It Works!

Now that I’ve seen dances for humans and intelligent pets, I strongly encourage attendance. The pieces are varied, the setting is deluxe, and whether or not this matters to anyone but me, the dancers and choreographers are really nice. In a world where support for the arts normally means support for orchestras and art classes, work in dance can make a person awfully dour. Not here!

I only acquired program notes after seeing the pieces sans title or credit, but no complaints. Every work spoke for itself. In her opening solo, “Moth – Asomati”, dancer/choreographer Liz Hoefner drapes David Parson’s strobe light work in “Caught” with a sepia dress, making the performer an icon both of vulnerability and of femininity. What might in lesser hands have become a ramble becomes, in Hoefner’s, a series of disjointed thoughts as erratic and engaging as the lights. In one moment she is a whirlwind of limbs and leaps, in the next she is crouched and defensive. In my moment of choice she steps out of the icon altogether when a tic (an exhale, a shake of the head) makes the soloist terribly, tragically human. In retrospect, Hoefner’s process statement makes perfect sense! You can read it when you see the program.

I’m slightly less satisfied with a trio in slickers, but I’m sure that’s only because I wanted a longer time to savor Hoefner’s impression. Maggie Lee’s “Chatter” puts three dancers in skin-tone lingerie and life-sized Zip-Loc bags, and in an exploration of the vast stage floor (which is, I should mention, at the audience’s level) they become a corps de modern with their shadows. Furthermore, the choreography handily isolates the performers from their humanity: it’s there to be seen, as obvious as the lingerie, but somewhere between the gestures and the non-functioning backwards run, the plastic wrap and the performance take precedence over the skin and the performers. I realize that this doesn’t quite mesh with Lee’s program notes, but that’s the fun of objective viewership, and I like the piece both ways.

“The Clandestine Life of Recycled Clothes” arrives just before Intermission. Remembering “Out Fitted” at The Open Space last week, I can’t help but commend how well Rebekah Davidson uses the cloth-and-plastic-cups havoc on stage. A soloist takes on more objects and a slightly modified identity with every dance step: a bathrobe here, a pair of sunglasses there, a plastic cup. When four like-dressed women arrive on the stage with their own plastic cups, we see the whole identity de- and reconstructed in vocal commands, lighting design, and good ol’ contemporary modern stock movement vocabulary. (I want to note that, mid-piece, I thought “Is this Phillip Glass?” It was!) That middle section of the aforesaid stock could be its own piece, but the rest of “The Clandestine…” felt satisfyingly cohesive. I’m just sorry that the regular audience won’t get to see the Intermission dance that followed on Thursday! Like Trisha Brown through a kaleidoscope.

I’m afraid the cup of coffee I got at Brewer’s kicked in during Carol McDowell’s “Surrender”, which really is Trisha Brown through a kaleidoscope. (There are a lot of exclamations in my notes. “I like these angles!” “Dance>Music! Yes!” “AND THE SQUARE IS NOW FIVE AISLES!”) The middle level and the flailing arms got a little disengaging, but I enjoy the diegetic vocal commands. Furthermore, just as I was writing some comment about the lack of contact, there was the most satisfying and unexpected embrace upstage, and I was won. Between that and the final disorientation of the lighting (see this program!), “Surrender” was complete.

The clickclickclick of the rehearsal photographer notwithstanding, “Hit The Spot” did just that, and wrapped up DHIP. I got the impression that the voices in the sound recording were emanating in real time from the dancers’ minds. In an exercise of memory and recollection, this quartet of Hoefner’s, including herself (she might be my hero?) showed the wacky disarray brains will go into when thoughts rain in and out, the same way bodies go into wacky disarray with inversions and lunges and all of the nonsensical things modern dance makes us do. Doris Humphrey said all dances are too long, and she might be right with this one, but if anything it reflects how endless the circular train tracks of recollecive thought are.

Mind status: blown.

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the blog is about saying as much as I want. I don't get the program title, but I hope I’ve said enough to sell some tickets to DHIP. Again, many thanks to the directors for the accommodating dress rehearsal.


LADB