Beth Corning's Once There Was a House, which started the evening, is a long dance which Cleveland audiences have seen fairly frequently since Groundworks' Artistic Director David Shimotakahara first presented it. We haven't really written about it or this company much, so it's time. OTWH is a dance that is really a play - of considerable depth - with dance being its major but not exclusive vehicle of expression. As this piece develops, the huge contrast between the public faces and the private inner worlds of its four characters is dramatically revealed.
In the beginning group prolog, Felice Bagley portrays a Goody-Two-Shoes character. She is, in her public face, oh so perfect. She is perfectly slim, perfectly charming, and wears the perfectly fitting little white dress... but behind this façade her inner world consists of a profound vulnerability. In her opening solo we see her perfect little white picket fence, and her perfect extensions, keep collapsing. Perhaps so does her sense of self?
During the Laurie Anderson monologue, David Shimotakahara and Bagley portray a couple alluded to; Anderson talks of breakfast, preparing breakfast food, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, talking to and partially ignoring each other. Very small struggles of ownership ("It was his toast"), and power ("Do you have to have the radio on?"), evoke a very ordinary marital existence seen from a disconcerting interior point of view.
The dancers' movements, which come from a pretty standard menu of ballet and modern dance steps, could be seen as providing a commentary - a supplement - to the monologue. Minor images of rejection (he bends down into a second position grande plie center stage and when she sits on one of his horizontal thighs he shrugs her off by lifting that heel; later she steps into a lunge and when he tries to sit on her back leg she shrugs him off) contrast with more traditional balletic partnering in which they embrace. Yet these embraces lack traditional partnering's expected warmth and passion. They are endured without affect.
The story gets darker.
Amy Miller portrays a character whose humorous public persona is the ultimate of bored ennui. In the dance's ensemble beginning she projects attitude - "I SO don't want to be here", but in her later solo, her inner world reveals an acute and self-destructive desperation. Crouching or lying, she hides behind a little metal house with edges that look sharp enough to wound. A red scarf seems to evoke blood; it is as though her very life-blood is seeping away behind the house's (her?) hard façade. Her desperation culminates in her setting her house on fire: Actual flames.
David Shimotakahara's character's public face initially appears pretty 'normal'. His private face is secretly aberrant. He appears onstage attached to and manipulating a life-sized doll, who hangs in front of him, hiding his face and body. She is faceless. Who she is or what she represents is open to interpretation. What matters is the tone that is created. As he hums a burlesque tune, he coyly opens the doll's bodice, then turns and wiggles his butt. The doll's front unzips and money falls out; then, as though ashamed, the doll stuffs the money back into the open cavity. When Shimotakahara turns his back to the audience to zip her front back up one cannot but help think of a man pulling up his pants zipper. There is something more than vaguely titillating and discomfiting about watching Shimotakahara perform with the doll. The result is an emotional content - more so than a graphic content - that feels uncomfortably exploitive and somewhat pornographic.
Dancer Mark Otloski portrays the fourth character. Where his introductory ensemble dance persona was resolutely upbeat - a salesman who is always 'ON'- in his solo he is revealed to be alone and lonely as he sits or sprawls his elongated, lanky body on a chair, or sometimes stands on it. Perhaps he is contemplating hanging himself? This dance with a chair as a prop recalls to mind one of Shimotkahara's own early choreographic efforts, also a chair solo dealings with issues of human anguish, which reminds us that Shimotakahara grew to artistic maturity at Ohio Ballet under Heinz Poll, who was strongly influenced by German expressionism. Which further reminds us that Beth Corning spent time in Scandinavia and was influenced by what we might call a Scandinavian sensibility. Which reminds us that this dance of hers is, in essence, not just a good dance, but good theater, with a pervasive darkness worthy of Ibsen, or Bergman.
In Corning's Once There Was a House there is a tight relationship between soundtrack lyrics and movement action and content. In Keely Garfield's dance Iron Lung, one sees a similar relation between the lyrics of the music (mope rock by Aqualung singing of "falling out of love" and relationships ending) and the movement. Both works are dark and disturbing looks at ordinary life, but where Corning uses a broad pallet of creative elements to create a dance that focuses on houses and suburbia as vehicles to explore individual introspective states of being, Garfield relies on movement and music - rather than movement and set - to focus on relationships, mostly between couples (most often, but not always, a man and a woman).
The choreographer has acknowledged an interest in pas de deux, but gives hers are non-traditional twist. Her movement, far from standard, is unusually interesting, and fresh. Perfunctory images of leaping or soaring are quickly corrected by more persistent images of floating, mostly down.
These pas de deux are edgy, and open to all kinds of nuanced interpretation. Our own responses differ, yet we both start from a common place. We agree that the relationships presented are not relationships of people coming together as equals or with equal enthusiasm. One person wants the relationship, but the object of his/her attention doesn't, or one person wants the relationship while the other is less invested, or one person doesn't want the relationship but is imposed upon by the other, or others, either by force of will or by physical force, as for example when Felice Bagley repeatedly runs and jumps only to have Shimotakahara forcefully and determinedly push her to the floor each time from the very apex of her leap. When at last she stays down on the floor and her persecutor sits proprietarily near her, her posture reeks of resentment.
Or when Bagley ties her skirt to Amy Miller's skirt and uses Miller's skirt to draw the unwilling Miller to her. What follows is a long across-the-stage passage where the sitting two men sequentially tie, untie, and retie the skirts of the two standing women who physically draw together and move apart - come into and out of relationship - one as aggressor and the other somewhat reluctantly. Who are these people and what relationships do they represent? Are the women a mother and daughter, siblings, lesbian lovers? Are the men their family members, manipulative boyfriends, sex club voyeurs?
In another repeated action one person pats another person on the head. Is this an act of affection or an act of patronization? In a scene where a woman kneels facing a man, while the other couple stands close by, is this merely a posture of respect, or submission, or are we to assume she is performing fellatio? These scenes are certainly amenable to sexual interpretation.
This is a low-key movement pallet that nevertheless manages to reach out and grab your attention. With its pop sound track and the way the dancers seems to be dancing for themselves or for each other, it could conceivably be being performed in a club setting, with patrons wandering in and out, drinking, talking, watching these little suggestive scenarios. "Suggestive of what?" you ask: You decide.
Well, that was the meat, and quite a substantial meal it was. After all that content and nuance the dancers unwound themselves and their audience with Shimotakahara's light, lilting, and entirely bright Kabila, a contemporary ballet danced to sweet acappella African singing. That one should expect it to make absolutely no significant reference to traditional African dance is cued by the abstract art inspired, totally non-African costumes. It made for a pleasant dessert.
All the Groundworks dancers with the exception of the younger Jennifer Lott have been with Groundworks close to or since its inception. They are impressive on many levels; they are in amazingly fit physical shape - strong, and lean as whippets (well, a greyhound in the case of Otloski); technically it seems they can do just about anything Shimotakahara or anyone other choreographer asks of them; 3 of then bring a shared background of experience from dancing for Poll at Ohio Ballet; and they are all mature individuals and artists, and that shows. On the rare occasion when we aren't particularly into whatever piece these dancers are dancing, it still remains a pleasure to watch them dance, for their own sakes. It is also interesting and revealing to watch Jennifer Lott, who was already a very nice dancer when she came into the company, shape herself to and become even more suitable to the company aesthetic.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net (:divend:)