ONE TO ECHO
I attended ONE TO ECHO at San Diego State University on Saturday night, December 2nd, 2006, the second of two performances. ONE TO ECHO was curated by Jillian Chu, Founder of BOUNDcontemporaryDance, and Alicia Peterson, Founder of A.S. Peterson Dance.
Jillian Chu and Alicia Peterson created an extraordinary evening of dance theater, presenting a wide range of events, pieces, and styles. ONE TO ECHO was a tremendously entertaining production. For me, the overriding qualities of the evening were invention, intelligence, and vision.
“everyone turns into birds”, by Amanda Waal, was a startlingly original creation, a compelling symphony of mixed media. This kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic piece included, at various times and in various combinations, dance, music, voiceover narration, film, stroboscopic lighting effects, and little white parachutists falling from the flies.
It’s not that “everyone turns into birds” was so good because it contained all these elements — merely dripping paint on a canvas doesn’t result in a “Jackson Pollock”. The piece is brilliant because of the talent, taste, and vision of the creator, Amanda Waal.
For me, “everyone turns into birds” was a continual surprise. It began prosaically with a single dancer upstage right, and yet interestingly, because the dancer had a red strobe attached to her left shoulder blade. Unusual. The assault on the viewer built gradually. It became clear during the first film segment that what was being offered was deep and rich and suggestive, relating strongly to some pretty important aspects of human experience, such as “how do you tell the living from the dead?”. And, what is living? and what is dying?
In the face of these critical issues, “everyone turns into birds” was warm, humorous, and engaging. The second film, from the early days of cinema, featured cavorting celestial beings, gods and goddesses flying about on their planet-chariots — Venus, Mars, the Sun. Jealousy, vanity, war, love. Just like us, really.
The second series of voiceover narrations were literally voices from the dead, dead people relating in single sentences or sentence fragments how they died. The impact and the tragedy continued to build, the weight increasing, and then the parachutists came down. This was a heartbreakingly funny, painfully bittersweet theatrical moment.
And, importantly, for a while the dancer was dancing in darkness. Other things were happening onstage but she was dark. This was very new, for me. At first, I didn’t get it. “Hey,”, I’m thinking, “that’s wrong. She’s not lit.” And then I realized this most unusual approach was well thought out, was very sophisticated. It made a statement — the dancer in a “dance” is not necessarily the only important thing that’s going on. And, “dancing in the dark” is a powerful metaphor, particularly in the context of the piece as a whole.
“everyone turns into birds” breaks new ground in dance theater, extending the poetry naturally inherent in dance by incorporating additional media and creating something new and valuable.
Dance is sufficient in itself. And, as Amanda Waal has so brilliantly demonstrated, dance can become part of a collaborative multimedia effort — very much like film, in this case incorporating film — in which something entirely new emerges.
“Why I move”, concept by Jillian Chu and performed by Sarah Keeney, and “How I move”, choreography by Jillian Chu and performed by Jillian Chu, Sarah Keeney, and Yvonne Hernandez, were small, gemlike etudes. These graceful studies contained many interesting moments. “How I move” was most powerful when the three dancers would find each other, forming a synchronous trio, and then breaking out into new combinations supportive of the music.
“A separate piece entirely”, choreography by Alicia Peterson, performed by Alicia Peterson, Jillian Chu, and Vanessa Tipon, presented a river of movement, like a horizontal waterfall. My impression was of liquid choreography.
“The Commitment”, choreography by Elizabeth Swallow and performed by Alicia Peterson, presented a lone dancer caught in a literal and metaphorical maze of her own personal tragedy and the never-ending demands of daily living. Four dynamic elastic bands angled across the stage from right to left, a spidery meshwork creating simultaneous traps and openings for movement, struggle, pain, and possible redemption. Having explored [for now] the phase-space of darkness and potential light, the dancer walked free of the maze and offered a wistful, half-hearted smile, a desperate attempt to prove to herself and everyone else that she was really all right. And then the stage went black. This was a great, truthful moment.
“Knock Knock”, a cinematic collaboration by Hassan Christopher and Monica Gillette, choreographed and performed by Hassan Christopher and Marissa Labog, was a genre-defining dance film. Not merely dancing captured on film or a film of dance, “Knock Knock” fused the dynamism and showmanship of jazzy choreography with the time/place/perspective shiftability that is the natural power of film.
First of all, the dancing and dancers were killer. And, the choreography was killer. Utilizing virtuoso film editing, a movement sequence would begin in one locale, in one season, with a certain costuming, and would conclude seamlessly in a radically different locale and season, and with different costuming. A spin move would begin in New York’s Central Park with snow on the ground and the dancer would come out of her spin in the brilliant summer sunshine lighting the mean streets of Compton in Los Angeles.
The quick pace of the choreography was complemented by the fast pace of the editing, creating a rich compositional effect. And, the choreography fully integrated the various environments, including solitary park benches, fluttering sheets of newspaper, snowy Manhattan streets, and the rocky shores of the Pacific Palisades.
These very talented dancers were doing very difficult things and they were totally committed to what they were doing and to each other. “Knock Knock” is a high-octane love story, a potentially award-winning film breaking new ground in a relatively new genre.
Likewise, the curators of ONE TO ECHO, Alicia Peterson and Jillian Chu, have set a new standard for what an evening of dance theater can be.
Add comment December 5th, 2006