The original ending to my review of Headlong's "more."

To read the full article as edited and published by the Broad Street Review, click here.

Then come back and see the final two paragraphs, as I submitted them (and which got cut, leading to unnecessary claims that I lack knowledge of dance history).

And FYI: I don’t write the headlines or subject headings for the pieces that appear in the BSR.

A question for my cleaning lady:

"And while I don’t believe for a minute they showed what remains of dance when bodies disappear, I think the work continues to ask important questions about the boundaries of dance’s movement vocabulary. Is rearranging your own furniture art (and not merely when it’s feng shui)? The next time my maid comes over to clean, do I owe Headlong royalties? Can any movement function in a choreographer’s arsenal?

Choreographers long ago answered the latter question affirmatively. But in making an entire work out of a continual reframing and re-asking of the question, Headlong instead set up an insignificant tautology, proving only that any time dancers (or anyone) engage in movement, they’re engaging in movement. As a company, they may have needed to take an artistic leap in a piece like more. But to argue that any and all of the movement they present constitutes art in some definitional sense when disconnected from bodies, from context, and from meaning does not extend the boundaries of dance but reduces them to meaninglessness."

In other words, embrace the freedom to use whatever movement you want but integrate it into a piece, rather than fashion the act of questioning into some meta-level approach to your work.

Review of A.W.A.R.D. Show Round One

First published in Edge Philadelphia:

The "art for art’s sake" crowd rarely likes to acknowledge the huge role that financial concerns play in the creation of new works. But two shows (among many) at this year’s Fringe Festival exposed the near-inseparable connection between money and art.

Indeed, when Headlong Dance Company choreographer Amy Smith hosted the first installment of the A.W.A.R.D. Show-a dance competition with a $10,000 prize-she opened the night with a complaint, telling the audience that "The idea of a competition for dance nauseates me a little".

I guess what worked for the Ancient Greeks doesn’t suit Smith’s sensibilities. But I can sympathize with her a bit. Four local choreographers competed in the AWARD show, and the evening structured three minute intervals between each of the four pieces, giving audience members time to reflect before voting. When the lights dimmed to commence the second piece (Jenn Rose’s "Way Up High"), the audience burst into exuberant, almost overwhelming applause merely on the mention of Rose’s name.

So much for the audience not turning the evening into a popularity contest (for those paying attention, Rose’s piece won the first evening’s audience vote count). I don’t know any of the four choreographers personally, and so I will say who I voted for, even if my vote doesn’t entirely reflect the merit of the piece they presented that evening.

ROUND ONE PRESENTS:

Kate Watson-Wallace opened the evening with "dances for the recession," an excerpt from her recent Live Arts Festival full-length Store. Their heads wrapped in fabric, six dancers rose up out of piles of clothing, clutching paper bags in a consumerist post-apocalypse landscape. Small scenes played out; a couple fighting, a man stripping to reveal a dress worn underneath, then later ecstatically groping and caressing a broken television set. Her dancers sometimes moved rhythmically in unison, and an ominous sense pervaded the entire piece.

I had already seen Store earlier in the week, and found it hard to separate my experience of the full-length work from this excerpt, especially since I consider Store the best dance piece I’ve seen during the Festival. However, as an excerpt, "dances for the recession" failed in many ways that Store admirably succeeded. Without the abandoned warehouse setting, Watson-Wallace’s shorter version didn’t engender the same sense of desperation, isolation, and pathos in her characters, and couldn’t locate their activities within the same space of consumerist experience.

In short, it lacked a framework to both contextualize the mood of the piece and give it meaning. Still, for all its disembodied disconnect, I loved it.

Jenn Rose’s Oprahesque "Way Up High" blended tap and modern dance choreography in four women’s emotional struggles. Rose’s dancers started in a circle around four pair of shoes, and the mood and music (and Jessica Sentak’s excellent lighting) set a dark tone for the piece. As the women found strength and hope in each other, they donned their tap shoes, and moments of exuberance and joy began to pierce through their darkness.

Rose didn’t need to tell us afterward the meaning that her choreographic journey made readily apparent. While I found the first half overly neurotic, in both choreography and dancing, Way Up High showed the best execution of the evening.

Jumatatu Poe’s melodramatic "Alibi" played the evening’s best soundtrack, but I found his multimedia and videos unnecessary to what the piece clearly conveyed. The text and dancing capably told the story of a man who comes home to find a dead woman in his house, and the oft-frightening choreography showed the battle within one man between his innocent reason and guilty conscious. Throughout, dancer John Luna wracked his face to fashion the night’s best characterization.

Finally, Kathryn TeBordo’s "You Ain’t Gonna Get Glory If That’s What You Came Here For" blended spoken word poetry (text borrowed from Dorothea Lasky) and minimalist dance. While three dancers moved slowly about the floor, a man stood still at the back of the stage, loudly and monotonically blathering out lines like "Conceptual art is dead, representational art is also dead."

The delivery hit the piece’s humor, but I wondered what TeBordo intended as ironic, and what as mock-ironic. TeBordo set out to find "how small can movement be to still be dance, and still be seen," and her work, while enjoyable on one level, proved just how insular art can become when it only focuses on the medium and not the product. Like the famed paradoxes of Zeno, I could just as sophistically (and just as easily) ask "is the last flicker of a bonfire still part of the fire?" and the answer would only satisfy those with an iron already plunged into the flames.

SO WHO'D I VOTE FOR?

If you want to know how I voted, re-read the order of the pieces as I described them. As for my comments on merit? Ultimately, my final vote reflects which choreographer I would rather see create new work with the $10,000. With money on the line, I’m going with who I can consistently count on to create new art. It’s not fair, and probably what artists hate the most about the free-market.

Review of Applied Mechanics "It's Hard Times at the Camera Blanca"

First published in Edge Philadelphia:

Applied Mechanics "It’s Hard Times at the Camera Blanca" presented the inescapable nature of the global economy, that other thing artists hate most about the intersection of art and economics. Here, eight circus characters (trapeze artists, clowns, a lion tamer) downed drinks at the Camera Blanca bar as they struggled with the economic uncertainty of a travelling show on the verge of financial failure. The audience moved between tables, chairs, and barstools, eavesdropping on conversations between a brother and sister as their relationship fragments over an uncertain economic future, listening to the outpourings of clowns who fear irrelevancy, and throughout, witnessing a Ringmaster ruling over all of them with a unyielding iron fist.

One moment of hope rises above the Dickensian din: a young clown arrives, hoping to reinvigorate, if not reinvent the circus (i.e., the economy, if you didn’t get it yet). "No one does that," the lion tamer tells him; "no one can do that" the Ringmaster commands.

Rebecca Wright’s text lays the metaphors on thick; however, she enlivens the dialogue by creatively borrowing from a number of other sources, providing a movie-buff’s dream script with quotes culled from Greatest Show on Earth, Trapeze, and Casablanca (hence the mnemonically mimicking "Camera Blanca" bar). I laughed in hearing the bartender and trapeze artist replaying the "Go back to Bulgaria" dialogue, just one of the moments that transcended the show’s melancholy mood.

Like several other Fringe Artists presenting works that deal with the scientific discipline of economics, I’d love to know the depth of Wright’s knowledge in this field (or at least how much research she’s done). However, unlike the two monologues Mike Daisey showcased at this year’s festival, Wright at least doesn’t dip into fantastical solutions to fix economic woes, but instead presents the valid, real concerns felt particularly by artists during an economic recession that makes the production of art a luxury and further drives the existence of artists to the margins.

Despite these financial concerns, Wright and her designer Maria Shaplin didn’t manufacture a sure-seller for the Fringe, but instead pushed at the boundaries of theatre as an art form. "Hard Times" dropped the proscenium, linear narrative, and fixed directorial focus, and forced the audience to follow characters about an awkward landscape, catching only part of the conversations at a time to piece together the evening by themselves. At times it felt a bit scatter brained, but the entire 35 minute piece repeated, allowing anyone with decent parallel processing skills (or massive ADHD) to catch every conversation and get the whole jist of her "hard times" and circus metaphor.

And while Wright may not have found any answers about the economy, her new work asked important, and theatrically rewarding questions about the dramatic nature of theatre.