Angella Foster's "Women's Work & Other Stories"

Exiting the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center around 9:15 PM on Thursday, March 26th, I had one word throbbing in my head—synergy. Angella Foster’s thesis piece Women’s Work & Other Stories blended monologues and movement, solos and synchrony, fact and fiction into a powerful whole, greater than each of its fundamental parts. To break down and match symbols with stories might help to reiterate the piece, but the holistic experience, visual, audible, and emotional cannot be justified second-hand.
Movement began before the house was full. The dancers walked on and off the stage, filling a clear, rectangular tub with buckets full of soil. Above the tub, an image of a tree was projected onto the backdrop. I imagined roots extending downward from the tree, into the soil. This created a strong base for the tree as well as set my view of the stage as underground—layered, earthy, and fundamental. Foster’s entrance served as a catalyst for the piece. She grew in movement, unfolding a long leg to create a largely obtuse angle and sending a button from her green plaid dress arching into the air. She was not phased; the blooper only emphasized the monologue she delved into on the “hand-made, slightly shabby, rough edges in life.” Her opening movement sequence ended as she superimposed herself in the foreground of the tree with her back to the audience. She extended one arm up and one arm out. I couldn’t help but think Foster was likening herself to this tree, with her own roots in the same ground—the marley stage and the southern soil.
Foster didn’t tell her story alone. Ten female dancers filled the stage with her, sometimes enacting the stories Foster recollected and sometimes moving in synchrony with her. Some of the dancers moved younger and some moved older. Their motions were characterized by age, creating a generational feel. The four dancers who first dove through and emerged from the hanging quilt played in their movement sequence. They held hands, twisted and fell into each other. Their facial expressions were joyful and excited and so were their body expressions. The same movement sequences could have sent a completely different message had the emotion behind them been another. This struck me as very different from my class experience. I feel as though I concentrate so much on the movement itself that I forget to perform. I forget to let emotion and movement fuse, soul and body. Each dancer let her soul move with her body and the result was truly stunning.
The exuded emotions were not always cheerful, however. The dancers who moved with greater age didn’t play in their movements, but rather worked in them. They didn’t make the movements look difficult, only necessary. Emitting strength and power, the dancers let the emotion take them past the steps and choreography. From hand movements that seemed to be working a loom to a deep plie, every movement radiated with purpose.
The most troubling segment to me was when the dancer who had been tending to an infant’s vacant dress broke off on her own. Even if Foster hadn’t explained the devastating phenomenon of outliving one’s own child, the message would have come through. The dancer threw herself to the floor into fast, tight rolls only to rise back up as if on the string on a puppeteer. Sadness poured from her eyes and from her fingertips as she picked up the baby dress. There is no telling whether the emotion enhanced the movement, or the movement enhanced the emotion. It is only distinguishable that the two had an exponential effect when combined.
I noticed many catch and release movement patterns, similar to ways we move in class. A difference, aside from the emotional and performance additives, was the way the dancers breathed in these sequences. There was a synchrony of breath and body; their breath was sustained in stillness and released with force in motion.
At one point, Foster said the women of Kentucky, the women of her life, would weave together something. The duality of this phrase stuck in my head for the remainder of the piece. There is an individual take, looking at weave together as a verb phrase. But, to consider together as an adverb makes community necessary. I think this serves as a mise en abyme for the piece, highlighting Foster’s personal journey to create or weave her story into something tangible and the impossibility of doing so alone.

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