Life as a Modern Dancer

Decisions, Decisions in BIG SALT

Emily Hansel, Mallory Markham, Katie Meyers, and Jessie Egbert. Photo by Summer Wilson.

Decisions, Decisions in BIG SALT

By Garth Grimball

“The doing is what seems hard. The having seems marvelous. But one doesn’t have a child, one does it.” So writes Sheila Heti in her autofiction novel Motherhood, dissecting the ambivalence and paralysis of choosing between motherhood and art; between giving oneself wholly to creation in two separate, unique forms. The Anata Project’s BIG SALT is doing -- it is a verb -- full action, full body. Premiering at Joe Goode Annex over two weekends, artistic director, Claudia Anata Hubiak, describes the work as “the clash between love and ambition in motherhood.” A mother herself, Hubiak drew inspiration from her own conflicts in valuing creative determination with birthing her second son.

A sense of division permeates the space before BIG SALT begins. The audience is split into two sections facing each other across the length of the theater. The dance floor is delineated by white lines into four quadrants. Choosing a side to sit feels less like finding a pleasing vantage point than staking a claim in an unknown conflict.

Five dancers -- Kaitlyn Ebert, Jessica Egbert, Emily Hansel, Mallory Markham, and Katie Meyers -- start the dance dressed in varying silhouettes of billowy white, standing in a line, swinging their arms back and forth. The arm swinging is a recurring visual motif, and collectively performed it feels like if a shrug could imagine itself to be more active: still listless and noncommittal but only just. The dancers lunge into competitive track and field starting positions and sprint across the space crossing one another and intersecting the imagined boundaries of the stage design. As they start and stop and change direction, the sprint devolves from a race against equal competitors to a rush of checkpoints in an endless to-do list.

The dancers slow and abandon the sprinter’s lunge for crouching into the floor. Four bodies are continually pulled down with lowered gazes by single down-stretched arms. Like tree trunks burrowing into soil to spread roots, the once swinging arms are now weighted and move with measured determination. Egbert contrasts the solemn ritual with a wild, frenetic solo. She is rootless and moves like the space is happening to her body. Every change in direction is outside of her control.

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. The arm-swinging returns around the halfway point. This time the dancers line up across center stage creating a barrier between the split audience. The unison swings break down and the bodies switch facings at uneven intervals. Newton’s Cradle comes to life, the motion begets motion, and the motion is the rhythm of waffling between two impulses. Not all thematic choreographic moments read so smartly. One dancer runs into a wall, another is pulled in different directions, and each feel like an easy pun. The literal undercuts the energetic build up in the movement.

The dancers perform with masterful technique and the awareness of a true ensemble. Hubiak harnesses the collective technical training of her dancers (Gaga, ballet, release) into a physical language punctuated by leg extensions, weighted centers, and crisp gestures. There is a frenzied section of dizzying and difficult partnering that breaks the spell of dancers’ focus. Every lift and lower is executed without hesitation, but there is the sense that when BIG SALT was constructed there was “the partnering section,” and the intention in the dancing feels different than the rest of the dance. The choreography is not lacking. Perhaps more time is required to build partnering trust that translates from the studio to the stage.

BIG SALT is true to its motive from beginning to end. And what an end Hubiak delivers. She avoids the explicit for the specific. There’s no dancer pantomime of infant care or hand-wringing at the struggle to create. The dancers fly and roll through the space in fast variations to glom en masse, repeatedly. Referencing the rooting from the beginning of the dance, four dancers are planted in space, arms floating above their heads, fingers twitching in search of stillness. Katie Meyers glides softly through this forest of decisions made. Doing is freedom from indecision but not from the repercussions of past choices. Ambition like parenthood is cumulative. Successes and failures build to form never-ending opportunities to succeed and fail. The Anata Project’s BIG SALT is a success.

 

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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Lili Weckler | Unhinge rocks the Earth with mixed results

Photo: Cheshire Isaacs

Lili Weckler | Unhinge rocks the Earth with mixed results

By Garth Grimball

Minimalism is a privilege. This is the creed of maximalist artist and Macarthur “genius” Taylor Mac, whose genre-blurring, activism-cum-cabaret acts use spectacle as a means to communicate urgency. Minimalism allows time to process and reflect. Maximalism demands action.

SiStars Strange & The Shatterer of Worlds by Lili Weckler | Unhinge, presented as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival 2019 season, is a maximalist show created with minimal resources. A choreographic rock opera, the libretto details the story of Lovechild (Weckler), who must reunite her parents Earth (Scott McPheeters) and Death (Alisha Ragon) to stop the Shatterer (Jennifer Meller) over the course of eleven loose scenes. Rounding out the cast is Jane Selna as Sistar Strange and Cory Vangelder and Hannah Ayasse as Forces of the Shattered World.

If “choreographic rock opera” summons visions of sequins, glitter, gold lamé, tutus, and Ziggy Stardust-inspired make-up, this show delivers. The strongest unifying element in this production is the design aesthetic. Performed in the Fort Mason Chapel, the sparkle of the costumes glimmer and wink with the stained glass creating a sacred/profane tableau. Unfortunately, the sum is not equal to the parts. The choreography, the rock, and the opera are present but rarely combine in united force.

The musical score, directed by Meller, is stellar. The songs and their orchestration are dynamic with impressive harmonies, choral rounds, guitar shredding, and subtle atmospheric movements that generate plot momentum. The entire cast impresses, meeting the demands and nuances of the music. However, performances falter in embodying the music to serve the narrative. The performers move back and forth between the sound stage area and the designated dancing area as the scenes demand. This spatial fluidity isn’t in itself distracting, but without a clear sense of when performers are commenting on the action like a Greek chorus, or, being the center of the action, the motivations vary in distinction. A standout is Meller as The Shatterer belting the song “White Lace,” as three cast members step-touch behind her costumed in skeleton painted sandwich boards. Meller struts and tip-toes in her platform boots, seducing Death, and her vocal and physical qualities synthesize to become a specific character. If only that specificity was directed in each performer. McPheeters as Earth is serving a modern dance version of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig character; mean mugging and condescension that drips off high cheekbones. While Ragon seems to be performing Death not as a character but as a neutral conductor for Symbolism. She doesn’t react so much as move as a blank canvas for costumes and props to adhere to as plot points. If this is a directorial choice, it is not clear.

Photo: Cheshire Isaacs

Similarly uneven is the choreography. No character has movement indicative of a persona. There are unison group sections, contact improv weight sharing, gesture phrases, pointe work, social dances, and an extended sequence with a large swath of electric red fabric. Again, it’s difficult to tell when choices were made, or, dramaturgy gave way to can-do groupthink in the spirit of playing it fast and loose. Which is a shame as there is some bewitching choreography. Selna swirls in the fabric, and the prop becomes an extension of her viney form. Ayasse lights through the space in a solo during the finale that feels like an EKG blast. In her fast and authoritative movement, she engages with her cast mates and sparks the only moment of dramatic tension in this shaggy production.

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.

Photo: Cheshire Isaacs

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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“Lipstick Lumberjacks, Losers and Leapfrogs” offers a tantalizing foray into a queer imagination

“Lipstick Lumberjacks, Losers and Leapfrogs” offers a tantalizing foray into a queer imagination

By Molly Rose-Williams

It is rare for me that going to a show feels like going to a party. Shaunna Vella and Andrew Merrell’s newest work, “Lipstick Lumberjacks, Losers, and Leapfrogs,” was one of those shows. Their brand of party wasn’t like the kind I go to in real life that happen in kitchens over small talk and chips with music that aspires for everything to be just a touch more exciting - this was a queered-up, punked-out deep dive into the aspirational realm of imaginative potential. In the show’s patch-worked world of “theatrical pas de deux” (the show was a collection of old and new duets from the pair’s many years of collaboration), traditional delineations around identity and connection were examined, rejected, and revisioned.  

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?

Between the duets, vignette-like transitions threaded the pieces together like a roller coaster ride through a set of colorful dreamscapes. In one, a row of Care Bears formed a massage train. In another, performers melted off the stage to soften into tender improvisational duets, each taking a turn to simply witness their partner move with gorgeously attentive attunement. Yet another saw the curtains open to reveal a tableau of performers, each sucking a lollipop. The scene pulsed with a fresh and satisfyingly characitured eroticism, both a joke and a husky murmur, hinting at a deep sense of very real desire.

The show beckoned forth the odd, the tender, the desirous, and the downright hilarious with open arms. It invited us all to join in with the humor, and with even more explicit invitations. In one transition about halfway through the show, Vella informed us from the stage that “now is a good time to move if you need to.” (To give some context, on the sunny Sunday afternoon that I was there, the audience packed Oakland’s Humanist Hall to the gills, lining the floors and walls thanks to Vella and Merrell’s NOTA policy.) From the beginning, Vella and Merrell invited us to take care of ourselves and one another in the packed space, letting us know that we should feel free to move around at any time. In this sense, they queered even the experience of seeing a show, throwing out the traditional model of audience as passive observer and inviting us to be participants in the show.

Though the tone of the show was often light and humorous, I got the sense that beneath these explorations lay a visceral imperative. Ironically, this sense came through to me most clearly not in the stunning dancing of the performers (they were stunning), but in a more subtle tone of disillusionment with dance itself that many of the choreographic choices conveyed. There was a thread of irony and containment running through much of the movement - most clearly observed in a relative absence of traditional virtuosity despite an inarguably virtuosic cast and supremely physically-articulate directors. This spoke to me of a lack of faith in the power of modern dance movement (the show’s primary physical language) to get to the heart of a matter so important.

There were moments in the show that I felt were well-served by the more muted movement vocabulary and post-modern eschewal of physical exaggeration. In “Rob and Diane,” a duet choreographed by Merrell with performers Juliana Monin and Jared Wiltse, the more physically-conservative approach to movement supported the piece’s portrayal of what I read to be a traditional Christian couple whose confinement to gender and relationship norms had snuffed their spark and lease on life. “Back Alley Fantasy,” also choreographed by Merrell with dancers Sarah Chenoweth and Chinchin Hsu, unfolded with its own brand of virtuosity - a stunningly precise yet understated back-and-forth which lent dynamic breath to the absurdist fantasy of this glue-on mustache romance. But as the show went on, my experience became a paired passage through gleeful abandon in the gloriously absurd and imaginative theatrics, and a growing hunger for a physical language to match both the dexterity of the dancers and the rigor of the imaginative spirit that shone through the visions unfolding before me.

The most notable exception to this for me came in “Dear Starlight,” choreographed by Vella with performers Kara Davis and Nol Simonse. The piece began as an accumulation with variation to gentle music, both Davis and Simonse cutting tortured paths perpendicular to one another. Their bounded movement read to me as a process of reckoning or sense-making. Suddenly, the track switched to a punk rock tune, and with the shift in music came a diametric change in physicality as well. They put on lipstick and let loose with a gleeful, boundless, flailing celebration. Underpinning their wild abandon was a physical intelligence from years of highly technical dance training. The result was at once absurd and exaltingly contagious.

I became curious about the discrepancy in physical range I saw manifest in the dancing, and the range I saw both directors and cast to be capable of in glimpses throughout the show (and in previous contexts) - to absolutely tear up the floor and/or battement like nobody’s business. It didn’t feel so much like a lack of faith in all physicality, as a disillusionment with the formalities of modern dance technique. I connected this potential explanation to the show’s shortest piece, a dance film called “Robots Go To The Spa.”

The film showed clips of Vella and Merrell rehearsing in the studio over multiple years. Overlaying their gesture phrases and physical explorations was an audio dialogue between two robots (though the content of the robot’s discussion was entirely inane, the discussion itself was bizarre and unaccountably fascinating). Scrolling subtitles described Vella and Merrell’s process of interrogating their own whiteness in relation to their dance practices. The video was, I felt, elegantly done. Short, concise, and clear, it expressed an impressively nuanced menu of thought in a relatively short amount of time: a conviction that interrogating their whiteness in relation to dance is imperative in dismantling white supremacy; an acknowledgement that although the process of exploring whiteness is critical, doing it within a public performance setting may take up undue space; and a suggestion that dance, and modern dance in particular, is arguably a poor primary mode of communication in conversations on race and whiteness because 1) it is comparatively abstract and indirect, and 2) it is heavily-defined by its origins and continued practice in communities that for the most part center and celebrate whiteness. “That took about 3 minutes,” the subtitles read. And the film ended.

Do the conventions of modern dance need to be left behind in order to locate a potentially transformational space within the form? “1/27/11,” the final piece of the show performed by Merrell and Vella themselves, offered a cryptic response to my question. The piece featured classic modern dance choreography to the sound of “Slide” by Missy Elliott. The song is an anthem for women who defy the patriarchal narrative that they are helpless or incomplete without men, but more broadly, sounds like liberation made audible. Merrell and Vella rocked out to the song in campy 90’s gear with a buy-in that suggested to me this song held real personal significance for them both.

In light of the video earlier in the show and ongoing conversations in the dance community around appropriation and whiteness, I found myself reflecting on the contrast between the Missy Elliott song playing overhead and the relatively bounded modern dance choreography of two white-identifying performers. The piece seemed self-conscious as well as genuinely-felt; ironic and not, as if they were embracing the modern dance vocabulary that was such a deep part of their physical histories, as well as seeking freedom from the constraints that it placed on their physical imagination. More, the piece felt like a fitting culmination to a near hour and a half of investigation into the radical potential of the broadest sense of queerness and boundary-blurring.

The only point of tension for me here, was a feeling that in seeking liberation from the physical chains of modern dance and the existential chains of a binary-loving culture, they were drawing on the explosive energy of Missy Elliott’s anthem - an energy whose roots were in hip-hop, a culture founded on the ongoing fight for liberation of black and brown people. Does that make it appropriative? If so, does that matter? To me, this circled back to the even larger question so succinctly framed in “Robots Go To The Spa” - in the work of dismantling white supremacy and racism, what is best taken on personally, and what needs to take place in community? For me, this final piece was a beautiful, thought-provoking testament to the larger truth at the heart of “Lipstick Lumberjacks, Losers and Leapfrogs,” in the case of things that really matter, binaries rarely serve us well.

Throughout the show, the absurd, the extreme, and the absolutely mundane intertwined to create a joyful experience. In the embrace of the unorthodox and the queer, Vella, Merrell, and the entire cast managed to touch upon the absolutely human. Scholar-activist Cathy J. Cohen writes: “If there is any truly radical potential to be found in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, it would seem to be located in its ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms, a space where transformational political work can begin.” “Lipstick Lumberjacks, Losers and Leapfrogs” offered a headlong plunge into the radical potential of the imagination. I believe that in doing so, Vella, Merrell, and the entire cast engaged in exactly what Cohen describes - creating a space where transformation could begin or, indeed, was already underway.

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Cathy J. Cohen in “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”. GLQ, May 1997 [p. 438]

 

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

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Amy Foley’s Let Slip the Witches is Flat-out Transcendent

Photo: Stephen Texeira

Amy Foley’s Let Slip the Witches is Flat-out Transcendent

By Sarah JG Chenoweth

The irresistibility of witches is markedly familiar, even if you don’t share the compulsion. From fable to brutal history to contemporary practice, their stories are streaked with a power and mystery that we cannot ignore. It seems that to be witchy is to have command of both the worldly and the otherworldly. That’s what Amy Foley captures in Let Slip the Witches: the equal earthiness and sacredness of the witch. 

A few pieces preceded Let Slip the Witches in Foley’s show last weekend at ODC Theater. The first, A History of this Moment, choreographed by Robert Moses and danced by Foley herself, charted the keenly sensate role of the dancer/artist in today’s time and times past. Moses’ voice gushed meditations on the dance artist’s insightful and weathered body, their fears and ambitions, the impact and echoes of their work. Matching the stream of consciousness style of Moses’ delivery, Foley was impeccable. Every millisecond of the piece was punctuated with her razor sharp movement execution. But her demeanor was casual and genuine, as if in real-time conversation with Moses. She danced with a faculty and maturity we all dream of. 

Thighs and Wages, a restaging of Foley’s 2016 work, tumbled through women’s experiences in a society rank with patriarchal tenets for bodies and wealth. Five dancers seemed to perform every move in the book: intense floorwork, classic turns, assertive partnering, lilting solos, eloquent gestures, sailing jumps. At times they had enough reserves to support each other in this cruel mess, and other times they had to retreat to their personal battles. The theme of combatting patriarchal harm was almost too abstracted to be clear. Even so, as four of the five women fell in eventual defeat, the piece poignantly expressed that “survival mode” doesn’t guarantee survival.

The next piece was First Love, in 3 Parts, and it was as charming as it was complicated. Nol Simonse, Tanya Bello, and Foley made and danced the trio. As they weaved in and out of solo, duet, and group material, the piece celebrated their abilities as outstanding performers. The whole thing swelled with fondness for one another and honor for their individual perils. 

Finally, Let Slip the Witches closed the evening with impressive flare. It stands as a phenomenon—an event only truly understood by encountering it. But, here goes. 

Let Slip the Witches opened and remained in near darkness, with the incomparable Kaitlyn Ebert running her hands down her throat, displaying a crown of gnarled fingers, bending and twisting just enough to suggest deviousness. Something was happening to her, but she was communing with it. Elena Martins, Karla Quintero, and Juliann Witt joined her shortly, blanketed in the shadows between a floral gobo light design. The four began a soft and serene incantation to set in motion the coming ritual. “Seeker. Goddess. Mother. Priestess,” they whispered as they demarcated the space with limb and voice. Their hush grew to declaration, and their movement correspondingly intensified, creating a layered quilt of sounds, reaches, prayers, curves, callings. 

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.

At the seeming insistence of the lead sorceress (Ebert), each dancer had her moment of rapture. Martins flew through the space in a fury of jumps, convulsions, and spills, exhausting herself into a heap of heavy breath on the floor. Afterward, the coven surrounded her, picked her up, and took care of her, but was not “careful." Instead, they were task-oriented, as if this was the millionth time they had carried a comrade through her destruction, and they would do it a million times more: this is how we clean her up; these are the tasks we do to mourn, to make change, to acknowledge her passage. It’s just what we (must) do. 

An actual, historic ritual—performed by primitive and modern people in order to manage the natural and unexplainable world—lies outside of aesthetic and technique, and only cares about the efficacy of the act (Highwater).  Let Slip the Witches falls somewhere between ritual and performance. Aesthetic and precise choreographic structure were clearly paramount to Foley, but so was the unfolding of an uncultivated, task-based journey.

Moments of the work had the dancers carving out private exorcisms on the ground, while others had them gently bending into each other’s arms. Some moments firmly referenced popular associations with witches. We were gripped when the four stood like a small crowd downstage center, the house lights came up, and they surveyed the audience with vehemence. When they’d decided on a target, they’d point—arm and index finger hardened with condemnation. The scene reproduced the arbitrary rancor extended to women during the Salem Witch Trials. It was convincing. It was haunting.

But it’s the ending that elevated the piece to the phenomenal. Ben Juodvalkis’ music was literally rumbling our chairs and bones—the driving drum beats of ancient peoples—and the dancers were whipping up a fifth, metaphysical body that swept around and above them, so turbulent that its tendrils reached out and curled around us too. Shuffle, slap, clap, snap, shuffle, shuffle, pivot, switch, slap, slap, snap, shuffle, switch. They outlined distinct spatial patterns and rhythms again, and again, and again. An invigorating frenzy of mathematical, determined orbiting and pounding. By this time, their hair was down and thrashing, full of sweat and tangles, further freeing their energies. This section truly made the work. Without it, we may have enjoyed a conceptual dance piece with attractive witchy imagery. With it, we were entranced in something that felt primal and important. 

Let Slip the Witches rang of some matriarchal pagan time, one in which women’s moves are seen to possess the wisdom and magic it takes to enact rites of passage and to defy physics and create energy. The piece feels feminist because of how power was defined and used. While it was clear that forces were acting upon and inside these characters, it was also clear that they had authority over themselves. So much potency came from their ability to endure and transcend, not just the insanely physical (dance) feat before us, but also millennia of labor, public shaming, and bludgeoning that they conjured up. 

At last the dancers lay on the floor, collapsed and panting. We expected an ending and would have been satisfied with it. But, the lead sorceress hopped up and goaded the others to do the same, as if to say, “We still have our work to do.” So they continued, with only slightly less vigor, to close the ritual, repeating the calls to seeker, mother, goddess. They ultimately settled into a warped, yogic goddess pose—fully flung, pulsing, wrecked, exposed, and robust, goddess. 

Highwater, Jamake.“History as Ritual.” Dance: Rituals of Experience, Toronto, Methuen Publication, 1978, pp. 39-44.

 

Sarah JG Chenoweth is a dancer, teacher, and writer based in Oakland, California.

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Still Resonating: Dicotomía del Silencio by Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

Photo: Ryan Kwok

Still Resonating: Dicotomía del Silencio by Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

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.

It feels relevant to say as well that just 12 days before I saw this work on its opening night, Lopez’s mother, Ignacia García, passed away. He dedicated the work to her, and the raw power of his grief and love, as well as the love so clearly felt for him by his dancer-collaborators, imbued the evening for me with a rare, near-tsunamic power.

The piece begins in darkness. A single bulb shines through a window upstage left, where Lopez stands playing a small hand crank music box. Behind him, dancer Andrew Merrell approaches him in cycles - coming forward to place a tender hand on his shoulder, and then backing away...to approach again, this time closer...away...to an embrace... The effect of his tidal movement reads almost like a musical element, intertwining the ethereal music box notes and Lopez’s hand that goes around and around and around. Lights off.

In the darkness a singing bowl sounds. The redolent note ripples out like a circular wave. A quartet of dancers - Andrew Merrell, Alexandria Whaley, Kevin Gaytan and Rebecca Johnson - is revealed center stage by two handheld flashlights that illuminate their black-clothed bodies like whispered secrets. They begin to move with full-bodied reverence, devotional patterns both intricate and full. At one point they bare their teeth to the sky, like an open-mouthed salute to the abyss. The darkness slips around the edges of their partnering like a sacred shroud. Pay attention, it urges - not all of what is can be seen, not all of what can be seen is what it seems.

Lopez follows as the quartet gives way to an empty stage. He enters sliding backwards along the floor, whispering a looping prayer in Spanish and shining a single light at the top of the empty stage on a toy truck that slowly retreats.

For the next thirty minutes, the piece continues to unfold in a series of deeply poetic, inexplicably intertwined sections lit only by handheld flashlights. The dynamic of separation between Lopez - who returns to the stage multiple times for solos but doesn’t interact with the other four dancers except as witness - offers a clear structural element to the work, and speaks poignantly of the isolation trauma often begets. The darkness offers a spacious container from which the work’s visceral logic emanates like an ember in the gut; winding like a labyrinth that unfolds with juicy partnering, sensuous details and a delicacy of touch that makes the whole piece resonate like glimpses of the unconscious.

Lopez’s solos are as varied as any infinitely complex internal landscape, from full-bodied dancing so expressive it seems to blur ecstasy and agony, to mumbled prayers, apparent rituals of repentance, and the quiet moment with the slowly-retreating toy truck. The other four dancers easily match his dynamism and feeling with a series of duets, trios, and quartets that speak to the paradoxes at the heart of intimacy, pleasure, trauma, desire, and connection. The dancing throughout is stunning - rigorous, athletic, and highly-technical without a trace of artifice. A single movement motif threads throughout, repeated almost every time by the hands of one person in embrace on the back of the person they hold. Hauntingly expressive each time it appears, the gestural motif evokes for me both devotion and dissection.

A turning point comes as a full-throated song from Lopez rings through the dark. A single bulb comes on overhead to illuminate his body, covered in scissors. El Señor me ha mirado a los ojos, sonriendo ha dicho mi nombre, Lopez sings. En la arena he dejado mi barca. Junto a ti, buscaré el otro mar. Though, I’m unclear what the scissors are meant to express, the image is stark and impactful, and Lopez’s singing holds me in rapt attention. A quartet follows, and then a duet - both which feel like echoes of previous sections but somehow texturally distinct in the twilight glow. The intimacy of the interactions between dancers feels more specific to the people themselves and slightly less symbolic, while the unbidden logic that holds the piece together feels slightly more diffuse without the stark delineation of singular beams of light.

All five dancers return to the stage for a final score in which, one by one, the dancers kiss Lopez and then rip velcro strips from his shirt to expose stripes like vertical red gashes. Though the image holds the potential for me to feel disappointingly unsubtle, by this point in the work, all five performers have established such a profound level of humanity that I am willing to read it instead as a guileless expression of the paradox of connection, risk, and pain. At last, only Lopez and Merrell remain. They share a tender kiss, Merrell rips a final strip from Lopez’s shirt, and leaves him onstage with nothing but a heavy strumming guitar. Silence. Lopez carves the movement motif like a devotional gesture on his own body once. Lights out.

For me, Dicotomía del Silencio felt like a physicalized reckoning with the sensations that haunt us. There were elements of the work I wasn’t sure how to read, but each piece felt like a crystal shard - something real and true. In the end, even the diffuseness of the resolution felt as if it served the piece overall, which seemed to ask questions so large their answers may not even exist, or at least not yet. Instead, the work made space for an impactful coalescence of sensation and its expression, while Lopez and his collaborators performed with a rare humanity so deep it felt almost spiritual.

Dicotomía del Silencio plays twice more, on March 23rd and 24th, at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley. If your experience seeing the show is anything like mine, you may find the experience reverberates for you long after the house lights come up.

 

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

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Related post:

Artist profile: Rogelio Lopez

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Tension Remains after Nevertheless

Tension Remains after Nevertheless

By Sarah JG Chenoweth

ka-nei-see | collective and Cat Call Choir produced an adaptation of their 2018 success, Nevertheless, at Z Space last weekend. The show—expanded from its premiere to include new sections, additional performers, and a visual art exhibition in the lobby—was condemning but not cathartic. Certainly the aftermath of sexual assault is many-sided within a single person, and also diverges from one person to the next. Nevertheless characterized a few justifiable responses: a “fuck you” from the choir, a crisp plea for communal reflection from the art pieces, and a touch of misery from the dancing. 

The show pointed strong fingers mostly at verbal abuse and arrogant handsy-ness of (assumingly) men. At one point the choir went as far as telling a story about a group attack on a college student. At another, they sang, staring zombie-like at us, about bashing in a woman’s head. Throughout the show, the choir sometimes spoke as the oppressor, sometimes the oppressed, sometimes omniscient narrators. These singers’ delivery ranged from stoic to slapstick. Delightfully grotesque and unapologetically hammy in their warping of actual statements from actual people about tit size, ass grabbing, internalized misogyny, and other aggressions, they grounded the performance with real talk. It was hilarious because it lampooned the idiocy in what has become commonplace; it was awful because we were reminded of the idiocy that has become commonplace. The choir was pissed-off and despairing in the same breath. In both aesthetic and deed, it attractively nodded to the Greek chorus—a collective voice commenting on staged scenes, often representing the attitudes of the viewers. But here the cat callers expanded on the Greek form by participating in the action and dramatizing society’s most vile behavior. Using sweet harmonies, cheeky lyrics, flamboyant groping, and rhythmic gesture, the Cat Call Choir made a stinging mockery of the “locker room talk” that pervades our culture. 

While the choir chewed up the topic and spit it back out, the dancing left it floating in some somber cloud. Much of the dance was a sad soundtrack to the horrors described by the choir. The ensemble both supported and trashed one another. Dancers literally held each other up and then got in each other’s way. Mangled figures emerged from the onslaught. Chianese’s choreographic mastery shone with the quartet, “You Bitch.” Four dancers swam and shoved their way in and out of unison trios with an ever-changing opposing soloist. The timing and spacing of the transferred solo were surprising and savory, and in a way they echoed the timing and spacing of sexual assault: we never know who will be next. 

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. 

However, the movement was overall too virtuosic and sophisticated for the filth of the content. Aside from some befitting motifs (breast swipes and forced smiles), such gorgeous dancing disagreed with the subject matter. Only one or two moments stung with the discomfort of sexual violation. The most effective was when three dancers, facing upstage, legs spread wide, bent forward and clutched their crotches, one palm over the other. The gesture was simultaneously protective and scared and defiant…and fleeting. The majority of the movement had less impact. 

So, while funny, beautiful, and theatrically flavorful, Nevertheless did not relieve the deepest tensions left after brutal assaults. It did tap into a collective desire to shout, to pierce through apathy with in-your-face dialogue. It did hint at how these offenses diminish their recipients. But, two years into the Me Too movement, we are ready for higher stakes. Christine Blasey Ford bore all to a hostile Congress and national audience. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib publicly called our abusive president a motherfucker the evening before she was sworn in. The now moment has adapted for more brazen action.

 

Sarah JG Chenoweth is a dancer, teacher, and writer based in Oakland, California.

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Related posts and writing:

How to Persist: Nevertheless with ka·nei·see | collective and Cat Call Choir (on diydancer.com)

One Good Quote: Nevertheless (March 2019)

Artist Profile: Tanya Chianese

Reflections from Nevertheless - Molly Rose-Williams (May 2018)

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Writing on Dance: A Response to Katie Faulkner’s Divining (ODC Theater, February 15, 2019)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines divining as an intuitive, sage-like form of discovery or a power for seeing the future. It often refers to the practices that people rely on to navigate the unknown. In her notes, choreographer Katie Faulkner references these definitions, suggesting that within them “the body becomes a conduit for felt or intuited knowledge.” It is here - with the body - that Faulkner’s Divining explores human power and fragility within a stark landscape that seems to be everywhere and nowhere.

Photo: Stephen Texeira

The dance opens in stillness, in silence, in fragments. A slow humming sound accompanied various tableaus that sculpted the dancers' bodies into shapes with hands supporting or resting on each other as if to signal future intentions. Once the dancers start moving, Faulkner’s suburb movement vocabulary is on display - articulate, intimate gestures and rhythms. The dancers - Alex Carrington, Chinchin Hsu, Tara McArthur, and Suzette Sagisi - moved diagonally across the floor, mostly in unison, with feet pounding while arms and heads moved sharply. Their hunched over bodies suggested a reverence of sorts, perhaps for the practice of seeking or devotion. This reverence-without-object was a frequent tópos in Divining, a common reference point throughout the full-length piece. The dance kept drawing the audience into such moments that seemed almost other-worldly due in part to the superb music composition by Ben Juordvalkis that incorporated both familiar and unfamiliar soundscapes. Did I hear the cracking of wood burning; the sound of an airplane, crickets at night?

Carrington, Hsu, McArthur, and Sagisi danced with committed grace, displaying the complexity of Faulkner’s choreographic thinking. At one point Hsu moved in large steps around the stage, clasping her hands together, never letting go. Her body appeared both in and out of control, reflecting how it feels during times of not knowing what to do or where to turn. Similarly, Faulkner’s use of the breath reminds us of how we experience the unexpected as felt surprises. In another diagonal movement, the four dancers move backwards, holding the breath and slowing down as if caught by something. This kind of repetition is also reflective of practice - if we keep doing the same thing again and again can we gain new knowledge or perspective? Can we change? Will something else change?  Divining included many of these repeating moments that played with the multiple sensibilities of being human or other than human. All four dancers scampered across the stage in crab walks that ended up with ears to the ground, slowly moving - suffering? searching? waiting?

Photo: Stephen Texeira

As Divining came to an end, stillness returned and with it a single note. Hsu slowly goes to each dancer, looking for a way to connect. She finally does - her hand to an elbow. As this sweet moment evolves, Hsu doesn’t let go. Can an elbow be enough? Following this question, Hsu, Carrington, and MacArthur witness, along with the audience, Sagisi's bursts of laughter evolving into an overwhelming display of how an emotion, like joy, which is not singular but multifarious. Taken to the edge of uncomfortableness, this section leads into 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.

 

Michelle LaVigne is a dancer, writer, and teacher. Currently she teaches rhetoric at the University of San Francisco. Her writing/research focuses on the intersections of dance, rhetoric, and performance. Michelle is interested in how practices of rhetoric might be rethought from the movements of dance and choreographic praxis. Her current project on The Nutcracker explores what its multiple repetitions over time say about the cultural present and contemporary ballet. Michelle often presents at national and international conferences and has published reviews in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theater & Drama Review, and Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. She was also a guest writer for the ODC Theater Writer in Residence Blog, Triple Dog Dare, in 2014 and 2016.  Since 2018 she has been a guest scholar with San Francisco Ballet. She blogs about dance in San Francisco at sfdancematters.

 

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Related posts:

One Good Quote: Katie Faulkner's Divining

Artist Profile #1: Katie Faulkner

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Reflections on Kristin Damrow’s “Impact”

Shareen DeRyan, center, with ensemble in Kristin Damrow's Impact. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Reflections on Kristin Damrow’s “Impact”

By Molly Rose-Williams

I was aware of my size the minute I entered the space. Three enormous cement blocks hung over a vast stage, surrounded on three sides by rows of seats. In the cavernous Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum, the blocks looked small. I felt even smaller.

Kristin Damrow writes in the program that her newest show, “Impact," was inspired by the Brutalist movement in architecture. According to Brutalist scholar Reyner Banham, Brutalism was “an attempt to create an architectural ethic rather than an aesthetic;" an ethic that valued function over frivolity. “Brutalist structures continue to hold a history that prioritizes equality for all people and reminds us of the power of a united community,” the program suggests.

The cement blocks hung over the stage like provocative abstractions of the Brutalist movement. When you’re proposing to prioritize function over form, ethic over aesthetic, what are we to make of enormous cement blocks that serve no visible purpose but to cast shadows like looming threats? I found my gaze seeking the softer forms of audience members across from me and meditating on a vision of “egalitarianism” that so intentionally de-centered individual humanity and aesthetics, and so fully prioritized function. Who defines “practicality” in this case? How do we decide what merits our collective efforts?

The lights faded to black in resonant silence. Footsteps, lights up. It was a rivetingly brutal beginning - bright lights, jumping right into the middle of a moment. One dancer (Anna Greenberg) lay at the feet of four other dancers as if defeated (Heather Arnett, Allegra Bautista, Shareen DeRyan, and Hien Huynh). The standing four exchanged looks in indecipherable silent conversation. A crowd of dancers dressed in black emerged from behind, moving in synch. Lights out.

A series of tableaus revealed by brief moments of light began to paint a picture of a dystopian world of an epic scale. Unmoored in a deeply satisfying way by the nonlinear exposition, I was thrilled by the audible efforts of the dancers to get to their places in the dark commas between the light.

I found myself increasingly drawn to watching the “chorus” of dancers in black. Their uniformity and exclusively synchronized movement suggested to me that they were intended to be more metaphor than human. But in their work to become a single entity, every tiny difference was fascinating to me - every variation in angle, gaze, curve and rhythm felt like a bright ray of humanity leaking through the cracks of an otherwise monolithic construction. I found myself musing at the difference between synchronized group choreography - at which this group was prodigiously skilled - and deep group listening - where I felt they were less in tune. Could the distinction between these two modes of group engagement also stand as a metaphor for the distinction between conformity and community?

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

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? The five principal dancers, including the queen, wore the same style of simple grey and blue costumes, and I found their movement to be largely descriptive as opposed to expositional. Because there were no particular clues to explain Anna’s primacy, I concluded that the arbitrariness of her dominance must be intentional - a broader suggestion at the arbitrariness of political power in general.

A solo by Hien Huynh about two thirds through the show heralded a narrative shift. With exceptionally nuanced and deeply-felt movement, he became the first of the principal dancers other than Anna to influence the shadow chorus to his will. Under white-blue light and the ever-looming shadows of the cement blocks, he banished the black-clad chorus from the stage with full-bodied energetic sorcery. The sound score shifted to what sounded like ocean sounds, the most “natural” of the soundscape thus far. For the first time that evening, I felt transported outside of the concrete building to a place at once more and less human than the harsh pragmatism of this Brutalist world.

Once again, I found questions unanswered; what gave Hien the power to banish the shadow chorus where the others had failed? And at what point had I ceased seeing the chorus of dancers as individual humans in favor of a symbolic abstraction? Was it intentional that he, the only male of the dancers oppressed by Anna, uniquely possessed this power? My meditations on the role of gender in the landscape of power increased triple-fold as a love story between he and Allegra Bautista began to unfold. Their amorous duet was so archetypal - he the powerful and capable man and she vulnerable and in need of protection - that I was unclear whether it was meant to communicate something in particular about love, power, and classic archetypal gender roles, or if it was simply a narrative device.

Their love affair also represented the first notable moment of connection between the principal dancers since the opening image. Until now, each of the principal dancers had been existing in effective isolation from one another, oppressed by the queen and her shadow army in the midst of impassioned solos. Anna and her shadowy minions descended on the lovers to tear them apart, and Hien was imprisoned, harsh bars of light traversing the stage. In an unexplained move towards solidarity, the three women (Allegra, Shareen, and Heather) united in their efforts to free him. Was it significant that romantic love alone prompted this move towards community?

With a scene shift, the queen returned, and all of a sudden the clump turned against her. Though a shift in music and lighting supported this dramatic pivot, I was left questioning if there had been a driver for the turning point in movement or physical narrative.

The three women arrived to save Hien from a breathtakingly poetic physical lament of repeated jumps. Mad from extended imprisonment, he collapsed to the floor with every attempt they made to heal him. In what felt like a parablistic allusion to “pulling himself up by his own bootstraps," Hien returned to his power only after the three women finally let him fall unsupported to the ground, at which point he leapt to his feet three times and finally stood on his own two feet. The quartet departed for the final showdown.

Anna, broken and defeated by the figures she had dominated for so long, was carried onstage by the black-clad clump. In another unexplained and somewhat baffling twist, the group of principal dancers that the fallen queen had oppressed all show, without seeming to miss a beat, unanimously and instantaneously chose mercy. Together, they began to “battle” the chorus in black, freeing her from their grasp and finally succeeding in subduing them to the floor.

One part of the message seemed crystal clear - together as community, we can overcome what alone would be impossible. But another part of the story felt muddier to me; why had all four previously oppressed dancers so quickly jumped to arms on part of the fallen oppressor? Again, I was confused as to whether I was meant to read this decision as an intentional commentary - on power, forgiveness, and morality - or if it was included simply for dramatic effect as a narrative device. Either way, I felt burningly cognizant of the fact that three of the four oppressed dancers appeared to me to be POC, while I read the queen as white. As a result, regardless of the intention behind the choice, I saw on stage a realized prayer for mercy from the formerly oppressed in the face of adequate weakness and remorse on the part of the oppressor, an uncomfortable echo of the classic white liberal fantasy of redemption.

The four dancers joined the fallen queen downstage, and the evocative opening image materialized, she at their feet. The standing dancers helped Anna to her feet. Together, they surveyed the wreckage like superheroes, and then exited upstage as if walking into the proverbial sunset. Just as the lights were about to fade fully to black, the dancers in black began to stir and rise once more: “The fight is never fully won.” But at this point I was unclear if the fight was against “evil” or “injustice," or both, or neither.

In a show that portrays such a harshly stark political reality, what are we to make of power dynamics that appear unquestioned and unexplained? When the premise of the show is meant to conjure “a set of egalitarian and socialist ideas” but doesn’t explicitly acknowledge the systems of oppression that so deeply characterize the time they evoke, how do we create a more nuanced portrayal of “social cohesion” and community? How do we employ the power of archetypal narratives for the depth, entertainment, and legibility they offer our work without recreating the systems of oppression they are born from and describe? And what does it mean to use groups of people primarily for their symbolic potential, such as the dark clump, as opposed to their individual humanity? Especially when the context of the work deals with meditations on collective justice?

The lights came back up and many in the audience rose in a standing ovation. The show was inarguably ambitious, epic, and stunningly successful in so many ways. In the discussion of power, I can’t help but to zoom out and reflect on the power dynamics inherent to dance writing in general, and dance criticism particularly. While the hours, days, and years of love, sweat, and labor contributed by every artist involved in “Impact” is, in many ways, innately transitory, the words I set down based on my singular, completely subjective experience of the work will be far more permanent, accessible by many for potentially years to come. In this discussion of power, what value might I offer in sharing my personal experiences and thoughts prompted by Kristin Damrow and her collaborators’ work?

Above all, for me, “Impact” was an invitation to reflect on and discuss the roles narratives, both intentional and incidental, play in our work as artists. To what extent can we be aware of the multiplicity of narratives inevitable in our work? How can we cultivate opportunities in our creative processes, both before and after performances, to hear the narrative perspectives of others? And especially, what might we learn from the narratives that pop up unbidden?

There are many moments from “Impact” that continue to stick with me, and I suspect will stick with me for a long time. Each image evokes a question, and in that way, “Impact” may be one of the most important shows I’ve seen in a long time. Thank you to Kristin Damrow and all the collaborating artists for such a thoroughly immersive and provocative experience.

 

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

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Review/response: We came, We saw, They conquered

We came, We saw, They conquered

By Todd Courage

The world premiere of Social Movement, a new collaborative work crafted by Molly Rose-Williams & Co., unfolded at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley on November 17^th. The evening was a strange triptych of sorts: three distinct parts, only two of which were directed by Rose-Williams, claimed space and time within the event. The taiko drumming ensemble, Jiten Daiko, kicked off the evening in a ground level studio adjacent to the lobby. Spectators were invited to have a drink and socialize until the performance began. Soon enough drums were resounding and the bodies that beat them were symbiotically moving into and out of a triangular play space wherein they hopped, and sweat, and pounded, and whooped, and shared joy. The vibrancy and the happiness of the performers’ faces were as satisfying as the very drumming itself. It was as if the act of enacting music art fed them viscerally which their faces displayed, and which registered with us as ecstatic, and that we in turn reciprocated in spirit. The way in which the drummers moved perilously close to each other was every bit as much dance as it was music making. Their choreography was deliberate and functional, as every rotation served the ritual: a collective effort and a great preamble for what was to come.

Upstairs, in a larger spacious “white box” – outfitted with a new set of bleachers for improved sight lines – an energized audience obediently took their seats, convivial and cooperative. People seemed to know each other; a social anomaly specific to the Bay Area modern dance scene. This communion of souls had a socially adhering effect that read “support” even before Molly Rose-Williams stepped out to greet us. Then she did.

The first note I made was “infectious smile.” Her presence gave renewed dimension to “you had me at hello.” Before that, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. My only reference to Ms. Rose-Williams were three pieces of her writing I had read: a dance review for another group; a press release for this show; and a "preview piece" she’d authored leading up to the event. All three were thoughtfully composed manuscripts put down by a deep thinker, analytical but not overwrought, and astonishing in their insight. “Wow!” I thought, “Who is this person?” Rose-Williams stepped into the performance quadrant with a warm and knowing smile. She welcomed us and then took us through an exercise in laughing: she’d strike a goofy pose and we’d laugh, and then again, and then again. The unpredictable nature of the drill was as funny as the game itself. And so we laughed. This simple tool did a couple of things: it relaxed us, and it diffused some of the seriousness that can accompany viewing dance – a constipated characteristic of regular dance-goers in the hopes of maybe “getting” whatever deeper significance there might be to get. She would have none of it. By "un"preparing us, she would allow the dance to unfold more freely, an unadulterated happening stripped of its vanity and acquitted of any baggage that a title like Social Movement might conjure – after all, we were in Berkeley.

She exited, the lights shifted, and a dancer entered through one of several visible doors. They exited as another dancer appeared from behind yet an alternate door. Doors opened and closed with conviction, dancers came and went in well-considered "randomness." There was something very beautiful and compelling about this weird co-mingling of diverse bodies. Three women and one man arrived and withdrew in varying ways, sometimes connecting, often not, a sporadic glance or furrowed brow, a wondrous constellation of moving parts. A quiet solo by Galen Rogers added an additional layer to the ensuing tableaux and the occasional comedic gag – dancers stuck in a door jamb a la The Three Stooges. How this dance began was odd, and fun, and recalled the stuff of any modern art museum anywhere: pristine and provocative and exceedingly sparse. We were disarmed and ready.

The performers’ costumes were not so much “costumes” but disparate separates that felt self-consciously casual. But like so many things in life, their garb assumed diminishing status in the interest of more complex revelations: people living with other people and what happens when that happens. As the "opt out" nature of the “doors section” waned, the famed Beatles song Come Together bled into the space.

I wish that I had not known the in-studio exercises that the group used to generate movement material that Rose-Williams had already so generously disclosed in her preview piece (“Flocking,” “One Move Story,” “Head to Ground”) because, while a “workshoppy” aesthetic is gritty and engaging, a choreographer runs the risk of preempting immediate meaning when the viewer already suspects the rabbit in the hat. Everybody loves the satisfaction of connecting the dots, but more satisfying is the subjective determination of making those connections. All of these anti-surprises were patently forgivable, however, as I watched the director sitting off-stage, laughing gleefully at what she was witnessing. Does she know something I don’t? People laugh prompted by two things: the unexpected and what they expect. I sensed that this was an amalgamation of both. “Come together, right now, over me,” the Beatles crooned – and Rose-Williams laughed, and I watched her laugh, and all was right within this little world somehow.

Next, I’m not sure why a Greek folk classic spilled from the speakers except to maybe say, “Here we are together, right now, dancing.” What a great way to address the director’s gnawing artistic inquiry: “What might bodies moving together teach us about the actual labor of social movements?” Some of the looseness of the earlier section stepped aside for one of the stronger segments of the evening as the proficient quartet fell into staggered patterns of unison, peppered with some deviating variations of twos and threes. The formality of these subdivisions anchored the piece in traditional dance-making and said something about honoring what and who historically had come before us, a type of social movement, although now different; change affected before our very eyes.

An adage laced with poignant trembling gave way to the reintroduction of the “doors” motif, this time less “Judson Churchy” and more “Hard Day’s Night,” sped-up and comical. Theme and variation. Brilliant. There were samples of blatant slapstick, and other times when funny and crazy alchemized into intellectual zingers. Chelsea Boyd Brown confronted the audience with just one such phenomenon. Her impeccable timing underpinned a bit where she engaged the audience with a series of off-the-wall questions, imploring a show of hands. Chuckling, we indulged her. Later, she revisited this theatrical technique, but more profoundly. “Talk to me after the show!” she hollered as the cast dragged her back into the performance rectangle. Even madness has its lighter moments.

What followed was, once again, beautiful and strange. Phrases of gestural solos suggested existential surrender enhanced by a coy Ky Woodward-Sollesnes alluding to her genitals in a most modest and innocent way. This component of the evening felt somewhat improvisational within a loose frame while a sort of “dance off” transpired between the four. Phrases involving shoulder stands drove a floor section toward an emergency exit door stage left. There, the artists built living sculptures with their bodies, stumbling and grunting under each other’s weight – a wacky comment on the ingredient of the accidental in a lot of art making. One final tenuous balancing act moved the entangled foursome like a messed-up centipede across the floor in front of us – a veritable movement social.

The punctuating gem of the evening was a solo performed by Rose-Williams titled Soliloquy. A short type of “reverence” soon busted out of itself into a frenetic flurry of space-taking. How the choreographer claimed the floor as her own shed light on the relationship between her intellectual self and how she lives in her body. The success of this virtuosic investigation was contingent upon the same mind and body in synergetic dialogue. A scream initiated shifts in idea as Rose-Williams physicalized her inner-workings: how a sharp mind translates bodily. A queer one-leg balance became a reiterative theme, and only until I reread her press release did I understand why I associated this with the circus arts. She had trained and performed under master circus trainers from eleven to eighteen years old. Such rigorous rearing informed her whole solo. Before long, her theatrics led us into a yet smaller cosmos: one with a warm sun, and some friends, and a loop of somersaults, and a small earwax castle. She infiltrated her audience, offered us pieces of her. We took them and blessed them and returned them, all of us fuller because of mystical correspondence. This kind of social movement spoke about the role of the individual involved in the momentum of a pivotal cause in the way that a snowball exponentially multiplies in size relative to exposure to more of itself.

A repeating frenzied movement clause left us speechless and her breathless. Once she had spilled it all, she rested as a recuperative meditation in front of us, her chest rising and then hollowing, her breath reduced to nocturnal crickets. In the end, she delivered what I thought to be the zenith of the evening: a shrug, a wistful smile, a saunter away, and one last door closing. But she wasn’t gone – because we could still feel how she happened to us, a prescribed agreement. A social movement.

Todd Courage (MFA Dance: Creative Practice) is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and dance scholar. Other influential interests include Art History, Literature, Food Culture, and Philosophy. He is currently artistic director of courage group and continues to build a diverse repertory of work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Related posts:

What is Social Movement? by Molly Rose-Williams

One Good Quote: Social Movement

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A Reflection on “Small Boobs” by Nora Sharp

Nora Sharp. Photo by Naomi Ishisaka, courtesy of On the Boards.

A Reflection on “Small Boobs” by Nora Sharp

By Molly Rose-Williams

It’s dark in the theater. The image of a warmly lit donut shop swims through my mind. The glow, the smell, the sweet, yeasty air as I step inside from the cold alley. I have never been to this donut shop. This donut shop may not even exist. But in the past five minutes, Nora Sharp made me not only believe that this surreal oasis exists within a world of sharp edges, but that I have been there. I am sitting in a fold-out chair in the Shawl-Anderson studio theater, and my mouth is watering.

Last Friday night, I saw “Small Boobs,” the breakout solo show by Chicago-based artist Nora Sharp. I had been looking forward to this night ever since I sat down with Sharp (who uses “dealer’s choice” pronouns) a few weeks ago to write a preview for her show. Our conversation was wide-ranging, but kept returning to meditations on selfhood, queerness, and the roles our identities play within our artistic practices. Walking into the theater on Friday night, I expected to see a show on bodies, sex, and selfhood, composed with the humor, honesty, and insight anyone who has met Sharp is quick to appreciate. I did not expect that over the next hour, I would witness a process of rebirth and be offered to join in.

I swallow. The lights are very low. Sharp, lit with a fading ethereal glow, paints a mirage with her words - “I’m in the donut shop and I’ve eaten so many donuts. There’s a person next to me, their head lolls on my shoulder, sleeping, and suddenly they wake up and throw up all over my lap, but I say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and start gathering all the empty donut boxes and cans of beer and go outside to the alley to throw them away and it’s morning and I wonder where all the time went and…” It’s now completely dark. Sharp is no longer talking. I’m not sure where she’s gone.

What is required for rebirth? The show began with a playful, understated choreographed number to “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls. Sharp’s direct, but receptive, gaze and acute presence wrote her dancing like an announcement of self: “Here I am.” Her own arrival complete, she facilitated ours. She transitioned to the role of host, picking up a mic and weaving an invitation to collective presence with dry, gentle banter. Attentive, silly, and spacious, her invitation was incredibly easy to accept.

She launched into a series of confessions. The stories were sourced mostly from her childhood, and spoke to themes of bodies, gender, sexuality, and identity. They read to me less as attempt to shed the burdens of her past through atonement than as an homage to the things that so deeply make us who we are that to shed them would be impossible. I don’t remember how the confessions turned into the donut shop story. All I remember is the realization at some point that the lights were going down.

I’m not sure where I am. A moment ago I was drifting from the donut shop to the alley outside, but the longer I sit in the pitch black theater, the more I feel as if I’ve entered a very quiet cave. I hear the person next to me breathing quietly, and I’m struck by the intimacy of sharing such dark silence with a room full of people. I hear a door open stage right. I assume it is Sharp. I am struck by how content I feel to be here.

After letting us marinate in the lingering impression of the donut shop for a good minute, Sharp flicked on a lamp upstage right. In the golden radius, she turned on a vibrator and held it to a microphone. She looped the sound and began a dance of accumulation, gathering clothes into a line on the stage and moving back and forth along the line. Her movement accelerated until she was sprinting, then she broke into a series of front-to-back passes that read like a bibliography of her body history - a cartwheel, a modern-dance pony step, a hip-swinging swagger. Primed as I was to read her movements as an expression of the stories that made her, each pass felt evocative of a lifetime of experience. Set along the line of clothes, I saw her traversing aspects of her identity, excavating parts of herself.

She continued to traverse the space, back to the lamplit corner where she briefly set a loop with a keyboard, and then into the space again for an eloquent dance composed of repeated gestures that seemed to melt between connotations with every slight physical variation and morph in facial expression. Of every moment in the piece, this brief dance spoke most powerfully to me of the agonizing and liberating space of ambiguity many queer-identifying folks occupy when it comes to defining themselves. Back to the blue lamp to sing over the synth loop, and by now, I felt fully immersed in the dark closet of her brain. We had entered the womb.

She rearranges the clothes into a diagonal center stage, and I find myself wishing she would talk again. Though her movement is absolutely genuine and quite evocative in its simplicity, I realize that in comparison to the directness of her verbal presence, her dancing feels like a private language. She invites us to witness her movement, but I do not feel invited into her home, as I do with her stories. I do not begrudge her this, but I do notice that this is how I feel.

The lights have started to fade once more, melting softly from a purple glow to a dusky violet. Hands in her pockets, she begins a mournful song, “If we collapse… If we collapse… If we collapse into ourselves…” As the words accumulate, the lights dim until we are once more sitting in the dark. The last image I have before the stage goes completely black is the diagonal line of neatly-folded clothes bisecting the space. Can we ever hope to unite the reified parts of our multifaceted selves?

In the dark, Nora is talking now about healing, sloughing off the things we don’t need. The darkness is a safety she returns to as a storytelling device - a time when anything is possible. It both brings us into uncommon intimacy of visionless sensation, and allows us to dive deeper into the solitude of personal experience. Right now, to me, the darkness feels like an offer for the potential to be reborn. Silence. A long pause. Applause.

Of the many things I will remember from “Small Boobs," one will be the belief I had leaving the theater that we each contain infinite potential to continue becoming ourselves. Every moment offers the opportunity to both honor the stories that compose us, and find new agency over who we choose to become. One line that struck me from my preview interview with Nora was when she shared the underlying intention for all her work: “I hope that by showing pieces of myself, I offer moments of resonance and the opportunity for others to do the same.” I applaud Nora Sharp not only for an excellent show, but for the incredible artistic accomplishment of achieving what she set out to do.

Molly Rose-Williams is a San Francisco Bay Area artist. Find out more at mollyrosewilliams.com.

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On Queerness, Selfhood, and Art-Making: In which my preview for Nora Sharp’s new show “Small Boobs” became a personal essay

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