To briefly discuss one unfulfilled expectation, consider the question posed in a program note: “What does place have to do with who we are?” Interesting question, but having watched the dance we found no clue to an answer. In fact, this group of nomadic dancers -- who spend a significant part of their life on tour and who are members of what Miller herself describes as a virtual dance company – are arguably less influenced by place than most people.
Consider also how Landing/Place was inspired by Miller’s 1999 travels in Eritrea. Her thoughts on communication across cultural divides, some of which appear as voiceovers in Landing/Place, are truly insightful and provocative, but we cannot honestly say that the text and the dance do more than coexist.
And on a more prosaic level, we’d understood from our reading that video images of Cleveland would appear in this performance of Landing/Place. But try as hard as we might, we did not recognize Cleveland among the various video images. We’d describe all this as the problem of making the visible VISIBLE. Dance can only communicate so much beyond a certain physical or emotional essence (which, we suppose, is why so many choreographers feel compelled to verbally explain their work rather than letting it explain itself).
Landing / Place began as expected. The set was a tiny house roughly center stage with a scrim in the foreground (stage left) and in the back on which large videos could be projected. The composer and musician Albert Mathias was visible at his console at the foot of the stage. There was no curtain to go up. Just empty stage. Projected onto the back scrim was an enlarged window with curtains billowing, creating an inviting space. Slowly, cloudy forms visible through the window took on increasingly human form and movement as the dancers gradually entered. Then loud, abrasive rock guitar music propelled the dancers into a repetitive step -- front- back, front-back (a simple step, but in tightly rehearsed unison) -- as the video images gave way to whimsical cartoons of dancing buildings and clouds that rocked and bopped more or less to the music.
This was a long, evening length work divided into about six sections. The second - adagio - section began again with a stage empty other than the little house (spot-lit here at first). Softer and slower guitar and organ music played as a human constellation descended on the little house to the sound of crickets. Two heterosexual duets took place against images of leaves and trees. The duets were not erotic or even particularly romantic, but they were intimate nonetheless, strongly suggesting personal friendships and mutual respect. As if to turn this interpretation upside down, the section ended with two of the women in long head stands, one leg passé and one extended to the side like an upside down grande pas de chat.
In the third section, Mathias played up-tempo music that sounded like African percussion. Among the many things that happened were Miller’s voice describing some touristy moments from her trip to Eritrea, shooting gestures aimed at the house (perhaps referring to the recent civil war in Eritrea and introducing a theme of threat to home and person), highly controlled and stylized projections of birds, and humanized (through motion-capture) images from nature (dancing milkweed pods?).
The next section? Catastrophe! Crisis! Against large video images of flood and avalanche the dancers were jolted into electric shock backbends in lurid red light. This section ends with its considerable tension dissipated by a buffo moment: Mathias enters into the action, lip-synching an opera aria, complete with grand gestures.
Admittedly, a lot happens (let us repeat that: a lot happens) that we can’t order. Suffice it to say that eventually we hear Bebe Miller’s voice again, and the lemon-sucking, hip wiggling dance we’d read about takes place in front of an enlarged projection of an Ethiopian boy’s face, seemingly gazing down on the live dancers on the stage, while behind him on the scrim an Eritrean folkdance performance takes place. The music is “Bale Washintu” sung by Ethiopian singer Gigi, and musician Mathias leaves his console to briefly join the dancers on stage, wiggling his hips with the best of them.
The little house in the set and the thematic emphasis on home, a landing place, reminded us of the house / set piece in Ground Works Dance Theatre’s recent performances of Beth Corning’s At Once There Was a House. People, including dancers, need a place to live, a house, a home, and a place in the community. But there’s such a big difference between renting in N.Y.C. and “becoming a home owner.” Judging from their dances, both Miller and Corning experienced considerable distress moving to the suburbs of Ohio and Pennsylvania respectively. Miller voiced her anxiety aloud to one interviewer, Sarah Kaufman of the Washington Post. “Am I going to lose my artistic standing? Will I lose touch with my work? Will I want to make anything?” Landing/Place and At Once There Was a House both suggest by their very existence that the creative life can continue even in the suburbs. But for how long can the suburbs endure the scrutiny of artists?
From Cool Cleveland contributors Victor Lucas and Elsa Johnson vicnelsaATearthlink.net
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