Life as a Modern Dancer

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.

In Review: Borders, Spaces and Brown Eyes with the Davalos Dance Company

Borders, Spaces and Brown Eyes

Davalos Dance Company

October 5, 2019

Shawl-Anderson Dance Center

By Bhumi B. Patel

I have brown eyes and am taller than the average Gujurati woman. My relationship to brown is knowing it to be the way I was born, like my mother, and her mother. And that feels acutely relevant to writing about Davalos Dance Company’s 25th Anniversary Season at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center October 5th and 6th. Borders, Spaces and Brown Eyes is a reimagining, a reiteration, a revival of a work presented 25 years ago. In the 90s, there was a widespread belief that assimilation was the answer to being embraced by white culture. (This is astutely pointed out in the 1997 hit film Selena when Abraham Quintenilla says “We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans, more American than the Americans. Both at the same time. It’s exhausting.”) 

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.

The first section, titled Borders, tells us the story of one dancer, Rogelio Lopez, and the borders that he faces, both physical and emotional. Touched with humor, I found myself alone in my lack of laughter, having felt the same weight holding shoes in a shoe store waiting for an employee to offer help. Lopez reminds the audience of something he was told, “up here, no one helps Mexicans.” This invisibility felt by most who live near the margins feels hard to laugh at, but if you’ve never experienced that, perhaps humor makes it more palatable. 

As the piece continues, the dancers evolve from all black costumes into garments that are colorful, garments that represent their cultures, garments that seem to feel like a lightness, like something of a mask has been shed. The third section saw caution tape spread through the space in a Z creating narrow triangles of space for two dancers, Edgar Mendez and Felicia Cazares, to move in and eventually break out of. As I watched the tape unravel across the space I couldn’t help but think of how for so many black and brown folks throughout history being born has been a crime. And, the very act of being born in the borderlands turns your body and your life into the battlefield upon which a myth of a war continues to be fought.

In the fourth section of the work, Leaving, I felt a swell of glee in my heart seeing two performers, Catalina O’Connor and Lopez, upon wooden boxes perform traditional ballet folklorico steps with heeled shoes in percussive polyrhythms. This foreshadowing returns in full force during the last section, Brown Eyes, where dancers perform in front of the Virgen de Guadalupe, a cultural icon representing the Chicano movement. I could have watched the dancers perform folklorico steps in bare feet for the entire evening (which is not to say the other dancing wasn’t beautiful, it was). And to me, the ultimate question I was left with was: why do we need the white (modern) form of movement at all? As I watched these beautiful dancers spiral in and out of the floor, almost touch the ceiling in tour jetes, stretch into deep lunges, this question just kept repeating in my mind. The traditional is enough. The folk is enough. The individual stories accounting their relationships to being invisible juxtaposed against being seen in a form that hasn’t always been accepted is enough. Despite asking myself this question about the place of whiteness, what stood out to me was the tone of celebration and jubilation and the feeling that each dancer had a moment to be seen.

This work isn’t trite. It isn’t the story of the immigrant who found the American dream. It doesn’t insist that we are one humankind. Instead, it honors and holds each individual in the cast, and asks us to look at them, to see them, to use our eyes to hold them in this space where, whether it was last century or last year, they each come from a lineage that gave up everything to travel here and find a home. 

 

Bhumi B. Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist who creates intersectionally feminist, multidisciplinary art to explore the contradictions of her inner landscape where she is brown, queer, working class, and a woman. She works from a trauma informed, social justice oriented perspective. Her work traverses dancing, choreographing, curating, educating, writing, and scholarship. Patel is on faculty at West Valley College, Lone Mountain Children’s Center, and Shawl-Anderson Dance Center. Patel’s work has been presented at SAFEhouse Arts, LEVYsalon, Shawl-Anderson Salon, max10, Studio 200, Molissa Fenley and Friends, Summer Performance Festival, RAWdance's Concept Series, and the first Queering Dance Festival. Patel has curated “fem(me),” a performance of femme-identified, radical queers, for SAFEhouse Arts and the National Queer Arts Festival since 2017 and has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle and Life as a Modern Dancer.

In Review: Queering Dance Festival, Program A

Aiano Nakagawa. Photo by Lydia Daniller.

In Review: Queering Dance Festival, Program A

By Todd Courage

Frolic, the 1^st annual Queering Dance Festival, conceived of and presented by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center’s ever-expanding support of dance everywhere and for all people, kicked off at the Waterfront Playhouse on Thursday, September 19^th and ran through the 22^nd. Two programs featured eleven visions by Bay Area dance makers. I felt exceedingly lucky to have been there opening night for Program A.

Peekaboo and jose e abad. Photo by Lydia Daniller.

The inaugural piece of the festival was an excerpt from a longer work titled “to become other than dust” performed by artists jose e abad and Peekaboo. In the upstage right corner, bathed in a “moonlight in the graveyard” illumination, two people provided a strange sound experience. Peekaboo was on cello while abad, armed with a mic and a laptop, created a haunting collage of captured vocal fragments. This type of invocation set a solemn and ceremonial tone that largely permeated the evening. Peekaboo sat in a chair, dressed in black, and pulled sad droning tones from their strings. Their low bellowing notes were reminiscent of Arvo Part’s Fratres but were slathered with abad’s oral pleas – some words intelligible, some merely pieces of words whose messages echoed something more primal. Soon a single mantra looped clearly and earnestly: Trying to find my way back to you. In my attempt to cull meaning from their symbology, I imagined a mystical portal, an entry point, through which all souls regress toward a source of ethereal origin; somewhere untouchable; an immaterial middle space.

When abad deserted their fabricated wizardry of sound tech to an upright movement exploration, heaven split open. Like some kind of spiritual visitation, their movement quality transcended all predictable patterns and crossed over into an immediate enactment of the extra-mundane, supported by animated flesh, but borrowed only as a vehicle to access this other place. This kind of dancing is rare, queer even, as it requires the dancer to reject performative conventions for something more insular. Less “look at me” than “look into me.” Public solitude.

abad’s quiet movement picked up speed and assumed the frenetic tone of a sort of exorcism as they thrashed and jerked and spilled and convulsed. Resolve was inevitable, and just like that, they were writhing poetically centerstage, soft and submissive, as their words faded to a whispering incantation, “Trying to find my way back to you. Trying to find my way back to you. Trying to find …”

The second piece on the program, although equally sobering, was made up of more disparate sections, a pastiche of loosely related parts autobiographically addressing choreographer Jesselito Bie’s multi-layered challenge of living with AIDS. He named the piece "D-Man Redux," a blatant reference to Bill T. Jones’ 1989 work titled "D-Man in the Waters" that was created partially in honor of his company member Demian Acquavella who, like so many at that time, was quickly deteriorating from the disease. Bie’s dance opened with himself and two additional dancers behind a microphone gleefully sing-songing Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-Flat Major, the very same opus used by Jones. Overlaying phrases, the likes of “Bill T. Jones is SOOOO pretentious,” accompanied this bit. A spoken litany of other famous gay male artists who passed as a result of AIDS followed: Keith Haring, Alvin Ailey. A short section of cinematographic poses for the trio who illuminated each other with lighters followed, strangely beautiful and somber.

Soon, in conjunction with readings of short narratives written by strangers recounting how and when their AIDS diagnosis was revealed to them, Bie spun his own account. “I have AIDS,” he said. “There’s no cure. I take meds. I don’t work. I depend on the government.” What made all of this interesting was not so much the loaded topic, or even the candid way with which the dance-maker disclosed his hardship. It was fascinating because, like any redux, he brought back a genre that, for the most part, hasn’t been seen since the steep decline in AIDS-related deaths as the result of the many effective medical advancements made that treat HIV infection.

Another bittersweet imperative was the tone in which all of this was presented; a sort of “Why him and not me?” note permeated the satirical nature of the piece. Jones has risen to super-stardom (involving both fame and, I suspect, fortune) while publicly owning his own diagnosis, whereas a coast away, Bie suffers separate indignities meted out by a suspicious and callous government. Both make solid dances.

Almost out of nowhere, a sweeping “modern” variation emerged, replete with the Jones-esque signatures of inventive lifts and atypical partnering. While I watched this, I was trying to find the relationship between the callow facial expressions of dancers Rhea Speights and Kevin Wong, and the more pained countenance of Bie. After conducting some cursory research into the creation of Jones’ D-Man, I came to understand that, as a result of the debilitating character of AIDS in the 80s, Acquavella could no longer walk by opening night but was integrated into the dance anyway. Knowing this helped me organize, in retrospect, some of these outward interpretations.

There were some gaffes too. A la Jones, the trio incorporated copious belly slides, one that included a collision between one dancer’s nose and another dancer’s ass.

Did the piece work? I guess that the bigger questions are “Does that matter?” and “According to whom?” Collage is every bit as legitimate as any other visual genre and, in spite of the uneven composition, we recognized structure, bravery, and defiance.

Bhumi Patel’s work, titled "zero," followed. Two dancers (Jordan Wanderer and Katherine House) in black leotards and pants began this sedate undertaking supported by sounds of water and a low drone similar to a fog horn. The night I went, a train blew its whistle. I honestly wasn’t certain if this was part of the track or an isolated coincidence, but its timing was flawless. The aural element complemented a series of deep lunges by the dancers, one toward the other, on a diagonal. A combination of arm-initiated gestures in the vein of post-Judson Church vocabulary intervened.

Both artists were profoundly committed to their physical tasks and also seemed to have had infinite classical ballet training, but I felt that the material slightly under-challenged their palpable promise and kinesthetic expertise.

The proverbial diagonal was revised throughout the piece, a traditional modern throwback where dancers look longingly toward, allude to, or walk that italicized path that often symbolizes a dimension outside of our own. It has always been a dependable choreographic tool and, in this instance, was no less powerful. Because the space was small, it was in fact a judicious way to move bodies and gained ground as a geometric motif.

The lighting design for this work provided a lot of its magic and lent some of the more innocuous passages their attending gravitas. One beautiful moment involved the two dancers recumbent, one sleeping while the other rotated on their side until their feet were slowly trudging over first the legs, and then the hips and rib cage of their motionless counterpart. A simple idea to maximum effect.

To the choreographer’s credit, "zero" did not end with dancers dramatically moving in the direction of a “diagonal somewhere,” but instead coupled them in sweet unity, bathed in golden light, backs to the audience, and slipping upstage toward night.

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.

Next up was a lighter offering by dance artists Malia Byrne and Melissa Lewis. Their “Tube Top Manifesto” opened with two women shedding their jackets to reveal their upper bodies, each wrapped in a tube top. “Thank you for joining us as we celebrate tube top awareness month,” says Byrne. A tongue-in-cheek spectacle challenging the “hetero patriarchy” by way of a tube top performance convo unfurled. Their gleeful foray into the social impact of the tube top took many turns. A mimed catalogue of spoken absolutes revealed that the tube top is made “for all bodies,” and is “the site of the revolution” … “outside of consumerist, capitalist structures!” “Everyone is hot in a tube top,” Byrne reminds us. I began to wonder if the patriarchy, too, might soften, cooperate, “hotten,” or even surrender swaddled in such a thing. Worth trying out.

With the fade of a light, Byrne finds herself on a stool with a guitar singing an anthem addressing impending change while Lewis, right on cue, swaps one tube top for another, and then another. A spoken word ode, to the tube top of course, fortified their zany thread as Lewis waxed stoically about the freedoms afforded the tube top wearer and the relationship between uncolonization and her bare shoulders and collar bones. A giggling audience was testimony of her spot-on delivery. Stage right, Byrne changed tubes and took selfies, even venturing into the bleachers to enlist the help of a random viewer who also snapped some impromptu photos. A brilliant conceit.

A wonderful section involving a unison, slinky modern dance combination to Nelly Furtado’s I’m Like a Bird was the next surprising ingredient of this fresh mash up. Breathy turns that released to the floor led to knee slides and whiplash spinal pulsings. As one would hope, the tops came down, and by virtue of light and darkness, we were confronted with a horizontally divided space wherein Lewis and Byrne exist tubeless but no less vulnerable. How nudity was suggested behind shadow was a smart and stunning effect, their glowing décolletage hovering independently over breasts residing in near darkness. Soon the two were confined within a single tube top, a funny and satisfying gag that lent levity to the evening generally. The piece wrapped up (no pun) with Byrne and Lewis enacting a type of tug-of-war within their giant black band of stretchy fabric, smiling, balancing, focusing, and eventually crumpling into a good-natured pile of their two bodies.

Malia Byrne and Melissa Lewis. Photo by Lydia Daniller.

The voice of Connie Francis ushered in the last presentation of the evening. “Who’s sorry now?” she crooned. Soon, a woman in a black skirt and tank matter-of-factly built a stage set from a chair, a glass, a lamp, and a vanity mirror. From a little drawer, soloist Aiano Nakagawa, the choreographer and the performer, proceeded to engage in small tasks that remained somewhat elusive to the viewer but that held a mystery of ritual, of specialness. The dark lighting supported her secret world: a potion was poured, her earrings shone bright, old photographs were methodically displayed with extreme care. Nakagawa cast her spell with patience and poise. Two fingers designating extra-ordinary possibility waved and pointed. A strange crawling pattern moved the dancer from her boudoir to the more liminal performance clearing. Here, never letting go of her established point of view, the performer supplely and reverently bent backwards, stood upright, and turned seamlessly into a walking design that followed an invisible ring on the floor. Fluid, embracing contractions initiated a series of enigmatic gestures that renewed a theme while introducing yet more riddles. What could a piece titled "92/swell" be trying to tell me, I asked myself. Spoken text, superimposed over synthesized tones, alluded to a woman, a priestess, and imbued the dance with more cryptic messages.

An astonishingly fluid mover, Nakagawa floated through a section of watery movement, swaying elegantly against a spirit-invoking sound element. This dancer’s movement capacity was uncanny. I had not seen such liquidity from a dancing body in a very long time. It’s a peculiar and enviable quality shared by few. Nakagawa’s was a summoning of numerous components: some plainly physical, others of a more spiritual kind.

 

Todd Courage is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance scholar. He is currently artistic director of courage group and continues to build a diverse repertory of work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Queering Dance Festival - A Verb of One’s Own

Snowflake Towers. Photo by Lydia Daniller.

Queering Dance Festival - A Verb of One’s Own

By Garth Grimball

 

Smear the Queer. 

Queer as a Three Dollar Bill. 

Queer as Folk. 

We’re Here, We’re Queer, Don’t F*ck With Us, We’re Fabulous!

For many of us “queer” was what not to be. It was threatening, exposing, and led to violence. Thrown at us like a verbal molotov cocktail; meant to harm the recipient and notify the public of a conflict. A conflict of identity. And yet, time moves gayly forward, and language, the most mutable of (popular) culture, is queer and unreliable and difficult and crucial.

We repurpose and redefine words thrown at us to empower us. Gay is Good. Black is Beautiful. Disability is not Inability. 

Queer is….?

This September saw the inaugural Queering Dance Festival presented by Shawl-Anderson Dance Center over the course of 10 days in various East Bay locations. The identity held in this festival is present as a verb, not a noun. What is it to queer dance?  The five original dance works of QDF’s Program B struggle and delight in acts of story, body, and collectivity.

The program opener is “Seeds and Sequins,” a solo performance by Snowflake Towers. Towers enters in darkness commanding the space with her powerful voice calling out and a buffalo rattle keeping rhythm. The live vocalization gives way to a pre-recorded voice-over as the lights reveal Towers moving through different scenarios, living and re-living each moment simultaneously. We hear an immigration and assimilation story of her family, centering on labor, visible and invisible. The visible labor of her family’s agricultural work planting seeds. The invisible labor of being an outsider in an outsider community; the labor of passing, presenting as someone else. Towers transforms, donning a gold sequin gown. The speakers pulse with Respect’s “I Am What I Am.” Towers is a glam goddess. She lip syncs and sashays honoring the seeds planted and sharing the fruits of her labor.

Frances Sedayao’s “Momentary Lapse” begins with Sedayao bathed in a pool of light and the sound of a heart beat monitor. Sedayao’s body winds and unwinds. Another body enters the space. Laura Renaud-Wilson drags a chair to upstage center, sits, and stares forward like a stoic monument. The dramatic tension in “Momentary Lapse” lives in the chemistry of Sedayao and Renaud-Wilson. They speak in ellipses interrupting, finishing, complicating each other’s narratives. Their bodies link, support, and abandon in kind. When a loved one dies do we let a part of ourselves die too? How did we create together? The performers negotiate how to start (over) when presence and absence bleed together.

Quaking, shaking, convulsing. Technical displays serving peak body. “Disclosure” by Mark Travis Dance toggles between theatrics and virtuosity. Styles Alexander and AJ Guevara dance this male-male pas de deux with expansive physical reach and awareness. The choreography is big, almost too big for the intimacy of the theater. The intimacy allows the audience to feel the effort and the body in this dance. The breath, sweat, and skin of the body is the thesis in “Disclosure.” Alexander and Guevara’s dancing emphasizes the physical impact and release in partnering. They cradle and toss. They challenge and compete. In the midst of leaps and turns Travis incorporates gesture to muddling effect. The gestures are grounding when given space to breathe and lean into melodrama as passing references. The dance ends as it begins. A body alone in spasm, but met with the support of a partner.

JanpiStar. Photo by Lydia Daniller.

JanpiStar’s “Ameliorate” is a Robert Andy Coombs photograph come to life. Desire and the presentation of desire to question how desire communicates. JanpiStar enters back to us. Bare torso save a bright red-orange harness (popular attire at events like Folsom St and Dore Alley). The solo performance is languorous and tactile. Hands move with grace and power caressing the body, wheeling the chair, down to the floor and back up in teetering balances. Their gaze and physical focus gradually move from floor to sky. Caresses become slaps on the body creating a rhythm as their arms reach upward and eyes follow.

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.

So. Queer is….?

Perhaps queer need not be a slogan or an anthem. So much of activism and identity is commodified into branding. There is power in numbers but freedom in ambiguity. If the dance in this festival is any indication, queering is an act of devotion without limits.

Stephanie Hewett. Photo by Lydia Daniller.

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.

*Editor's note = the review of Program A of the Queering Dance Festival will be published by October 10th.

timesTWO: Writers Molly Rose-Williams and Todd Courage Reflect on the FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

It has been a wonderful experiment throughout the past year, diving into dance criticism and reflection on this blog platform. What are the various new angles and approaches to writing about performances - before, during, and after? We are exploring this with artists, audience members, and writers alike.

This week you can read our latest take on dance criticism. Two writers share their reflections on the four pieces of choreography in the 2019 FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival. How might the same performance be viewed through different eyes? How might their perspectives layer to offer a unique opportunity for reflecting on and celebrating the work they write about? 

Please join us! Today we reflect on "BackstitchBack" by Charles Slender-White.

"BackstickBack" by Charles Slender-White. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Take 1 - from Molly Rose-Williams:

The piece began with amber light streaming down the back wall to illuminate a line of five performers dressed in ornate, old-timey dresses and rompers. They moved with simple gestures in shifting groups of unison - sometimes all five together, and other times in groups of two or three mirrored figures. Layers of music, and a voice speaking the lyrics of “These Are The Days” in a deadpan tone offered a compelling audio backdrop. A single performer soon left the wall to deliver a lyrical performance downstage, and then returned to join the back line. 

The five fanned out, filling the stage and executing sweeping, graceful movements with formal lyricism and high skill. Chime-like voices in the audio track began counting from 1 to 6, then 1 to 8, alternating back and forth between the two counts with a cyclic regularity. The cycling numbers, lingering sentiment of “These Are The Days”, and (to my eye) old-timey costuming painted the piece with a tone of nostalgia. 

Then a man’s voice like a minister delivering a sermon layered into the soundscore over a violin. “Sometimes at the end of the day we need a story to relax,” he intoned. He launched into telling a story about a man and a woman sitting on a bench. The woman kept asking the man for reassurances of his love for her, and he kept providing them. Dancers Amanda Whitehead and Keanu Brady moved forward to interpret the story with more formal, lyrical choreography while the entire stage continued to constantly remake itself as all five moved through intricate, interlocking patterns.

I was struck by many of the elements in this piece - the costumes, the lighting, the soundscore, the impeccable skills of the dancers, and the interplay between ensemble and individual - but I wasn’t entirely sure how to read the whole, especially in relation to the love story that to me felt somewhat gendered and stereotypical. Specifically, I wasn’t sure where this tone of nostalgia was meant to land in relation to the story, the costumes, and the formal movement, which together evoked for me a sense of restrictive institutions and times past. In light of this reading, I found myself not enjoying the airy, lines-for-days dancing and intricate patterning in the way that I think, given a different handful of elements, I would have immensely.

Take 2 - from Todd Courage:

Charles Slender-White, Artistic Director of FACT/SF and the producer of FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival, was the last choreographer of the evening to unveil his latest creation "BackstitchBack." The piece opened in visually arresting Slender-White style. Mr. Medoff’s lighting produced two giant luminous arches wherein resided five bodies. These dancers, four women and one man, stood in stoic profile against the bare upstage wall à la bas relief, each with one palm affirming the dark concrete, feet parallel. Two dancers wore dresses. All wore blood-red socks. Slender-White’s penchant for design was as much on display here as his passion for dance. I suspect that he doesn’t limit dance solely to the category of “performing art,” but in fairness, appreciates the potential conversation of all things perceivable and the attending chance for great beauty. Past works, like this one, have attested to his interest in sculptural statement and the echoing impact that varied visual textures and layers can provide.

Intermittently, dancers began to break away from their source of origin, moving downstage in minimally advancing variations, challenging the proximity of their audience, only to retreat upstage again, tag up quickly, and then re-engage with the open floor and each other. A separate couple remained attached to the wall where they performed a slow, tactile duet in unison. It was at this point that a juxtaposition of opposites began to take shape. Billed as “the first iteration of Slender-White’s diptych on the looping nature of memory formation and memory loss,” this part of "BackstitchBack" could have symbolized one or the other of these phenomena, or a composite of both simultaneously. Either way, the choreographer’s gift for counterpoint grounded the work in craft and idea. At its strongest, the piece assumed the spirit of an abstract morphing movement collage, solos becoming duets, evolving into trios. At times the disparate nature of the many moving parts was reminiscent of a Greek chorus as a foundation for more specific bits and pieces that happened in and around it. Form and relationships seem to be additional passions for Slender-White. His uncanny ability to blend and synthesize complex patterns is dizzying and how his spatial configurations related to the aural element of excerpts from Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach curiously supported the dancing. “Just lean into it,” he offered when asked about his use of the now-famous score. While watching, I took his advice and emerged deeply satisfied. “My love for you is higher than the heavens, deeper than Hades, and broader than the earth. It has no limits, no bounds. Everything must have an ending except my love for you.” The audience succumbed to the breathy tonality of Glass’s text as we watched the dancers curl away from us in fetal stillness, a developmental posture, and yet so quickly forgotten as new memories crystallize.

 

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

Todd Courage is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance scholar. He is currently artistic director of courage group and continues to build a diverse repertory of work in the San Francisco Bay Area.