fleshy examinations at the Fringe

One of my favorite words in the english-speaking world is flesh. I love how you can draw it out, and how evocative of the human form it is. Both the fl and the esh are equally satisfying, and put them both together? There’s really no resisting. So, naturally, I would be interested in a dance work that was all about exploring flesh and Contradiction Dance did not disappoint. Last night saw the lone performance of of the company at the Phillips Collection as part of the Fringe Festival.

photographer: Jessica Leigh dancer: Jasmine Artis

The performance was designed to use the current Phillips exhibit Paint Made Flesh as source material. Paint Made Flesh “examines the ways in which European and American painters have used oil paint and the human body to convey enduring human vulnerabilities, among them anxieties about desire, appearance, illness, aging, war, and death.” It’s not as common as I would like to witness collaborations between DC’s entrenched and established museums and its more precarious dance companies, so this effort was heartening to see. Also very nice to see a dialogue between the visual art in the exhibit and the performing art of Contradiction Dance. How about we have more like this, yes?

The work, In the Flesh, featured 6 dancers, including choreographer and Artistic Director Kelly Mayfield. The 4 females and 2 males wore black pin-striped power suits, but with pieces cut away, revealing both skin and bandages underneath. The effect was sexy but unnerving at the same time. What were the wounds underneath? Who had done the cutting? The suits eventually came off and went back on, but the costumes were powerful throughout. Seductive looks were shot at the audience as the dancers enacted various scenarios: a jealous trio in which a woman wriggled out from the grasp of two men, a competitive male-female duet, each jockeying for prime position, a couple of girls engaging in friendly rough-housing, wiggling their toes.

The dancers were all technically very strong, but still showing a ton of heart as well. All showed off their traditionally gorgeous dancer bodies to the extent that at one point I thought, “ok, ya’ll are all hot, we get it!” But what a happy surprise to find that impression was intentional and directly addressed in the next minute by Neil LaBute’s text in which Philippe Bowgen discussed how being so attractive had been “more of a pain in the ass” than anything else. Bowgen delivered his monologue so convincingly that it was absolutely believable and read as sincere. Bowgen looked underrehearsed in his duet with Joseph Nontanovan, but it almost seemed unfair to expect his dancing to be as flawless as his acting.

Sometimes I felt like I was watching a really good Beyonce video and sometimes I felt like I was watching Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet. The result? A really fun, puzzling but accessible, evening of dance that clocked in at a trim and perfect 40 minutes or so. Looking forward to seeing more of Mayfield’s choreography and her superb dancers. (a nice bonus: Mayfield put up a sneak peek of the work on her blog, and it was enough that my eye could really enjoy some of the material that was just a little bit familiar.)

notes from the Fringe

There are many things I like about the DC Fringe Festival. Toward the top of the list, DC needs more art, and definitely needs more weird, avant-garde, experimental art. The bohemia-meter reads dangerously low in this town, and the Fringe Festival makes a solid and welcome attempt at nudging it upwards. I like that they provide bits of neighborhood history in the festival booklet, and that they have recycling, and vegan wraps, and organic beer for sale. I like the phalanx of enthusiastic volunteers and staffers (ok, some disgruntled staffers in the mix too). And the ambition of the whole thing is kind of amazing, over 100 different performances in the run of the festival, from July 9-27. I’m also impressed with the new initiative that will run throughout the year, the Fringe Training Factory, led by DC treasure Anu Yadav and partnering the Fringe with the Sasha Bruce Youthwork. (Check out Anu’s latest project Classlines.)

Arriving from Gallery Place, I was freshly struck by how bizarre the whole area feels these days. We watched some young men of color being arrest while their friends fretted to the side, one making the universal ‘call me’ sign to his friend as he was being placed in the squad car. At the same time, tourists from Iowa and businessmen in suits shared the same patch of sidewalk. We hung out at the Gypsy Tent bar and got to catch a short but lovely set from Alien Tears. Walked over to the Apothecary to see the Weerd Sisters present Journey #8.

I do understand that Fringe often implies a certain level of disorganization and chaos, a lack of polish, and I’m down with that. Really. But I do not understand charging people $20 ($15 for the ticket, $5 for the mandatory Fringe button, plus an additional $3 if you bought your ticket online or on the phone ahead of time), to sit in an un-air-conditioned room in the middle of summer in which the theater performance going on next door was often louder than the work you had come to see. Loud male cussing from next door in the midst of an all-female ritual diminished the effect more than a little. I kept opening my mouth, like a fish, in a futile attempt to give any air in the room more opportunities to pass into my body. So it’s possible the work might have seemed more coherent without those distractions. As it was, I was puzzled for much of the show. How did the text connect with anything else in the evening? Why did one soloist have a beautiful, flowy dress and the next one was wearing jeans and a t-shirt? Why have a saxophone solo in the middle? Maybe what I was witnessing was actually a variety show, rather than the dance-theatre I was expecting? There were some evocative arm movements, particularly by dancer Regina Blake, and the live music provided by Lisa Buchsbaum added some interest, but mostly I was hot, bothered, and confused.

The Washington City Paper is a good resource to help you figure out how you might make the most of the Fringe, but I could use more assistance myself. Have you seen anything great this year, particularly in the dance offerings? Anything we should stay away from?

a rooted Drift from Cassie Meador

photographer: John Borstel

Meador is a company member of Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange as well as a choreographer. Drift is rooted in Meador’s hometown of Augusta, Georgia, and interweaves storytelling, voiceover narration, statistics, and dancing. Issues of sustainability, food transport, and development are explored as a piece of land goes from farm to Piggly Wiggly to church.

There were numerous things to savor in the performance at Dance Place on Sunday night. The gorgeous dancing of Samantha Speis, Sarah Levitt, and Martha Wittman was very high on the list. With Speis especially, my eyes just wanted to bask in every little movement, each one so full and scrumptious. There was an unabashedness to much of the work that I appreciated. Meador was not afraid to be overtly political. Drift incorporated humor that could have easily slid into cheesy territory, but instead managed to stay funny and fresh. Some of the movement looked like straight-up Graham and I liked it. It seemed old-fashioned but not stale, traditional but still exciting. I had to keep myself from applauding after some phrases. In the program notes, Meador wrote that, “I believe the best dance-making also pulls us in and out of the studio to navigate the borders between known and unknown territory, reason and imagination.” Yes yes yes!

In addition to the movement component, there were some images that I want to carry with me. An older couple calmly eating rocks. Soil spilling out of a bag after the bag is knifed open by the older woman. Dirt pouring from the spout of a tea kettle. A 50s sockhop in the supermarket. A man supporting a woman as they both crouch down and look optimistically, expectantly up and to the side. A seductive dance with cereal boxes. And my favorite, the closing image, with a stained glass window featuring the Piggly Wiggly pig beaming above branches and candles — incorporating nature, commerce, and religion in one beautiful, complicated tableaux.

The variability between the abilities of the various cast members was sometimes distracting. As much as I appreciated the intent behind the text, and the hybrid nature of the performance, I think the work might have been stronger without any text at all. Anyone who’s been paying attention to newspapers or magazines at all in the last five years is familiar with the food arguments. Barbara Kingsolver, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan. This is some ground that has been exceptionally well-trod. The death of the American farm. We know. The visuals felt fresh, the text did not always. One element that worked in its favor was the rootedness in the particulars of Augusta, Georgia. This helped counteract some of the largeness of the issue by providing a narrow focus.

And for all the articles and books that have been written about our food system, we still clearly have miles to go in our collective habits, so maybe attacking the problem from a dance perspective is necessary too. Drift was exactly the right length at 50 minutes, and engaged the audience with some memorable dancing and images (perfectly captured by photographer John Borstel) and plenty of material to chew over.

Pina Bausch – Michael Jackson

I know the linking may be a little simplistic, or a little silly, but how we memorialize our dancers has been on my mind with the passing of Pina Bausch and Michael Jackson. Pina Bausch passed away earlier this week. Last week I was on a train that stopped briefly in Wuppertal, Germany, and I remembered Bausch, wondered how much time she spent in Wuppertal. Dance Magazine sent out an e-mail with the subject “The Dance Community Mourns the Passing of Pina Bausch.” I did not get an e-mail from them mourning the passing of Michael Jackson, even as dance writers from Apollinaire Scherr and Sarah Kaufman in the Washington Post, and a whole slew of folks in between eulogized him. For both, I went to youtube to remind myself of their creative output. For both, I went to facebook to see how my friends were reacting to the news. Both were inadequately memorialized by the New York Times. I think it’s notable that Bausch was still creating new work, and obviously had more work in her, just waiting to be born. (I would have loved to see her work inspired by Chile.) I know these thoughts are kind of inchoate; I’m just struck by the sudden absence of these two artists, one whose name is known by most everyone on the planet, one known by a segment of the cultural elite, at least in the US. How did they alter the dance landscape, both in death and in their lives? What lasting contributions did they each make? Who cares about which one and why? What would a Pina Bausch-Michael Jackson memorial dance look like? Why is one considered high art and the other not?

Dance Place in DC is hosting a memorial with music and dancing tonight from 5-6 pm for Bausch, Jackson, and Portland dancemaker Keith Goodman. I love this big tent attitude. Have you heard of similar events in other cities that put Bausch and Jackson together?

(As an aside, this week has solidified my position that I don’t really believe in people “resting in peace.” The now-defunct but fantastic LiP magazine used to run this column Honest Obituaries for a Dishonest World, obituaries that tried to give an unvarnished, complete record of a life, rather than just the nice things. The time to cut people some slack and give them a break is when they’re alive. After they’re dead and gone, you might as well give a true accounting of the life, what that person did and was responsible for, both good and bad and everything in between.)