Life as a Modern Dancer

Juilliard’s “New Dances” Showcases Strings and Socks

Juilliard’s “New Dances” Showcases Strings and Socks

By Garth Grimball

Alicia Graf Mack, dean and director of Juilliard Dance, introduced the department’s “New Dances” program with now-familiar caveats: dance rehearsals followed public health guidelines; in-person and Zoom process; casts of no more than 8 dancers; no touching or partnering; lastly, within restrictions creativity flourishes. If only that were true of this program. The dancing is virtuosic and passionate. The dances are bland and long.

Four choreographers, Tiler Peck, Sonyah Teh, Bobbi Jene Smith, and Matthew Neenan, created original works on the students of the Juilliard Dance Department. Are there obstacles this new generation of dancers can’t handle? 

Dancing for camera - check. Creating work under the confines of health precautions antithetical to dance making - check. Ignoring the swamp-face from strenuous activity in a mask to the point of seeming like it’s totally natural - check. Their verve and commitment to dance inspires.

Peck’s “Broad and Free” builds vocabulary out of attitude turns, enveloppé​, and port de bras above the head. The choreography follows Caroline Shaw’s piano and violin composition, never going against the music, but cruising in the wake of its melancholy. The structure and staging have the forward-facing unison common to competition dances. At one point the music slips into a mazurka and Peck quotes Balanachine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.”

For “End, Middle, Beginning” Sonya Teh brings the viewer into the piece with cinema-verite-style filming. The camera moves through the wings onto the stage and out into the audience. For the rest of the piece the viewpoint is mostly static with crossfades as transitions. Group floorwork interrupted by standing solos define the dance. The interruptions lack the punch of creating a ceiling and breaking it, feeling more like a knock on the attic door. The somber music of Son Lux dulls Teh’s creative ideations on the Graham-Gaga lineage.

Speaking of Gaga, Bobbi Jene Smith’s “Ways of Listening” is a parade of solos overflowing with the pelvic floor and energetic mania endemic to the technique. Smith’s choreography and staging is the most dynamic in its use of the theater space. Thankfully she goes against the Nico Muhly cello (more strings) solo played live on stage. “Ways of wanting to be heard” is a more apt description of the dance. Soloists center the action while the rest of the cast stand still observing. The lunges, turns, gestures, and leaps become shouts into the void because of the static listening. Smith breaks the only-8-dancers rule in her climax. Twenty one bodies fill the stage in a tightly structured mix of unison and variations.

Matthew Neenan’s “The Solo 7,” set to String (!) Quintets by Mozart, has the idiosyncrasies of a dance made 10 years ago. Remember between 2009 to 2013 when every contemporary dance had the “flick” gesture (arms unfurl out and snap quickly at the wrist)? “The Solo 7” is of the era when ballet choreographers decided to incorporate the “flick” and other contemporary dance gestures into classical vocabulary. The dance has three costume changes: muted pedestrian, monochrome floor-length dresses, unison brown and black ensembles. The sartorial variation has little effect on the mood or tone of the piece.

Other than being set to strings, all of the dances have one commonality: socks. When did the mid-ankle length sock become the contemporary dance uniform, like pointe shoes to ballet? Each dance used the exact same type of socks, no variation in length or material. I love dancing in socks. It’s comfortable. Socks signify a coziness that contradicts the groundedness of modern dance, the connection to the earth. The Juilliard dancers move with precision and abandon. But through the screen and through the socks, the weight of a body floats away.

New Dances: Edition 2020-21 is available to stream for free on the Juilliard YouTube channel for 1 year.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the Reference Desk podcast and is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective.

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In “FRAMEWORK,” Kristin Damrow & Co Explore The Body Inside And Out

Dancers Brandon Graham,  Anna Greenberg Gold, Sawako Ogo, Sam Grayson, and Allegra Bautista. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

 

In “FRAMEWORK,” Kristin Damrow & Co Explore The Body Inside And Out

By Garth Grimball

Kristin Damrow knows how to produce live art. Since “Eames” premiered in 2018 in San Francisco, Kristin Damrow & Company has been making dances that are design-forward, thoughtfully staged, and detail conscious. “FRAMEWORK,” presented at The Lab on June 3-4, builds on the company’s reputation of impressive execution while plateauing in movement invention.

“FRAMEWORK” is billed as an immersive experience of the skeletal structure and biomechanics. The Lab gallery had three 12-feet high white, monolithic structures cutting through the space at different angles. A striking paper sculpture, made by Damrow, hung from the ceiling like a diorama of vertebrae or layers of skin peeled back. On the back wall a projector showed images of biomass at a cellular level.

Damrow invited the audience to move through the space letting yourself miss some things and discover others. Throughout the show she led by example and the audience followed suit, creating our own swirling biomass. I walked, sat, squatted, leaned, stood still. I was more aware of my skeleton by moving through the space than if the show were a seated event. The audience accepted Damrow’s invitation to immerse.

Allegra Bautista, Brandon Graham, Sam Grayson, Anna Greenberg Gold, and Sawako Ogo entered in black pants and semi-translucent yellow anoraks cropped at the waist. In a line they leaned against one of the monoliths touching their heads to its surface. Delicate moments like this heightened the sense of architecture’s precarity; no matter the strength of the materials the assembling is key to integrity. The dancers disassembled and assembled in solos, group choreography, and stillness.

Kristin Damrow & Company. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

The choreography began with motifs on waves and distal ends. Erect arms acted like a compass for the body to rotate around. Deep lunges were the base for torsos to ripple and sway like bamboo scaffolding. One movement phrase evoked the jelly bones of Trisha Brown—side step into a curtsy lunge as the arms slice across the upper body, using the momentum to change directions.

The motifs recurred throughout the dance but the dominant movement vocabulary became contemporary modern: sickled-foot developpes, pirouettes, body undulations to the floor. All danced beautifully by a technically skilled cast, but the connection to the concept spread thin as “FRAMEWORK” progressed. At the work’s beginning I was truly considering the skeleton. By the end the body’s architecture was backgrounded by dance moves that lacked the specificity imbued in the performance space.

Composer Aaron Gold’s score is replete with hooks and beat drops. Part of the evening’s choreography was the swaying and head bobbing of audience members. As the dancers reached their energetic apex though the music had a flattening effect. There was little sonic space left to ratchet up the energy.

“FRAMEWORK” succeeded in its mission to create an immersive dance experience. Walking through The Lab’s gallery was an orgy of sound, visual art, and bodies in motion. The work’s skeleton could use a few more bones.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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“Four by Four” by Emily Hansel: Reflections on Product as Process

Mia J. Chong, Chelsea Reichert, and Alex Carrington (left to right). Photo by Steve Disenhof Photography.

 

“Four by Four” by Emily Hansel: Reflections on Product as Process

By Molly Rose-Williams

A few weeks ago, I went to a friend’s art opening. It was held in the front room of a large Victorian with lofty ceilings and hip-to-ceiling windows that shone with dusky light. Her prints meandered like a black and white stream around white walls, and lay across a large table in the middle of the room. I started at the table, magnetized towards a small paper box with printed accordion fold-outs that stretched into printed images of verdant greenery.

“That didn’t turn out how I meant it to.” Artist Olivia Arau McSweeney looked on as I pumped the box open and closed, printed sides folding and unfolding in paper pleats. She picked up another small box to my right and pulled it open like an accordion. “See? This was my prototype.” The blank sides on hers stretched flat, while mine stayed furrowed and off-kilter. “I made a sketch of how it’s supposed to work here.” She pointed at a series of diagrams drafted with an engineer’s precision. “I think the ink affected the folding action?” 

She replaced the box on the table. “Anyway, let me know if you have any questions while you’re looking around!” I nodded and she drifted away to greet a cluster of new arrivals.

Last Friday night, sitting in the ODC theater at Emily Hansel’s newest work, “Four By Four,” I couldn’t help but think of Olivia’s show. Though the setting (a dark and drafty theater), the art form (moving bodies on stage), the context (a “completed” work at the culmination of a month's long rehearsal process), and the themes explored (a “messy attempt at refusing productivity” and an exploration of “not knowing”) were distinct, both shows felt like invitations to enter the work through process instead of product. These invitations came not in the form of written descriptions or verbal explanation, but instead by way of the art itself. Both Olivia and Emily used the languages native to their work (sketches, paper prototypes, and choreography) to reveal the processes that had given birth to what we were seeing. 

In doing so, both bodies of work unfolded for me in unexpectedly rich ways. Olivia’s folding box became not just a beautiful and clever paper contraption, but a study on iteration, noticing, and the unpredictability of working with uncontrollable materials like paper and ink. “Four By Four” became a series of infinitely branching questions around the communicative potential of moving bodies on stage—Is movement innately meaningful? What limits and potential do moving bodies have for precision in communication? To what extent is the meaning of a movement shaped by its context (physical, compositional, historical, sonic etc.)? How are all these things the same or different from other forms of communication? And on and on. By the end of the show, I was swimming in a gentle glow of non-verbal intention, clear that something had been given to me, but not yet able to put words to it.

The show took place in three 15 to 20 minute chunks of dancing separated by two 5 minute pauses. During each pause, we were invited to get up and stretch, chat with our neighbors, or do whatever else we wanted—a sort of choose-your-own-adventure palette cleanser. The chunks of dancing read like triplets to me—clearly of the same family, but different enough from one another to feel like separate entities. They became synergistically more fascinating when presented alongside one another. 

Dancers and co-creators, Alex Carrington, Mia J. Chong, Shareen DeRyan, and Chelsea Reichert, danced in every section. Each wore an outfit of monochrome pastel—orange, pink, lavender, and yellow—and their movements stayed in a similarly narrow register throughout. I saw mechanical clocks and ballerinas, swooping birds, a wind-up toy, a water toss, a dog tail-wagging, hugs, butt scoots, and body rolls. Mostly, they moved with a kind of gentle staccato of linear arm, hand and leg gestures, accented by brief moments of stillness, a curve of the spine, spiraling turns, or minor upticks in speed. 

It was often unclear if what I was witnessing was improvised or set—the movements were precise, and movement themes consistent enough to make me suspect it must be at least partially set. But they moved with a fluidity and presence that suggested spontaneous composition. After speaking with Emily after the show, I learned that the the first five minutes of the show were fully improvised—an open score to help the dancers “enter the work” from a place of authenticity as opposed to rote memorization—and that after that, the invitation to “do what you want at any time” applied at all times. “It meant every night was different,” explained Emily. 

Shareen DeRyan. Photo by Steve Disenhof Photography.

On the night that I went, each section felt like variations of the same dance—a liberally-imagined remix of the same modest vocabulary of post-modernesque movements. The first was a tour of solos, duos, trios, and quartet dancing. It felt like the most formally-constructed of the three sections, with the dancers following clear geometric pathways across the floor, and each movement section unfolding with a kind of symmetrical linearity. The formality broke down towards the end, when the dancers all went to exit the stage by scooting on their butts backwards through the curtain. The first three of them made it without a hitch, but Chelsea Reichert was left struggling alone, unable to quite make it to the curtain despite her absurdly gargantuan effort. She finally abandoned the task and closed the piece with a stunning solo downstage to the mournful croon of a cello.

The second section started in a single pool of rectangular light. Chelsea Reichert and Shareen DeRyan whispered to each other and they constructed a phrase we had seen in the first section. As they “remembered” more and more of the phrase, they moved across the stage through two more rectangular pools of light that grew to hold them. Mia J. Chong and Alex Carrington watched from the side of the stage, whispering to each other as if welcoming us into a most intimate rehearsal moment. The second section ended with the same cello as the first, this time with all four dancers moving before leaving Chelsea, once again, alone onstage.

In the third section, the dancers moved with the most energetic abandon I had seen yet—a kind of modest celebration performed in the vocabulary of post-modern dance. Once again, we saw echoes of moments from the first two sections, remixed and reworked. It ended with the mournful strings, this time leaving just Mia to dance in the glowing orange light.

Throughout, the phenomenally spatial soundscape by Sophia Cotraccia and Ben Juodvalkis served as a central anchor for my meaning-making. Pebbles falling, children laughing, water flowing, and a deep resonating bass that reverberated through my very bones became a dynamic landscape, painting the action onstage as human, nature, spiritual or energetic. I felt invited by the work to follow the imaginary tangents sparked by the vast textural diversity of sound, somehow confident that there wasn’t a single “right” interpretation that I might miss by allowing my imagination to run wild. I think this spaciousness was created in large part through how the dancers witnessed one another, often with gentle smiles that suggested some kind of inside joke hidden between the seams of this formal movement.

Overall, the effect of placing three similar pieces next to each other evoked a similar fascination to what I felt at Olivia’s art opening. It made me want to look, and then look again. Each moment unfolded like that little paper box—one time this, the next time that. The same movements became something new each time I saw them, like the layers of a many-faced kaleidoscope, slowly revealed, face by face. The most conclusive “take away” I can share, is that by the end of the show I felt relaxed and at ease. I look forward to more from Emily Hansel and her collaborators.

Photo by Steve Disenhof Photography.

Molly Rose-Williams is a performer, writer, maker, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. In her writing about dance, she’s interested in exploring language as a tool for amplifying and challenging the unique perspectives that body-based art can offer. When she’s not dancing or writing, she also works as a creative producer for The Nocturnists podcast, teaches cooking and science, and organizes community arts events. www.mollyrosewilliams.com

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Related posts by Emily Hansel:

Relearning Agency: A Dancer’s Call for Collective Action

Cultivating Healthy, Equitable Workplaces for Dancers

Empowering Dancers Through Contracts

 

 

Review/Response: "One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives II" with Peiling Kao Dances

Peiling Kao Dances: One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives II

May 6th & 8th, 2022 

University of Hawai’i, Mānoa Earle Ernst Lab Theater, Honolulu, HI

Reviewed by Christopher Blasdel

Peiling Kao’s dance concert—One Body, Five dances, Six Perspectives II—consisted of a series of short, commissioned dance vignettes from five guest choreographers. Each of the guest choreographers came from differing cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and they infused different themes, costumes, styles, movement, stage props and music into their works, reflecting a great diversity. The only unifying aspect of these five disparate pieces was the dancer herself.

For the first dance project of this series, One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives I, Peiling commissioned dances from five female choreographers. The second iteration focused on male choreographers. Her intention, according to her own words, was to explore the additional gender dynamic in the process of creating dance. She selected her choreographers on the basis of personal relationship, admiration, ethnicities, styles of the work, and her own desire to collaborate.

Like a musician performing a commissioned piece, the dancer must put herself at the will and direction of the choreographer. Peiling asked herself at the outset whether “this dancer’s body can be colonized by the choreographic intentions,” but she demonstrated that her cultivation into each dance piece was both natural,  meaningful and fleeting. She swept through the pieces like a peregrinating spirit incarnating for a brief period within each dance vignette. It is a tribute to Peiling’s great skill and extensive dance vocabulary that she successfully inhabited these dances and made them into her own. The result was a rare opportunity for the audience to experience a wide variety of highly articulate movement and storytelling.

Pele honua mea (Pele of the Sacred Land)

Choreography: Peter Rockford Espiritu

This piece opened the recital with a chanted tribute to the ʻāina—the concept of land that is sacred to Hawaiians. The chant described the location of the theater and its place within the overall hierarchy of land in Hawai’i, starting with the largest land division in the state: the individual island (mokupuni), in this case Oʻahu. The next level of division is moku (Kona, referring to the southwest part of Oʻahu), and then the lesser ahupua’a division (Waikīkī), down to the smaller subdivisions (‘ili) and finally to the very small division—the hill upon which the Earle Ernst Lab Theater stands.

Peiling emerged from the darkness clothed in a red and black flowing dress. She was Pele, the volcano goddess, and indeed the back story of the dance referred to a defeat that Pele suffered in a disastrous fight with her sister, Nāmaka o Kahaʻi (Pele is the fire goddess, and Nāmaka is the water goddess, so I assume there is a basic instability in their relationship). The story, according to the choreographer, depicted the resurrection of Pele and the rebuilding of her home (Kilauea) as she recovered from the battle.

Peiling physically narrated this story with elegantly extended arms and legs, taking ownership of the stage (and her world) by creating an expansive sense of space. She used two props, both long sticks, that (to me) resembled serpents, although in this particular context it may be more meaningful to interpret them as moʻo, the traditional Hawaiian lizard (or dragon) that is an elemental, though troubled, water spirit. At one point in the dance, Pele picked up the largest of these moʻo and held it aloft, in a triumphant gesture of fire subduing water. This movement demonstrated mastery of both her dance/storytelling techniques and the energetic ascendency of Pele back into her rightful status as the volcano goddess. After the dance finished and the light faded from the stage, I thought how appropriate this dance was for the opening. It made clear the Hawaiian’s reverence for ‘āina, tradition and mythology that informs the profundity of the Hawaiian culture, and I felt as if I had witnessed a ceremony attended by divine participants.

How Water Disappears

Choreography: Shinichi Iova-Koga

How Water Disappears was danced in total silence with an almost brutal minimalism. The choreography was a reference to butoh, a movement that originated in Japan in the late 1950’s, early 60's and reflected an intense questioning—at least in butoh’s early days—of one’s place in society as a human and an artist.

Whereas Pele knew her destiny and how to reclaim it with broad, expansive movements, Peiling as the butoh dancer remained focused on her inner world, only emerging for brief moments to express wonder, or perhaps a slight annoyance, of things that were going on in her surrounding physical world. Her body seemed to alternate between an inward uncertainty of the spirit and outward exploration of the physical world, and as she shifted perspectives, I felt myself joining her, going inward into my thoughts then outward to the movements onstage. The switching of perspective reminded me of the traditional Japanese bon dance, where villages and local family members welcome home the dead for a few days of food, entertainment and communion with the living. In some of the local dances, for example the Nishimonai bon dance from rural Akita Prefecture, the dancers move in a choreographed line, first facing inward then outward, symbolically alternating between the world of the dead and the living. Gestures emanating from the dancer’s body, it seems, can exist in both.

Iova-Koga described his dance as being based on the theme of water as a life-giving force. He envisioned images of a child discovering the transitory nature of water that collects in the morning rain and evaporates in the midday sun. Both rain and life are evanescent, and one must enjoy them to the fullest while they are with us.

Hapon

Choreography: Gerald Casel

This dance was well-placed as the third piece in concert. Peiling entered the stage dressed in white and, with Debussy’s  Afternoon of the Faun as background music, began dancing in a modern dance style, totally different from the previous segments. Not surprisingly, throughout the piece Peiling demonstrated an impressive mastery of both modern and classical dance techniques.

Afternoon of the Faun (which originally premiered in 1894) is probably best known as the music to which the Ballets Russes legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreographed a sensual and provocative (for the times) dance in 1912. Indeed, shortly into the piece Peiling began to imitate Nijinsky’s iconic hand movements; kneeling low on the floor with palms extended in straight lines or at a 45 degree angle from the body. Guest choreographer Casel, inspired by Nijinsky and Debussy, choreographed this piece in 2019 during a residency at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, but Peiling’s performance was its premiere. The piece was effective, coming as it did immediately after the fiery Pele Honua Mea and the watery, introspective butoh dance. Peiling danced with a clever sense of self awareness, and it was refreshing that she did not take herself too seriously and enjoyed the brief channeling of Nijinskyʻs spirit.

The Sound Keeps Falling

Choreography: Wen-Ching Lin

This piece was a light-hearted and openly humorous respite from the previous works. Holding four bamboo clappers, Peiling moved around the stage to the well-known Taiwanese dance song Chē gū diào. The arrangement of the piece she used however, was done on synthesizer with humorous electronic timbres, creating an absurd, manga-like parody of the music. Peiling danced this absurdity to the fullest, made even more effective by a straight poker-face held throughout the dance. She heightened the cartoonish effect with humorous actions; for example, she perched her clappers on her shoulders, where of course they inevitably fell off. She replaced them, only for them to dislodge once more. The inevitable futility of this unpretentious action reminded me how entertaining simple repetition can be. It added to the cartoonish atmosphere of the choreography and delighted the audience.

To discover the subtext of this dance, however, one apparently had to look beyond its cartoonish veneer. The choreographer explained that he wanted to make the audience consider the present state of traditional folk dances. He asked questions like: How can one keep these dances alive? What is the place of the traditional folk dance in contemporary society? and How do we make them relevant and meaningful in modern society? Indeed, these are important questions, but for the moment I just sat back and enjoyed the funky music and fun dance.

Island

Choreography, visuals and text: Keith Hennessy

The stage set for this dance utilized more props than the other dances, including a very large, seven-pointed star (made by the dancer herself from cardboard, tin foil and decorative paper) suspended at the back of the stage and a large plastic tarp, consisting of colorful segments sewn together and laid out on the floor.

The music was abstract and blended well into the background. Both the star and tarp were reminiscent of simple folk art and contrasted the minimalist stage settings of the previous dances.

Peiling made her way through these props, exploring a relationship with them. She danced with her star, then made her way to the tarp, at times completely covering her body with it so that it seemed as if its patterns and colors had a life of their own—whipping across the stage like a giant flag torn from its pole, or a tent with the errant leg or arm protruding from it.

In preparation for the dance, a stage-hand came on and set up a microphone downstage, indicating  to the audience that something unusual was going to happen. Near the end of the dance, Peiling suddenly broke the “fourth wall” and made her way to the mic to begin reading, in both Chinese and English, from a set of cards she carried. They were simple statements about her life, like “I have become proficient in cooking,” “I bake as well” or “My mother has a Japanese name.” I wondered if these intriguing declarations were scripted on the card or if they were answers to questions the cards poised.

It was refreshing to hear Peiling vocalize during the performance, though I wished she had forgone the use of a microphone and just allowed her voice to resonate in the small theater. Nonetheless, the scripted words spoken at the end of the final dance forged a deeper connection with the audience.

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Peiling’s dances were transparent yet at the same time full of color, imagery and story. In the program notes, Peiling stated that “The performer’s body is the container that transforms movement through space and time into something meaningful to individual viewers.” Although each dance was laden with cultural references that demonstrated, in the dancer’s own words, the “postcolonial body,” each of the five dances allowed the viewer to make their own personal interpretation.

 

Christopher Blasdel resided in Japan for 45 years and is a recognized master of the shakuhachi (Japan’s traditional vertical bamboo flute). He has worked with dancers throughout his career, including the pioneering butoh dancers of the 1970’s: Akira Kasai, Kazuo Ohno and others. He has written numerous reviews for books and concerts for the Japan Times. He presently resides in Hawai’i and teaches a course on Japanese music at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. www.yohmei.com

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Review/Response: "Talking Circle" with Risa Jaroslow & Dancers

From left: Erin Yen, Sharon Dalke, and Chelsea Reichert in Talking Circle. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Risa Jaroslow & Dancers

Talking Circle

May 12, 2022

CounterPulse

By Sima Belmar

One of my favorite things about dance class is the time spent on the sidelines watching others dance. I suppose the main reason why we take turns dancing in smaller groups is to afford each other more space. But we also get to watch each other. We watch to learn, to rest, and to marvel at one another.

This was what it felt like to bear witness to the dancing in Risa Jaroslow & Dancers’ Talking Circle. The six movement collaborators—Sharon Dalke and Pamela Wu-Kochiyama (the “elders” of the dance), and Anna Greenberg Gold, Chelsea Reichert, Cauveri Suresh, and Erin Yen—had me in marveling mode the whole time. Technical, sensual, articulate movers all, each dancer exhibited a bodily surety that I found deeply satisfying. 

The choreography is full of subtle surprises—a head thrown back at an unexpected angle in relation to the shoulders during a spiral to the floor, a wrist oddly cocked, power poses that morph into sloth poses into pin-up poses. There was so much delicious movement and because the CounterPulse theater is an intimate space, I felt close enough to chew it, to taste it.

Talking Circle was driven by the question, “What is the freedom you long for and what will you risk to have it?” (program note). But I didn’t think about freedom when I watched the dance. I thought instead about the word “articulate” as I lapped up the deep lunges, viscous footwork, and eloquent hand gestures. I wondered what I was missing but then, after the show, I listened to Jaroslow, Suresh, and composer Amy X Neuberg talk about the work. Jaroslow explained that the group developed 42 gestures to create their own language. So my experience of the dance as an exercise in articulation (as communication as well as the movement of joints) reflected the process if not the original driving question. It didn’t matter to me that I didn’t understand what the dancers were “saying.” Like an aria in a foreign language, I could ride the beauty of the choreographic specificity. 

Neuberg’s score is a wild ride—acoustic instruments (cello, banjo) collide with ambient sounds (glass breaking, seagulls cawing, ocean waves) and Neuberg’s signature nonsense syllable singing (with some recognizable speech). Sometimes I had to lower the volume on my auditory sense in order to focus on the dancing because the score had such an epic storytelling quality. I’m not usually particularly attentive to lighting design, but I was very conscious of Allen Willner’s sensitivity to subtle shifts in mood as he kept all the dancers in their best light. 

The piece looked like a community being together through the rise and fall of everyday affects—pleasure and pain, sorrow and joy, solemnity and jocularity. I thought, “Is this a coven?  A deconstructed Little Women? Herland?” I did find myself wishing that Dalke and Wu-Kochiyama were given more to do because when they weren’t sitting on the sidelines (perhaps marveling at the others as I was), even their simplest of movements—slow walking, arms moving like the currents of a river—were captivating. 

I wrote a whole dissertation about the relationship of talking to dancing. One chapter focused on the use of ASL in an early work by the Wallflower Order Dance Collective. The specificity of the gestures in Talking Circle often felt like language, which was intentional. The dance begins with these gestures, dancers in duets and trios, sometimes seated, in conversation with each other, performing a sort of call and response. That specificity extends to the lower body, moving out of the typical communicative gesture space, giving pelvises, knees, ankles, and, above all, feet the power of speech. And, for me, whether or not I understand what is being said through the body, I can feel, I can be moved, and I was.

Cauveri Suresh in mustard, center, in Talking Circle. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Sima Belmar hosts the ODC podcast Dance Cast and teaches in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

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Related posts:

Circling Freedom with Risa Jaroslow & Dancers - by Garth Grimball
Artist Profile: Risa Jaroslow
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Review/Response: "Are You There God? It's Me, Jules" with Julie Crothers

Julie Crothers. Photo by Hans Holtan.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Jules

NOHspace, San Francisco

April 15, 2022, 7pm

Choreographed and Performed by Julie Crothers

Original music by Ben Juodvalkis with contributions from Greta Hadley and Jeanne Hadley

Lighting design by Maxx Kurzunski

Review/response by Sima Belmar

I recently listened to a conversation between Wesley Morris and Dr. Daphne A. Brooks about the violence of lists like the Billboard Top 100, in which Brooks makes a strong case against canons in favor of care. In other words, it’s not about whether an artist or artwork deserves to be on a greatness or most popular list, but why a particular artist needed to make the work they made in a particular moment. In 2020, Julie Crothers was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to watch.” And though I agree that Crothers is indeed someone to watch, I’d rather follow Brooks and talk about what makes her work a work of this moment. 

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If you’ve ever identified as a teenage girl and grew up in the 1970s and 80s, you’re probably familiar with Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, a novel about searching for religion, shopping for bras, and having to use pads held in place by a belt in the pre-adhesive tape era of sanitary napkins. Growing up in an interfaith household with a Christian mom and a Jewish dad, Margaret was spiritually lost—Jesus or Hashem? Christmas tree or Hanukah candles? Ham or gefilte fish? Though I grew up with two Jewish parents, I could relate to Margaret’s struggle. I prayed to the Jewish God of the Old Testament (mostly for the continued survival of myself and my parents, sometimes for Jordache jeans) in a combination of English and Hebrew, always signing off, “Thank you, God. Thanks an awful lot”—just like Margaret.

Given my intimacy with Blume’s book, Crothers’ title set me off chuckling before I’d even entered the theater, which was packed to the gills on opening night. Chuckles morphed into guffaws and gasps; my face hurt from smiling for an hour straight. Are You There God? It’s Me, Jules mixes sketch comedy, physical comedy, the multiple embodiments of the work of folks like Anna Deveare Smith and Sarah Jones, and dancing, exquisite dancing. 

The performance begins with a land acknowledgment. Crothers’ took the form of a story, spoken in her own voice with a depth and care I rarely hear from white artists. She situates herself in San Francisco/Ramaytush Ohlone by way of Brentwood, TN, “a rich white suburb of Nashville, and ancestral home of the Cherokee, Shawnee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek peoples.” She talks about field trips to Andrew Jackson’s home and the way her American history education glided by slavery and the trail of tears, burial mounds and stolen land. In that way, her land acknowledgment is itself a performance of reckoning with erasure. She encourages us to find the QR code in the program that leads to  The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone so we can donate funds. She takes her time. It was the first time in my experience that a land acknowledgment felt like more than lip service.

A phone rings in the audience. Jessi Barber answers so I know it’s a plant. (Later, my neighbor’s phone goes off—not a plant, grrrr.) Jessi says, “Hey Jules.” I can barely make out Crothers’ voice as she talks to Jessi from somewhere backstage. Jessi walks on stage, sets a clock for a 2-minute countdown. Crothers enters to an 80s sounding groove in her underwear and tank top, unfurls a long strip of tape on the floor diagonally in front of a clothes rack, and proceeds to set the stage:  she repositions the clothes rack, a music stand, some chairs, a backpack, a bowl, a stool, three blue balloons, a water bottle, and sneakers. She dons red pants and a red blazer, and with ten seconds left, backs up to turn toward the audience before the alarm rings.

“Welcome. You are here and you are welcome here…” This is Jules the preacher and she is here to tell us a “true story” about God. With a convincing warmth that nevertheless borders on a kind of creepy kindness, the preacher explains that God has a big tv made up of billions of screens, one for every person—God is always watching. As she moves to a chair behind the tape, the preacher morphs into God himself: a dude on a chair with his leg up, watching tv and eating snacks, sometimes laughing, sometimes sighing at a cacophony of voices. 

Crothers’ preacher returns to explain, “When you sin, God can’t see you. God can’t watch you sin.” She explains that the sinner’s screen becomes fuzzy. But then, “In comes JC with a wrench to save the day!” It’s hard to describe how convincing Crothers’ embodiments are, not because they aim for a sort of verisimilitude (there is no crown of thorns nor holy vestments), but because of the way her memory and imagination combine to create a kinesthetic expression. Jules as Jesus has her jacket tied around her waist and wears sneakers. Jules as Jesus who has come to fix everything is confident and smooth. Jules as Jesus makes imaginary nothing-but-net basketball shots and pumps her elbows, thrusts her pelvis. Jules’ Jesus is carnal.

This is the magic and mastery of Crothers’ performance, a layering of memory and imagination, of remembered and imagined embodiments, practiced and finely choreographed—even the improvised dance sections have a clear score and purpose: to embody character and affect, and to entertain. I believed every posture, gesture, vocal tone, and dance move. This would have been enough. But Crothers goes further by shaping a performance that also embodies the way Christian spirituality navigates, constructs, and claims transubstantiation. Crothers turns the teachings of her Christian upbringing into flesh. And she is clear that this is not entirely her own invention—her “Jesus dance camps” appear to have been centered around this very practice. 

Crothers reenacts an experience from “Jesus ballet camp,” where she also studies “Jesus modern” and “Jesus jazz.” She describes a workshop that involved a tunnel maze on a “very intense Tuesday.” With a backpack on her back, she crawls through a chair (the tunnel) and tells us that the tunnel was covered in papers with sins written on them: anger, bitterness, boasting, divorce, drinking, dishonesty, hatred, homosexuality—as she pronounces each word, she shrinks, cowers, falls back as if burned, reminding us that, “If you don’t say it (or see it) it doesn’t count.” Emerging from the tunnel there is a bright light, a cross, and a dancer named Colleen. Jules tries to describe the feeling of the dancing and singing that follows the harrowing journey through the tunnel of sin, but she can’t find the words. Instead, she writhes as a rainbow (flag) lights the upstage wall and the Christian rock praise song she wrote with Juodvalkis and Greta Hadley, which Hadley sings, plays. 

Because she always looks more or less like herself throughout the performance, it’s all the more extraordinary how Crothers transforms from preacher to God to Jesus to a painfully cheerful church mom to teenage Jules. As church mom, she recognizes faces in the audience, smiles, waves, and performs a shushing gesture. Like her play with transubstantiation, she uses verbal repetition to enact the ways dogma inscribes itself in the body but can also lose meaning. Church mom says, “I pray that you are moved. I pray that you want to be moved. I want you to want to be moved. I pray that you want to want to be moved.” To want, to move—the words change their meaning, lose their way. In this scene, JC returns like a boxer or bboy warming up to enter the cypher, sternum caved under the pressure of praying to want to want. I’m brought back to that Flashdance confession moment—” I want…I want so much!” 

Julie Crothers. Photo by Hans Holtan.

Crothers sets up her characters so the abstract dancing sticks to it; the dance sequences are coated in meanings established in the script, which allows her to maintain control of the character and the narrative even as it unspools, unravels. She appears always in command in part because she seems to be listening as she goes. It’s been said that acting is reacting and Crothers is right there, responding to (and delighting in) the unpredictable nature of live theater.

I could go on and on about the critique of Christianity Crothers performs in Are You There God? It's Me Jules. She certainly conveys the pain of shame around longing, particularly queer longing. But somehow critique feels beside the point. The point Crothers seems to be making is not a point at all but rather an ever-moving target of self-exploration. In the final scene, Jules is Jules. She calls God on a push button phone: “I’m sorry I ghosted you. You know. You don’t know? Ok.” Curled up in a chair, she wraps the phone cord around her toes, flanked by her props (what holds up our faith?). Ending on this earnest, teenaged Jules note is unexpected. It speaks to an evolving relationship with her faith and herself. Blume’s book is a coming-of-age story. Crothers’ performance is too but with the understanding (and promise) that she is forever a work in progress. I can’t wait to bear witness to the next phase.  

Julie Crothers. Photo by Hans Holtan.

Sima Belmar hosts the ODC podcast Dance Cast, teaches in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and loves writing for Life as a Modern Dancer.

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Related post:

5 Questions for Julie Crothers

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Zaccho Dance Theatre’s "Love, a state of grace": aerial, ethereal, magical

Zaccho Dance Theatre aerialist Ciarra D’Onofrio  at Grace Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Zaccho Dance Theatre.

 

Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Love, a state of grace: aerial, ethereal, magical

By Sima Belmar

I couldn’t get the word “empanada” out of my head. I was lying on Mary Armentrout’s Feldenkrais table in Berkeley and the word kept circling round and round as she gently adjusted my whacked out nervous system. When I mentioned this strange fixation on empanadas, Mary asked if I’d ever been to the empanada place in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I hadn’t but I took it as a sign.

I picked up my plus-one in Downtown Oakland and we made it over the Bay Bridge in record time, enough time to warrant a stop at El Porteño for empanadas. An easy double-park and an indecisive group of people in line meant two hot empanadas—one mushroom, one swiss chard—delivered to my car in a mere moment. A moment of grace.

From the Ferry Building, we drove to the cathedral. We parked in the garage across from a Rolls Royce occupying a bishop’s spot. Vescovo is the beautiful word for bishop in Italian and we chanted it as we tripped up ramps and steps to the cathedral doors where we were met by kind folks who checked our vaccination cards and who couldn’t find the press list but trusted us that we were legit. After a brief subterranean labyrinthine escapade to find the bathrooms, we emerged, just in time for the start of Zaccho Dance Theatre’s Love, a state of grace.

The space is enormous, so although there was a nice crowd (I can’t say exactly how many people were there; I’m terrible with those sorts of estimates), there was ample room to maintain social distance and everyone was masked. I’ve been to a few live performances since March 2020, but this one, thanks to French Gothic spaciousness, felt by far the safest.

Three dancers in Joan Raymond’s jewel-toned costumes that echoed the cathedral’s stained-glass windows moved through the spectators to meet in the nave, emptied of its pews. The meeting was brief; slowly (but not Butoh slowly), Suzanne Gallo walked toward a bench swing; Ciarra D’Onofrio toward a ladder bent at odd angles (designed by Wayne Campbell), positioned at the center of the labyrinth, and rising over 90 feet, disappearing as if to heaven itself; and Nina Sawant to the North Transept, an arm of the cruciform, where a sculpture in the shape of an hourglass (designed by Sean Riley) stands.

Zaccho’s artistic director Joanna Haigood chose to work with the affordances of the space, physical and spiritual. Gallo, seated on the swing, rises 70 feet at the speed of a death march before the rigging lets go, catapulting her toward the altar. I knew this would happen (what else can a pendulum do but swing?) but, still, my breath caught in my throat. What I didn’t expect, because I was still marveling at the speed and height of Gallo’s soaring, was the moment when she released herself from the swing and flew-floated alone. And this is just what I needed: a sense of soaring, of quietude, of holy ecstasy.

Because the audience is invited to explore the space at any point during the performance, and because you can’t look at two places at once, I didn’t see D’Onofrio make quiet progress up the ladder. Meandering alone toward the altar, I snuck peeks: I would look and she’d be a third of the way up, then three-quarters until, suddenly, she was gone. A choreographic assumption.

My gaze had been pulled away in the direction of Sawant revolving around the hourglass “seated” in lotus position, a circling meditation. When Sawant’s feet would connect with the rim of the sculpture, her body leaning impossibly far from the edge, I felt that despite the supernatural, goddess-like, gravity-defying feel of the work, the message was that we are tethered—to the ground, to ideas and identities, and most importantly, to each other. Walter Kitundu’s score, which incorporated recorded and live elements (the cathedral’s mammoth pipe organ was played by Christopher Keady), had been unobtrusively supporting the ethereal proceedings until it climaxed with a single bone-rattling chord. The sound, familiar to church-goers and early-horror-film-watchers alike, brought the dancers down to earth and gave the rest of us mere mortals wings.

After a quick pass around the space, and a moment to linger in front of a chapel lit in the colors of the rainbow flag, my plus-one and I stood on the cathedral steps and talked about that moment of release when Gallo soared. We ran into a friend who was with her mom on their way into the cathedral. We were all so happy to be together on a beautiful, unseasonably warm day, with live performance back in all its glory, in all its grace.

I’m not a religious person but I’m a sucker for majesty, for over-the-top glory. We’ve been living in a treacherous mundanity. I felt blessed to be among bodies aiming higher.  

Love, a state of grace, like the labyrinth on which it begins, invites meditation. The program includes “Rooted in Love,” a series of rituals and meditations written by artist-theologians Yohana Junker and Cláudio Carvalhaes. Had I been able to stay for all three performance cycles, I may have accepted this invitation to participate more actively. You can still catch Love, a state of grace on Thursday, February 17, 1-4pm, and Friday, February 18, 7-10pm, and if you do, try to carve out some time to engage with Junker’s and Carvalhaes’ invocations and ruminations. Ponder Haigood’s questions about how to cultivate love as a state of grace. Read through the dozens of reflections on love offered by members of Haigood’s community. Or just bear witness to the dancers as they call forth love. Get your tickets here.

Zaccho Dance Theatre aerialist Helen Wicks at Grace Cathedral. Photo courtesy of Zaccho Dance Theatre.

Sima Belmar is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, and the host of the ODC podcast Dance Cast.

 

Looking Back and Celebrating: Dance Performances in and from the SF Bay Area in 2021

 

FACT/SF in "Diffusion." Erin Yen and Emily Hansel (background), Samuel Melecio-Zambrano and Katherine Neumann (foreground). Photo by Robbie Sweeny. Image description: Four dancers perform in a park. In this image two are in the foreground moving in unison, arms wide to their sides. Two are in the far background running away. The costume is a red t-shirt with a black long sleeve underneath, black cap and shorts, and high red sports socks.

Looking Back and Celebrating: Dance Performances in and from the SF Bay Area in 2021

By Jill Randall, Blog Director

It is December 18th; I scroll back through the blog to remember and revisit the dances we covered over the past 12 months. Some writing was a preview, and many were reviews and reflections post-experience. Performances took place: live and online, streamed on your laptop at a time of your choosing, outdoors, and indoors. My heart feels fuller today remembering that good art did make many appearances in 2021, and that format and scale were wonderfully re-imagined by many.

Today I reshare the 12 projects highlighted on Life as a Modern Dancer throughout 2021. Thank you for revisiting them with me and allowing them to linger and be savored a bit more. Thank you artists for these gifts!

This is just a modest slice of Bay Area modern and contemporary work. Thinking of many other performances in 2021 as well that we did not get to cover on the blog, including: Flyaway Productions, AXIS Dance Company, Joe Goode Performance Group, Margaret Jenkins, and Molly Rose-Williams + Randee Paufve, to name a few.

Shout outs to the wonderful writers who covered these projects throughout 2021, including: Sarah JG Chenoweth, Garth Grimball, and Molly Rose-Williams.

January: RAWdance

“Still Dancing”: The Dancers of RAWdance on Working on “The Healer” in the Age of Quarantine

One Good Quote: "The Healer" with RAWdance

Virtual Healing with RAWdance - by Garth Grimball

April/May: Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works

A Practice of Unknowing, Breaking Away from Structures and Habits: An Interview with San Francisco Dance Artist Jennifer Perfilio

One Good Quote: "As Is" with Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works (April 2021)

May: FACT/SF

An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s "Diffusion" - by Molly Rose-Williams

September: RAWdance

RAWdance’s Portal into (Un)familiar Space - by Garth Grimball

October: Hope Mohr Dance

In Bacchae Before the Reveal is in the Subtext - by Garth Grimball

October: Queering Dance Festival

Gestures and Dreams at Queer Date Night - by Garth Grimball

October: FACT/SF

Wholeness in Split - by Sarah JG Chenoweth

October: Funsch Dance Experience

Modern Dance Fan Club: Funsch Dance Experience in "EPOCH" - by Jill Randall

November: Kristin Damrow & Company

Dreams of Friday: Kristin Damrow & Company Premiers "Medium" on November 5th in San Francisco - by Jill Randall

November: Paufve Dance

Paufve Dance Remembers and Looks Forward - by Garth Grimball

December: Megan Lowe Dances

The Weight of Shadows with Megan Lowe Dances - by Garth Grimball

One Good Quote: "Tangram" with Megan Lowe Dances

December: Gerald Casel Dances

Reflections on Gerald Casel’s "Not About Race Dance" - by Molly Rose-Williams

One Good Quote: "Not About Race Dance" with Gerald Casel Dance

Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance Residency at MANCC (Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography). Photo by Chris Cameron. Image description: Cauveri Suresh and Gerald Casel dance together. Gerald, sideways to the camera, folds his arms over his chest and looks down over his shoulder. Cauveri stands close behind him with their right arm extended upwards, palm-out.

 

FACT/SF in "Diffusion." Erin Yen and Emily Hansel (background), Samuel Melecio-Zambrano and Katherine Neumann (foreground). Photo by Robbie Sweeny. Image description: Four dancers perform in a park. In this image two are in the foreground moving in unison, arms wide to their sides. Two are in the far background running away. The costume is a red t-shirt with a black long sleeve underneath, black cap and shorts, and high red sports socks.

Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance Residency at MANCC (Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography). Photo by Chris Cameron. Image description: Cauveri Suresh and Gerald Casel dance together. Gerald, sideways to the camera, folds his arms over his chest and looks down over his shoulder. Cauveri stands close behind him with their right arm extended upwards, palm-out.

 

Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance Residency at MANCC (Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography). Photo by Chris Cameron. Image description: Cauveri Suresh and Gerald Casel dance together. Gerald, sideways to the camera, folds his arms over his chest and looks down over his shoulder. Cauveri stands close behind him with their right arm extended upwards, palm-out.

 

Wholeness in "Split"

LizAnne Roman Roberts. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Image description: Dancer stands downstage in a performance space lit bubblegum pink. Dancer wears a sleeveless button up shirt, dark shorts to her knees, and white socks. The dancer is slightly arching and looking up to the ceiling.

Wholeness in Split 

By Sarah JG Chenoweth

For FACT/SF’s Split I walk through the bowels of CounterPulse. Dark and fantastically quiet, the first hallway presents a soft towel on a wooden bench nook cut into the wall. Next to it, a placemat, a card with my name hand-written on it, and my drink of choice. I am charmed. What a personal touch. I sit. Pop the top and feel the fizz cut my thirst as a throng of portraits meets my eyes.  The people in them are close to me, literally—the hallway is narrow. They range in gender expression and race and age and declaration: laughing, staring, peering up, glancing sideways. Each one has some kind of patchy reflection of themselves superimposed on the same photo. Like they are caught in a prism, self upon muddled self. Portions of their own face or body are mirrored at indiscriminate angles. But instead of feeling disjointed, the fragments and fog declare a completeness: they are more than straight and center. I am stuck with one face. Eyes I know. A person I know, have moved with. I think they are beautiful. The faintest smile. Just the corners of the eyes squint—otherwise totally still. In this photo they watch me patiently, exactingly, insistently. They are waiting for me to catch up to the wisdom I should already have, the right relationships I should already be in. 

My host (here to usher me from room to room) interrupts our silent conversation and softly directs me to the next space. A pitch-black booth behind a lavender curtain whose bottom has been rippling with nearby filtering air—the only movement in these smooth halls. My host explains that I can put on some headphones and control sound levels. The host is calm. Reassuring. Slow and kind in their body and volume. They close the lavender curtain. I sit again. This time across from three iPad screens. I watch a series of mini films of faces submerging in water. My point of view is from the bottom of the container, and I see the people explore their mouths and eyes and cheeks as they plunge in and out. Some talk or scream, and bubbles dance out and up from both sides of their lips to a surface I know is there but I cannot see. Some grin widely with full teeth and squeeze their eyes shut. The film flickers from one person to the next, from just bubbles to just faces. Sometimes all three iPads show the same face, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes, like the portraits, the faces overlay, coincide, recede or advance from one into another. Also like the portraits, it’s a digital echo that so accurately/hypnotically captures the sensation of a very real and a very complicated, refracting, bending identity. I am not often grateful for digital representations of human distinctiveness. But here I feel the wonder of a face literally inside of another face—a self that is diverting and returning. Fractions of self added to self, beautifully illustrating the sometimes severing nature of psycho-emotional realities. I can’t remember what the sound was. Their voices maybe? If so, muffled to obfuscation. Music maybe? Something droning or murmuring only to sink me into the mouths (moustache), eyes (tight and wanting), cheeks (ballooning), and bubbles (hasty dancers). 

My host returns. They’d warned me I had only about five minutes in this watery world. It’s fine. I’m in a trance. The next phase of this experience I know to be its culmination. I am wanting but sedate. I feel held. I didn’t think that after this baffling and dehydrating year I would respond so well to solitude, to sparseness. But, this is potentially the most quiet, still space I have been in in eighteen months. Even sitting alone at home there are a thousand things to snatch my attention. The limitation of stimuli (other audience, a large space, colors and light, sounds fighting sounds, jabbering internal monologues) is a gift. A gift of clearing and rinsing. Of immersion. My own submersion. Into this softly, deliberately crafted art and experience. My host walks me down a longer hallway. My shoes click in near emptiness. They explain that I will go alone down another hallway, turn, go up a few steps. A chair will be waiting for me next to a single, lit lamp on a small table. If I need anything, shout or knock loudly on the table. I am so in. Buzzing. 

The lamp turns off. I am held. In darkness and in their craft. Black curtains hang just to my left and just to my front, delineating the stage space from my space, which is small. I feel safe. I am wrapped. Behind a plastic barrier not three feet in front of me—that I barely believe is there—lights come up like rising steam. I begin to see a retreating corridor created by walls of soft white fabric, back lit with soft pinks and oranges and yellows: warm sunsets and warm flesh. One dancer.* They start stingingly close, and I am lapping it up. They find my eyes and we lock in. I feel the corners of my eyes smile. They cannot see my mouth. I wonder if they can see my delight. Slacks with a few pleats cut off at mid-knee. Boxy, billowy button up shirt with a collar and no sleeves. Socks. Limbs. Pining limbs. Growing limbs. Rotating in and out, in and out, searching for something deep in their sockets, then flicking something away. Femur loose and free to glide open and closed, swiveling and squeaking the ball off the foot on wood below. The set narrows to a single, small, not quite door-sized opening upstage, just like a perspective drawing from Art 101. The white floor cascades in three tiers back into the non-door as well. Two small tables with two clear bowls of water anchor each side of the top, closest tier. The dancer centers, heightens, and authenticates the space. Though they are limber and strong, their work and their need here are not smooth or linear. One movement is pruned in mid-action to give rise to an opposing one… slickly sinking grand pliés truncated by a spring upright into a tight parallel, fingers curled and stiff, head cocked backward toward the right shoulder. A series of flowing revolutions are cut off to stare firmly at me, dancer paused deep in a lunge, limbs dangling. Then back up, palms stretched wide over hip sockets. The disruptions in the movement sequences offer the same sort of splintering of self that the photos and films did. They are splitting and whole at the same time, erupting into an attitude turn and leap from something inside shoving them sideways, then erect again, stern.

LizAnne Roman Roberts. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Image description. A solo dancer performing in a white space lit bubblegum pink. The space has three descending performance platforms, and the dancer has her hands on the top tier and feet on the second tier. Two small white coffee tables flank the dancer, with a clear glass bowl on each of them with water.

The mood is serious. I am taking it seriously. There are three sections. To enhance each respectively, there is silence, some kind of instrumental hum, and some piano in a minor key (or at least it sounds dissonant). Over the course of the piece, the dancer makes their way from downstage with me, through the canal, and out the bottom tier. I notice that the entire set of Split—the winding hallways, the small dark rooms, my being solo—mimic the dark nooks and the singularity of internal landscapes. I all of a sudden wonder why we generally do dances that are about internal shit in such outward environments. At some point the dancer goes to the water and rubs it on their face and arms. I think of the conjoined iPad faces in the water. Water has a way of refracting and changing our perception of a form. Things can look distended or sliced, depending on the angle, the light, the ripple, the arrangement of the atoms. Shapes and selves bent yet bathed. The dancer begins to speak. The text is poetic, unorganized, and pointblank in its delivery—not conversational but decisive: jagged thumbnail scraping skin; pushing and pushing against a brick wall; car driving down the hill without anyone in it; it was me [them] caught in a distant tree like a balloon. It is patchy and dreamlike, parts of stories or realities or perceptions. Until the moan. Toward the end of our time together, the dancer moans. A long, long, animal moan. The moan rams and revs through their body while they brace in a bent plank position until the moan is ready to be done. I think of labor. A birthing of wounds or past selves who knows what. And afterward, before exiting out of the not quite door-sized opening, the set goes nearly dark. The dancer, only a shadow now, rolling through liquid joints, limbs floating.  
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I’ve never felt so important to a piece, so integral to a performance. Not only were the dancer and I so selectively relating (you can’t not relate to them), but also I was so fucking delighted to be there and relating in that way, to have it all be for me. Not “for me” as in “I’m special” or it’s “about me,” but for me because I was the only person there. I felt taken care of in the prep-work and execution, but not treasured. Which is great. I was solo but not alone. It was still quite shared. I left in a slow, low stupor. Huh. I didn’t want to release what it felt like to be so inside, so narrowly and so powerfully absorbed.  Nevertheless, traffic and texts took me right back out.

LizAnne Roman Roberts. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Image description: Photo of the dancer's upper body with a dark purple and black background. Dancer's elbows are bent and her right hand is reaching up while the dancer looks down at the right hand. Left hand is on her thigh.

*LizAnne Roman Roberts was the performer for this iteration. Four dancers rotate through performing during the run of Split: LizAnne Roman Roberts, Samuel Melecio-Zambrano, Katherine Neumann, and Charles Slender-White. 

Sarah JG Chenoweth is a dancer, teacher, and writer based in Oakland, CA. But on her favorite days, she sings Gwen Stefani songs with her 3 year old, Wyatt. 

 

Related posts:
An Afternoon Walk and Dance Through Glen Canyon Park: FACT/SF’s “Diffusion”

Artist Profile: Charles Slender-White

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Gestures and Dreams at Queer Date Night

Octavia Rose Projects in "bodyfabric II" with Jhia Jackson (left), Heidi Cash (center), and Noah James (right). Photo by Kim Anno.

Image description: Three dancers pose in close proximity in a space with light wooden flooring and white walls. Two are standing and one is seated in a power wheelchair. Each dancer is frozen in a gestured position. The stage lighting is a warm orange and pink tone. The costumes are white, grey, and orange.
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Gestures and Dreams at Queer Date Night

By Garth Grimball

Does anything scream “queer!” more than descending a staircase with drama? Well, Octavia Rose Hingle knew what they were doing to open Queer Date Night, part of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center’s Queering Dance Festival. 

Due to COVID, 2020 festival artists are finally given the chance to share work in 2021. Shawl-Anderson is producing small festival events throughout the year instead of a week of consecutive performances. Queer Date Night took place at 2727 California Street in Berkeley (CA), an intimate arts and education space in a converted corner grocery store.

In Hingle’s bodyfabric II they score the dancing of Heidi Cash, Jhia Jackson, and Noah James with live piano playing. James kicks off a suite of solos from a spiral staircase. Hingle smartly makes use of the quirks of the venue. A support beam centers the stage space, and the dancers utilize its dimensions rather than pretend it’s not there. Much of the movement concerns surface, its presence and absence. Each dancer takes time to assess walls, floorboards, and the piano with intimate grace. Hands caress bodies like fabric then reach and embrace the surrounding aura. 

bodyfabric II shifts abruptly from interiority to exteriority. Hingle stops playing piano. A club beat by Octo Octa drops the gossamer vibe into a party. The trio come together to move freely, outwardly in gaiety. Their energy feels genuine. A more developed tonal shift would release that energy into the ether.

Queer Date Night shifted from live to digital with the screening of uuu_prelude: wet dreams of J.A.P.A.N pt. 1 & pt. 2 by Estrellx Supernova. The 21-minute film is a meet-dirty of Annie Sprinkle’s eco-sexuality and Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun. Supernova and Tina Wang grind and undulate amidst the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco, while Zoe Huey draws non-figurative interpretations of their grooves.

Screenshot from the film with Zoe Huey (left, drawing), Estrellx Supernova (center, red shirt), and Tina Wang (right, in pink wig).
Image description: Three dancers are in a wooded area in the daytime, on the ground. All three are wearing wigs. One dancer is drawing on a scroll of white paper with a black charcoal or pastel. The other two dancers are on the edges of the paper, posed on the ground.
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Directed by Supernova with videography by Chani Bockwinkel and Ainsley Elizabeth Tharp, the camera’s primary focus is the pelvis. Supernova and Wang’s faces are obscured by bright wigs and COVID-era fabric masks. A pithy means of disidentification. Without visible faces their bodies abstract into the wilderness. The hypnotic quality is undercut as passersby enter and exit the frame. This happening in the woods is glanced at as just another day in the Bay. There’s little variation in the content of the film but it doesn’t feel long. Its intent is opaque but its impact lingers.

Electronic music from six different artists soundtrack the dancers as they undress into thongs — red lace for Supernova, cotton for Wang — allowing more coupling between nature’s debris and skin. Orgasm defines a wet dream from a dream. The film ends with the duo snaking their way towards a grassy meadow. The final shot is of Supernova face down on the ground. It feels less like a release and more like exhaustion from an abundance of foreplay. But, then again, who doesn’t love foreplay?

Screenshots from the film with Tina Wang (photo #1, left image) and Estrellx Supernova (photo #2, right image).
Image description for photo #1: Dancer is outside on a dirt path amongst tall trees and rocks. They are standing, facing away from the camera. Their legs are twisted, arms outstretched to the sides. They are arching back, and their long dark hair drapes down the back. They wear a white sports bra and white booty shorts.
Image description for photo #2: Dancer is stretched horizontal in a bright green grassy area with white flowers in the grass. Their head is turned away from the camera. They are only wearing red thong underwear.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the Reference Desk podcast and is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective.

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In "Bacchae Before" the Reveal is in the Subtext

Silk Worm as Dionysus, center, with Belinda He, left, and Karla Quintero as two Bacchae. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Image description: A very dark theater space with black background and black marley. Three performers are on stage - one standing in the center dressed all in white, holding a microphone. Two performers flank the center artist, kneeling and facing back with heads turned towards the center person. Their hands are up applauding.

 

In Bacchae Before the Reveal is in the Subtext

By Garth Grimball

How interesting is it to watch others party? The fun in revelry is the absence of ego as you get down, boogie, praise, or exhale deeply. Being outside, watching the party, it’s easy to feel like Jay Gatsby staring through a window waiting for the party to become something or someone. Ego held strong. Depending on how much you enjoy watching others party will determine your response to Hope Mohr Dance’s Bacchae Before. Mohr and Maxe Crandall co-direct this dance theater adaptation of Anne Carson’s Bakkhai, a translation of the Euripides play.

Performed by Belinda He, Wiley Naman Strasser, Karla Quintero, and Silk Worm, Bacchae Before opens with all four in low-key orgy mode—groans and heavy petting—and uses the mode as transition between most scenes. Euripides’ Bacchae dramatizes the conflict between Pentheus, king of Thebes, and Dionysus, a newish god flexing their power, over influence on the female citizens of the kingdom and the power of faith writ large. Carson updated the language to better reflect the humor of the tragedy in our modern tongue. Mohr and Crandall use the text as a foundation to build a loose narrative around the tragedy of gender reveal parties. The adaptation is largely a performance of Carson’s text with scenes by Crandall interspersed.

Silk Worm and Strasser do double duty as Dionysus and Pentheus and a contemporary hetero couple expecting a baby. They slide easily between mythic authority and Instagram banality.  He and Quintero are the Greek chorus dancing and assisting throughout. The pair have one extended dance break. They ratchet up the energy with unison choreography of weighted centers and thrown limbs. Otherwise their dancing is a direct extension of the text. The stage is bare except for the characters and clusters of props. The props become more than costumes or scenery as the narrative switches between Carson’s and Crandall’s texts. Fondled or thrown aside like a quick joke, the objects are signifiers of class, gender, and temporality.

Bacchae Before is dance-theater. The text defines the work but dance is given its due. Mohr and Crandall wisely have the actors do the most acting and the dancers do the most dancing. I wish that dance was used as a connective tissue between scenes and time periods beyond the aforementioned writhing and improv-ecstatic dance. The body and gender locate the concept yet the body isn’t given much to do conceptually.

The program makes a point of noting, “the moment of reveal is a cornerstone of classic tragedy.” This recognition, combined with gender reveal parties, leads one to believe a reveal would be forthcoming. Not so, at least in the narrative sense. The reveal in Bacchae Before is in the subtext not the text. Silk Worm as Dionysus asks rhetorically, “How do I look? Convincingly human?” The text is telling us a god is in human drag. The subtext points to the absurdity and violence of how much being “convincing” within a gender identity is predicated on external forces rather than internal truth.

Death of Pentheus. Object animation by Mike Chin. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Image description: Photo of a small plastic brown toy deer. Next to the deer is a pool of red spilled paint to simulate blood and a crushed pine cone in it. The surface is wide stripes of light pink, light yellow, and grey. The background of the photo is blurred with small toy trees.

The most arresting scene is object animation. Silk Worm reads the play’s climax directly from Carson’s text. Strasser, He, and Quintero approach a mise-en-scène laid out on a table downstage center. They turn on a camera with live feed projected on the theater’s back wall. The ensuing minutes see a tracking shot across a miniature landscape designed by Mike Chin. The landscape evolves with the narrative blending mundane objects with fantastical colors and contexts. This scene is a welcome disruption of the binary of performer-director and the trope of livestream within live theater. The cast animate the inanimate. The scene provides an intimacy deeper than the moments of ecstatic revelry. One medium becomes the chorus to another.

Euripides’ Bacchae ends with an exile. Bacchae Before ends with a projection listing all the anti-trans legislation enacted or proposed across the United States. A different kind of exile.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the Reference Desk podcast and is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective.

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