod

By Garth Grimball

Imagine wilderness. Is it near or far? How do you access the wild?

For some “wilderness” is a curse word. It implies that the natural world is wild and separate from nature we interact with daily. It allows a magical thinking of boundaries determining land stewardship. I recycle over here. I camp over there. I escape from regular responsibilities out there. In the wild.

Nina Haft’s Precarious Pod is a “Yes In My Backyard” response to the interconnection of nature, wild and tame. A call to awareness. Premiering over two weekends (Nov 15-17, 22-24) at Joe Goode Annex, Precarious Pod is inspired by nature in Haft’s everyday. A diversity of birds once perched and migrated through her backyard. In the span of several years she’s witnessed the volume and variance decline. This noticing led to investigating animal responses to humans and human habitat. What thrives and what dies? How can humans act with empathy and responsibility?

Haft welcomes the audience with a declaration of her intention. I appreciate the clarity. Yes, the beauty of art is in nuance and interpretation, but sometimes it’s refreshing to be told, “This is what it is.” Especially if the goal is engagement with a specific issue.

We enter the space in small groups to find a performance installation of sorts. Taut awnings cut through the overhead space with projections of ecosystems transforming into a forest canopy or an underwater cave. Dancers are clusters of low level positions, barely lit and easy to stumble into. Walking around the space I hear animal sounds - crow, wolf, vaquita - the triptych focus of the work.

The prologue ends. We sit. Jennifer Twilley Jerum and Jesse Weiner enter. The beginning of the duet is improvisational in an almost too obvious movement language. Like how in movies you can tell when the actors are improvising because of the sparse cadence, the lags between the words. But then the movement shifts to distinct. Twilley and Wiener jerk and shuffle like crows, but it’s not pretending to be the animal. It’s exploring a context. The duet feels like I’m seeing a familiar animal with new eyes. The routine improvisation at the start is necessary to get out of the routine and see what’s in front of you afresh. 

Next the wolfpack. Rebecca Morris, Rogelio Lopez and Andrew Merrell tumble into the space. Similar to the crow duet, the movement took time to land on me. Due to our intimacy with the wolf’s domesticated cousin it’s challenging to see the movement vocabulary and not three humans being wolf-like. What about the other senses? Seeing may get in the way but hearing draws me in. Within the choreography the dancers master the rhythm of canines. The collective patter and swish and unpredictable halts. Rose Huey enters the trio. As a quartet the spatial complexity heightens into a struggle of allegiance and territory. A familiar struggle indeed.

The program informs us there are fewer than 10 vaquitas remaining on Earth. We are killing them, drowning them. We the creators of precarity. Haft and dancer Mallory Markham create a sublime solo of isolation. The choreography is beautiful and tightly constructed. Bathed in a large down pool of light Markham wriggles on the floor, slowly makes her way to standing and articulates every movement and every body part with clarity. She radiates a bodily awareness born out of solitude. Her costume (design by Andrew Merrell) showcases the most successful use of sequins outside of Dolly Parton’s wardrobe. Adorning the top of Markham’s shirt, from sternum to shoulders, the sequins bring us underwater with their power of reflection. 

Every design component excels in intention and theme. Rogelio Lopez’s lighting creates an intimacy both unsettling and comforting. The light plays on our spatial proximity to the performers. We are so close but are we seeing the forest from the trees. Gretchen Jude’s soundscore is a synthesis of mimesis and abstraction. Ian Winters’s use of photo negative in projections is striking, so evocative of absence and the space left behind.

The vaquita solo ends with Markham venturing beyond the pool of light. Is the exit the conclusion of peril? We witness the end of a fellow species. Or, can it be hopeful? A return to power in numbers. Either way, it’s up to us.

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, California. He is the co-director of Wax Poet(s), company member of Dana Lawton Dances, and performs regularly with Oakland Ballet.

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Related posts:

One Good Quote: Nina Haft & Company in Precarious Pod

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: Catch the Final Weekend of Nina Haft & Company's Precarious Pod

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: Opening Weekend for Nina Haft & Company's Precarious Pod

Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (Nina Haft)

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A Bridge to Cunningham in Six Quotations

Left to right: Hope Mohr, Nicole Peisl, and Rashaun Mitchell. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

A Bridge to Cunningham in Six Quotations

By Garth Grimball

 

I like poems to be poetic and prose to be prosaic, religion to be prophetic and philosophy to be crystal clear.

Edmund White

This year marks the centennial of Merce Cunningham, one of the most influential and prolific choreographers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. An influence so great that rather than settle for a fun Google doodle on the day of his birth, dance companies and artists around the globe are restaging and exploring his deep oeuvre in honor and celebration of his impact as an artist and thinker. On November 8 and 9, the Bay Area welcomed Signals from the West: Bay Area Artists in Conversation with Merce Cunningham at 100, led by Hope Mohr Dance’s The Bridge Project and co-produced with ODC Theater, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and the Merce Cunningham Trust. Ten artists were selected to participate in a residency with Rashaun Mitchell and Silar Reiner, former Cunningham Company dancers, to create original works, and four dancers were cast to learn and perform Cunningham repertory. That’s 11 artists’ works plus collaborators sharing an evening to honor/complicate/respond to the legacy of one man.

What is a legacy? And what is it worth? It is easy to reduce Cunningham’s creative voice to systems. Chance operations - I Ching, Solitaire, flipping a coin - guide his choreographic craft. This democratic, formalist method is equal parts impenetrable and inviting. It is what it is. It refuses to submit to the tyranny of narrative. Cunningham technique is precise and exacting. This is why the work is so ripe for interpretation, so fecund for collaboration. All of it is there. 

What is culture?

The formation of attention.

Simone Weil

Jenny Odell, Sofía Córdova, and Julie Moon transform the visual texture of Cunningham’s dances into multimedia. Odell’s Merce-bau video art is the creative process. The dancer Sarah Cecilia Bukowski moves within the limits of various filmed aspect ratios edited as an evolving Tetris game. Merce-bau elicits the fragmentary and sublime in making. Córdova’s Underwater Moonlight (days of blood & milk) is a found poem collage. There is a visual discord of ‘90s era media content with 2019 editing capability. Geometry, directions, and nature collapse and fold in on each other. With Quincunx Julie Moon connects tactile and digital. A platform sculpture of overlapping common materials (artificial grass, paper, styrofoam) invites the audience to feel difference beneath our feet. Using a QR code we experience a virtual kaleidoscopic visualization on our phones, later projected in the theater, of geometric shapes employed in the sculpture. Standing on the platform and focusing on the digital is like occupying the space between two mirrors, turning around, trying to catch yourself in the infinite reflections.

I’m wondering why every act that narrate[s] female lived experience ... has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.”

Chris Kraus

Nicole Peisl’s for_rest and Danishta Rivero’s Tejidos/Weavings, or No puedo hablar con mi voz sino con mis voces are active, real-time collaborations. Each have a singular artistic voice, literally and figuratively. Neither sacrifice the power of the individual in art created by the communal. Peisl invites 8 audience members to join her in an improvisation score. She wiggles and extends her entire body in polyrhythms as the volunteers pause and permit her flow to continue. Rivero, with Alexandra Buschman-Román, Rodolfo Córdova, gabby fluke-mogul, and Shanna Sordahl, create a Meredith Monk meets Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music soundscape. Donning flowy white costumes the performers circle a stationary microphone singing vocal rounds and overlaps as Sordahl manipulates and re-engineers electronically. The vocal ensemble thrills in contrasting dulcet tones with warbles and trembles befitting of a horror film. The volume and vocal intensity contrast the slow pacing steps. It’s more than a difference in time signature. It’s outside time.

So often the narrative work I see labeled as “queer” moves with such literalism...My definition of queer art is more defined by a work with a radical internal logic that defies the external logic of its form.

Jeremy O Harris

Chance is an opportunity for play. It’s serendipity, it’s luck, it’s surprising. Chance often leads to laughter whether humorous or uncomfortable. Sophia Wang’s film short, Work in Place, and the Maxe Crandall directed - Karla Quintero choreographed performance, STOP PLAY, puncture the reverence of experimentation that’s become canonical to let out the laughing gas necessary to experiment. In Work in Place, Wang performs repetitive acts with frequent collaborator Brontez Purnell. The colors and shapes and repetitions of the set pieces and editing make a postmodern dance PeeWee’s Playhouse. In STOP PLAY, Crandall and Quintero enter with Danny Thanh Nguyen and Julie Moon, all adorned in queer archetype: the leather daddy, the diva, the Parisian effete, the swinging ‘60s go-go dancer. Conceived as a soap opera suite, its balance of playfulness and craft is too delicious to recap. Each of the performers commit to melodrama: Quintero’s gaze as she’s dragged across the floor, Nguyen’s crack of a bullwhip (yes!), Moon’s affected slouch, and Crandall’s acerbic-cum-twee line readings. I wish STOP PLAY were a soap I could tune into every week.

The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

Josef Albers

Imagining Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a pas de deux, that is Dazaun Soleyn’s (Study)one. Murky lighting and a backlit cyc create spatial density and division. Dancers Claire Fisher and Frankie Lee Peterson III move independent of each other while maintaining a shared energy. We see one dancer in the light and another’s shadow grow and shrink. Is it an echo, a memory? When does the illusion of connection become reality? The brief partnering between Fisher and Peterson is referential to Cunningham’s partnering of support not control. In Moves Cords Names Christy Funsch distills the intersection of legacy, work, and influence. Nol Simonse dances a construction made of “shards” of a 19 year collaboration with Funsch. Courtney Moreno coils up audio cords. Behind them is a projection of Funsch reading aloud the names of “100 people who have positively impacted her dance making,” but will unlikely be celebrated with centennials. The three alchemize into a meditation on time. How memory becomes present. How actions coil and uncoil never ending. 

Understand or die.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

In a profile on Merce Cunningham and company, dance critic Deborah Jowitt writes of the dancers’ curiosity about Merce after she interviews him. He never shared information about the dances with them beyond the steps and had she learned anything more? She had not. The notorious aloofness of Cunningham the man extends to his dances. There is nothing extra to interpret. What is seen is what is shared. Which is why Alex Escalante’s PARIS is a gift to all Cunningham fans and dance history nerds. Escalante bobs and hustles as his voice-over tells a deeply humanizing anecdote about working as Cunningham’s assistant. The type of mishap ensues that in the moment is peril and with time can be shared with laughter and a quick pulse. 

The bond of humanity and risk is at the crux of the Cunningham repertory restaging. Bukowski, Traci Finch, Emily Hansel, and Stacey Yuen dance excerpts from Change of Address (1992), Roaratorio (1983), Fluid Canvas (2002), Scramble (1967), and BIPED (1999) in two parts in the program. The four dancers are strong and technically deft in the demanding movement. They curve, leap, rise, twist, and extend in the signature counterpoint of overlapping speed. Embodying the virtuosity of the Cunningham spine requires more time than a residency allows. Even considering the limits of restaging Cunningham dances the element of his work and legacy I longed for at program’s end is risk. Scroll through the mercetrust Instagram and witness the synthesis of risk and humanity (Holley Farmer’s Loose Time solo). Like spinal acuity there is little time to foster this synthesis in the short term. Yet risk may be what is necessary to keep legacy work from becoming relic. There is a desire for risk in all the works in conversation with Cunningham. Can we see his legacy as more than chances and systems? Can risk be centered without sacrificing integrity? Can we reckon with one artist’s methods beyond integration into our processes? Merce Cunningham’s technique and choreography requires extending beyond accepted limits into new space. As we hold space for legacy I’m confident there will be many more conversations to come.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, California. He is the co-director of Wax Poet(s), company member of Dana Lawton Dances, and performs regularly with Oakland Ballet.