It was dark in CPT’s Gordon Square Theatre, even though the house lights were up. Too dark for our geriatric eyeballs to decipher the program cover at first. Finally we squinted and puzzled it out. It was just the usual 5 lines including, “Thank you for putting away the map,” a piece of advice we’d already taken to heart, carefully reading the program notes and then not thinking about them too much as we watched the dances.
But darkness is an apt description for GroundWorks’s thematic palette. Or maybe better, “serious.” So much so that we have from time to time gnashed our teeth and sent anguished telepathic messages to AD David Shimotakahara et co.: “Dark is fine but how about darkly funny once in a while?”
[As we sat there in the Gordon waiting 2 minutes for the concert to start, our wish list for GroundWorks also included a little more of 2 of our favorite dance elements: syncopation and sex. Syncopation in movement as well as music; in this regard, GroundWorks’s Director of Music Gustavo Aguilar is a vital ingredient that Shimo has yet to take full advantage of in his choreography. When are Aguilar’s polyrythms going to find their way into the GroundWorks dancers? And sex not in the sense of commercial exploitation of the depiction of sex but in the sense of evocative exploration of adult sexuality. In this regard, Iron Lung exceeded expectations. Bravo! Encore!]
For those of you searching for proof of the efficacy of telepathic communication, we sort of half got our wish: Shimo reminded us that he can choreograph and perform with humor. Also somewhat kinda sorta sex and syncopation.
Saturday’s program began with Shimo’s new sextet, Insideout, which his program note linked to his company’s residency last summer with choreographer Keely Garfield, which resulted in the darkly sexy Iron Lung, a piece which, as we said earlier, we really liked on GroundWorks even though Garfield saw fit to leave out the funny part of her usual darkly-funny-duets-about-relationships. “I told her, ‘you left out the funny part,’ ” said Shimo of his collaboration with Garfield. Shimo’s own explorations of Garfield’s ideas about the relationships between movement, meaning and emotion and some of the problems associated with describing movement have, in Insideout, resulted in a dance which, to his credit, includes funny as well as a sort of lighter version of Garfield’s darkly sexy universe.
Insideout consisted of 5 sections. 1,3 and 5 centered on a duet (which was repeated verbatim 3 times by different casts). [The same duet repeated by different casts harks back to Shimo’s Open Seating; an intimate duet with watchers is reminiscent of the voyeurstic sections of Iron Lung.] In the first section the other 4 dancers stood around and variously described just the movement; In the 3rd section we heard the emotions of dancer Amy Miller’s character doing the movement, and finally in the fifth section we heard the thoughts of dancer Damien Highfield’s character doing the movement, which segued into a kind of community chorus kibitzing the relationship. First we watched, then she said and then he said and they all said.
Section 1 shows us a duet which depicts an obviously unhappy relationship while the dancers verbal descriptions describe only the movements: eg “he puts his hand around her and they begin to sway.” In section 3 the same duet is described by Miller, who verbalizes her character’s bitter point of view, “here we go again and I don’t feel a thing.” And in section 5, Highfield verbalizes his own equally unhappy feelings.
Miller and Highfield are both past masters at dancing depictions of such material. In Insideout they make the leap to vocal expression with laudable aplomb. Even partially deaf geezer Victor could hear and understand them and the rest of the dancers. Were they miked? If so, Saturday’s performance was one of the smoothest audio techs we’ve ever heard on any stage. Props to the dancer / actors, their Acting and Vocal Coach Shanna Beth McGee, and lighting Designer Dennis Dugan and his crew who ran the show.
And the text, which was uncredited, was really very good. In section 3, for instance, we hear Miller rehashing her character’s thoughts about a trampoline, over which the couple disagreed, but which “turned out to be a great idea,” and on which she could often hear the kids bouncing. Miller was totally immersed in her character, who was unaware of of how funny she was and powerless to get past her anger. The text has stayed away from the lurid soap opera realm of death and infidelity and given us a window at once funny and poignant into the lives of the characters. A text that doesn’t overreach, yet delivers. Who wrote and edited that text?
Section 2 a male duet. Mark and Shimo in a 3 stooges mode. Or maybe Waiting for Godot. A suit coat and pants with a vivid fuschia lining is variously misapplied by these two clowns. Shimo and Otloski They struggle for possession of the coat and both try to wear it at once. They put their arms through pants legs and their legs through coat sleeves. Not as violent as the 3 Stooges but probably as skillful as the Stooges at their best and live, yet! [program note asks what if our thoughts were exposed like the lining of our clothes?]
Section 4 duet between Felise and Jennifer. 2 hot spots and video projections, which remind us of a dance Jenn did with video projections for Food for Thought years ago. Writhing through deeply arched backs and attitudes of extravagant display, the women’s duet partly fulfills our wish for a sexier GroundWorks repertoire. Not as sexy as Iron Lung but that’s setting a very high standard tough competition.
Even aside from our obsession with the sexy, the women’s duet is a pretty good dance. It shows both dancers considerable abilities, combination memory as well as technique. True to Shimo’s default mode, it’s low on interaction … more to say here…Not a bit too long at 20 minutes (?). Score by G Aguilar is electronic / techno, not our favorite of his many modes but still a score we could relate to. Like Iron Lung, we could imagine seeing this performed in a dance or jazz club as entertainment between sets.
Aguilar live on electric guitar.
Tipping Point. That vocabulary was so limited. Still, it was amazing how much mileage choreographer KT Niehoff and the dancers got out of it. The real payoff for this dance might be not the dance itself but on the compositional method the dancers have learned from Niehoff. “Rules born of the movement vocabulary itself,” … “the dancers’ effort to relate to each other within these rules.” It sounds like just the kind of thing that Shimo et co. can take and run with on their own.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas vicnelsaATearthlink.net (:divend:)