Redefining Solo
By Sima Belmar
What: From One to Many: Six Solos Shared
An online performance premiere and artist Q&A featuring six commissioned choreographers presenting brand new solos made in their homes for this time of physical distancing to the music of composer Michael Wall.
Who: Works by Melecio Estrella, Molly Heller, Molly Rose-Williams, natalya shoaf, Liv Schaffer, and Erin Yen
When: May 2, 2020
Where: On YouTube and in domestic spaces with access to internet and a capacity for navigating Zoom
Why: What, you’ve got something better to do?
Ding dong! The Zoom bell rings. I appreciate the effort to sound like a real doorbell.
Clickety click clack clicky. The sound of Jessi Barber, our fearless virtual stage manager, furiously fielding questions from audience members about how to get to the show.
… … … Me, muted, trying to get attention from the faces I know by waving and mugging. Even if someone is waving back at me, I can’t tell.
Clickety click clack clicky. Me using the chat box to connect with friends.
“We shut our doors on March 13.” Shawl-Anderson Dance Center Artistic Director Jill Randall welcoming us. “How can we keep making art and supporting artists?” Jill explains how she reached out to composer Michael Wall for music to springboard solos by six invited artists, culled from prior, current, and visiting artists-in-residence.
100 people on the Zoom call!
There’s Chingchi Yu sipping tea against a backdrop of (real) Redwoods. A woman I don’t know looks cute in her Princess Leia headphones. Andrew Merrell! I love your Donna Summer hair! Couples in bed, drinking tea or water or maybe schnapps. Melecio has a cat statue seated among crystals.
The artists introduce themselves. The introductions will be my program notes.
Molly Heller, in Salt Lake City, was supposed to be in residence in May at SADC. Describes her solo: contrasts, writing and movement, body/architecture, ease/resistance, buoyancy/density, and something else I miss. Something about the desire to desire and the relentlessness of wanting.
Molly Rose-Williams with a new buzz cut asks “what it means to play when I can’t play in community or in contact.”
Erin Yen, self-described “emerging dancer and dance-maker in the Bay Area,” explores the idea that “movement arts are essential in the movement and technology relationships to come.” She performs in a warehouse in San Francisco against a backdrop of animations by Coal Rietenbach.
natalya shoaf is excited to share through this “weird and necessary way to communicate.”
Liv Schaffer. I think she talked about space. I had stopped typing to listen more carefully for a second. Look where that got me.
Melecio Estrella dedicates his piece to Nancy Stark Smith, one of the founders of contact improvisation who died on May 1. Many if not most of us did not know she had died.
Michael Wall, also in Salt Lake City, tells us he has been collaborating with choreographers remotely for 15 years, first by mailing VHS tapes back and forth, now on his iPad. Wall sings the praises of Instagram—glad my teenager isn’t listening. Points out that we couldn’t have this many people in the SADC theater. Asks the artists in the audience what they need from a musician/accompanist during these times.
We wait in awkward silence for someone to unmute themselves or be unmuted, a warped version of the talking stick. Meanwhile, I text with an audience member who is keeping her video off.
Jessi informs us that Zoom has limited the meeting to 100 but there are others trying to get it. I envision legions of dance-lovers storming the virtual palace.
Jill asks us to jump over to YouTube. The show is about to start. Ooh, so cool! It’s counting down with groovy music—by Michael Wall?—and some colorful graphics. The big countdown from 10 begins and I count along with it as if I’m in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
I wish I was in my bed watching on my laptop but I need two computers. I watch on my desktop. I type on my laptop. Usually I’m scribbling illegible notes on the backs of programs in dark theaters. I’m excited to be able to capture so much and also wonder if this is a good thing.
The house lights in my imagination go down.
Dance No. 1. Molly Heller’s Falling. Molly stands in what looks like a living room cleared for the performance. Behind her, against the wall, lean two large, square, black canvases with “before” written in white on one and “after” on the other. Right above her head hangs an enormous lamp that seems like an old school beauty salon overhead hair dryer frozen in mid descent. She’s in black and barefoot. There are exposed outlets and a piece of furniture that do not seem to be intentional parts of the scenic design. She raises her arms and twists on half point, lands on her heels, a torso and arm dance. Heller hovers between the words, dipping into their diagonal spaces, crossing into one, then the other. Before. After. Before. After. A clear and compelling mover. There are lots of presentational gestures, reaching and retreating, and gorgeous head-tail connection. Her flow morphs into staccato hopping and I start to notice the repetition of balled fists, put-up-your-dukes gestures, and facial changes that move from ferocity to disgust to sickly sweetness, a whole world of expression. I am drawn in by the contrast of movement precision and face dancing.
Dance No. 2. Molly Rose-Williams’ Today or Tomorrow. Outside. A chain link fence enclosing a schoolyard. Two signs. One reads “Reserved for Principal,” the other advertises the company that built the fence. Tree, fence. A jogger runs by on the sidewalk that runs perpendicular to the fence. The birds are loud. Molly pops up behind the fence under the Principal sign. Molly climbs. We see her arms and torso but not her face. Bicyclists go by. Molly climbs to the top of the fence. Now we see torso and legs. Pedestrians glance over at her as they pass. Molly hangs over the top of the fence, balancing at her hip crease. With a finger, she traces the words on the sign, her feet dangling and kicking lightly, slightly, a leisurely paddle through liquid sky. She walks sideways across the fence, one foot at time, two feet at a time. Two women walk by. One gestures as if to move something from right to left. Wall’s music whistles with slow guitar that gives me a telenovela feel, which really works for me. Molly tries to touch both signs at the same time, with a foot and a hand, with each foot. She is a curved shape in burgundy. Like Heller, this Molly too suddenly hops, two feet across the fence’s middle bar. She comes to the wide pole nearest the sidewalk and shimmies down. Molly hits the sidewalk. Done. Molly calls this a game. I call it an exploration. Is there a difference?
Dance No. 3. Erin Yen’s Taking In. A warehouse space with an unfinished wood wall, a tarp floor, and Yen in yellow track pants. There’s a lone office chair in the back corner. A rectangle of light creates her shadow. The rectangle of light is a screen across which a red blobby circle swims. The released, acrobatic movement feels improvised but not necessarily in response to the shaking vertical lines of light that trap her face and torso. She looks hunted, haunted, her long ponytail whipping against red mountain ranges that turn white. A fluid mover whose big movement stops and gets micro, fingers rubbing together. The animations shift from yellow square on zebra crossing to purple disk. Shapes move, Yen moves, humans are shapes? Suddenly, a word appears, upside down and backwards so I can’t read it. Yen sits cross-legged breathing, while a fire burns behind her. She strikes poses—martial arts, The Thinker. Her dancing and Wall’s music seem to suggest that her body is a piece of technology among others, particularly when she’s twitchy. She comes close to the camera and gestures around her face, repeating a phrase that involves slicing, catching her hands. The repetition doesn’t clarify the story for me. The affect is sweaty, disturbed but not terribly, somehow coherent but hard to name. A paint can drips red, the red blob returns. Yen runs and leaps in and out of frame. The dance ends with Yen on her knees, vigorously swatting at some invisible nuisance getting in her way.
Dance No. 4. natalya shoaf’s Shift. shoaf sits facing the camera in a room lit by fairy lights. It is night and there is an orchid. We see only her torso at first. Arms rise. The tone feels serious, not quite ominous, maybe a little bit witchy. A dance of upper limbs in relation—head and arms, hands and face. Sensual. Her hand pushes down toward her head, the space feels like it’s closing in. shoaf reaches toward the camera, bows her head, disappears. She crouches like a fairy tale crone and then, legs—strong and bare. Like Yen, there is twitching but then a languorous pose like a pinup, an arabesque. The music is minimal. There are books on the floor, postcards on the wall, city lights outside. shoaf upends herself, looks around. Is she being pursued? Possessed? There is instability as the room presses down. The room is bigger than the enclosure she creates by staying close to the camera. She strikes poses an artist might want to draw. I feel inside a hot summer night as shoaf breaks and contorts a balletic leg. I love when her face comes in and out of view as her body deconstructs classic female figures. Her face contorts as Heller’s did, as Yen’s did. Something is going on with the face. Modern dance face is gone. Where did it go? (Good riddance.) Also like Heller, there are muscle man, bicep flexing gestures. What are we fighting against? Sometimes shoaf looks like a college student in her dorm, other times like something wilder.
Dance No. 5. Liv Schaffer’s Cagebird. First, just a hardwood floor, partially illuminated. Photos cascade to the floor to a deep organ (accordion?) sound. Black and white photos, color photos, an elderly couple posed for a portrait, a wedding cake, a person with a tennis racket, time and place stamps on a photo’s flipside. Liv’s shadow appears in the lit corner, then her feet and cuffed green pants, green hoodie. She starts arranging the photos without showing her face. I marvel at her scalp, the strings of her hoodie dangling. She slows down at a portrait of a man in a suit, sepia print. She strokes her chest and lets something go. She is kneeling in a heart chakra dance. She closes her eyes, opens them to look at her hand. Melancholia and loss, her body shifts like a typewriter, hiccoughs echoing the twitches of the earlier dances. The camera is above her so she looks like a supplicant to a higher power. She draws a circle around the photos with her fingers then lies down on top of them, her nose touching the side of a woman’s face. She shoots herself across the floor disrupting the organization. She moves in and out of the frame. The music finally tugs hard enough that I start to cry, just a little. Her pelvis resisting gravitational pull with taffy pull makes me cry a little more. She’s like a child alone with photographs. I was a child alone with photographs. I’m getting it right in the solar plexus now. Liv nears the camera, a stack of photos in her hand. We now see them close up. Is that Liv as a child? Is that my aunt Mildred? Who are these people in the catamaran, on the steps in the house Brady Bunch style, at the shore? Are they here? Are they gone? Balloons and birthday cake. The back of Liv’s foot lifts from the floor with froggy suction feet, treading and swiping so we see the underside and the articulation. That nearly does me in. The light in the room changes, it presses Liv down beneath it. Prone she lays. She rolls, caresses her face, her neck, her collar bone, pushes herself across the floor and out of the frame again. The last thing we see is her hand. Is that a cello? Gone.
Dance No. 6. Melecio Estrella’s House Plant. Ah, Melecio, in your yellow tank top in a taupe-colored room in front of a gray curtain hanging from a white doorframe, making us laugh. Face dance: pondering, smiling, pandering. Your jaw works, your eyes blink. You show us a white watering can. You pour water into a small mason jar, toast us, take a sip, nod, take another sip. Your lips are working, you look at us—you know we’re watching you! Then, boom!, your heads bobs down and dramatic heartbeat footstep music rises. You bring your hands to your face and, what? Ha! Another set of hands come up. But it’s only funny for a second. The four hands smear all over your face. Whose fingers are those going into your mouth, exploring your teeth, palate, inner cheeks? All that face touching really knocks the wind out of me. I think about hand sanitizer. Your eyes are closed in this sensual and somehow macabre dance. Silver or platinum wedding bands glint. You stand up and we see your floral print shorts. In front of the curtain, you are, I believe, improvising. Looks like Gaga. Looks like Authentic Movement. Again, the typewriter body, a little robotic. And then every part of you is undulating, torso, arms, fingers, rib cage, undulating with hiccoughs. Is that a clock ticking? Are you being swallowed by the energy that courses through you, forcing your head to nod, your arm to get stuck behind your back? Who’s in control here? I can’t keep track of what body part is in charge—arms follow spine, legs follow arms, knees give into wingspan. And then you burst through the curtain—I had expected this at the beginning of the dance but by the time it happens, I’d forgotten and was surprised. The curtain drops, revealing a dark room full of house plants. The leaves become the hands that smeared your face. They massage your whole body. You luxuriate in the leaves. The plants dwarf you then eat you alive, a vernal quicksand. All of this and then “Amazing grace.” You disappear. Black out.
We return to the Zoom meeting and the silent applause of 112 participants erupts.
Jill moderates the discussion. People post questions to the chat.
Michael Wall: “Don’t think about trying to copy what we’ve done before. What are the tools we have now? What’s unique to this? None of the things we just saw could happen on a stage with very little budget.”
Molly Rose-Williams: “It doesn’t feel like a solo in the theater because the act of performing feels like a collective effort.” I stopped typing and lost the exact words, but she talked about the fact that unfolded cell membranes would cover the earth 4 times over. She wants to go in and unfold into huge space, to “allow small spaces to unfold into their vast magnitude.”
Molly Heller: “I felt quite distant from my body. It took time to find a relationship with myself.”
Liv: “All of you seeing into my home both in the video and on Zoom.” “Viewpoints audiences haven’t had to see me from before.”
I have been asked to watch an inordinate amount of dance content lately and it’s too much. But this event asked me to commit to a time and a place. I didn’t know I needed that. I didn’t know I missed that. I think we need things like this: a dedicated time to gather to watch together at the same time. To feel beholden to the community. To be held by a container of time.
Shawl-Anderson is my community. Executive Director Rebecca Johnson held up a picture of Frank Shawl, reminding us that Frank and Victor are always with us. They showed up. We all showed up.
Sima Belmar, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the ODC Writer in Residence. To keep up with Sima’s writing please subscribe to tinyletter.com/simabelmar.
