Joe Goode's "Maverick Strain" & "Wonderboy"

The Joe Goode Performance Group took hold of the Ina & Jack Kay Theater of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Friday, May 1st, 2009. With visible strength, they controlled the stage, catching each other and catching my attention.
I expected the strength and radiance due to an exploration of the company’s website before the show. I watched a portion of a piece that became a pas de deux of sorts, with one performer situated in, but hardly confined to, a wheelchair. The pair utilized every aspect of the wheelchair, the handles, the brakes, the wheels, the leather seat. Even through the short snip-it, I got a powerful feel for a message of equality regardless of a perception of handicap. There was no disability, only capability.
The first half of the performance I saw in person, was made up of snip-its as well. Maverick Strain, a 1996 reincarnation of The Misfits, a screenplay by Arthur Miller, was highlighted in excerpts. I did not get a solidified feel for the mood of the piece, possibly because I had no background knowledge of The Misfits, however I was still captivated by the way the performers moved on the stage. Initially, I was slightly distracted by the costumes: lilac-crushed-velvet pants, fringed vests, royal blue sequin waistbands. Their tops (those who wore tops) didn’t match their bottoms, and no dancer’s get-up matched another’s. The costumes disappeared when the movement picked up. As one of the male dancers brought his leg from back to front, his foot high off the ground in an informal ronde de jambe en l’air, I didn’t need to strain to see the definition on his quadriceps . It was not his physical form that I found so captivating though, it was the way he moved past himself, taking up more space than his personal volume. The force and exertion was so close to visible, those are what I was straining to see.
One section of the overview gave the impression of a saloon. First, two women engaged in conversation, moving from pose to pose, on and around chairs in unison. The poses varied from casual and everyday, to contorted and inverted. I couldn’t help but recall the poses held on top of the wheelchair wheel that I had seen just hours before. The women were joined by two men, who came prepared with chairs of their own. The two parties went back and forth, then surprisingly switched roles entirely. They replayed the scene, complete with dialogue and body language. It was an interesting play on gender, the grotesque pelvic thrusts seemed far more foreign on the females, even as they played the same role in the situation as the men had.
The most emotive section of Maverick Strain, to me, followed the staged death of one of the dancers. Soft woodwinds set a tone that the dancers embodied with sighing movements. In three sets of partners, two male-female sets and one male-male set, the dancers draped over, melted into, pushed and pulled each other. Each lift moved seamlessly into another and no set of partners had a dominant or controlling person. In each set, the partners seemed to hurt and comfort one another, lift and drop, hold and release. Even the women lifted the men. Their lifts were not modified versions but a calculated balance of forces. When the women lifted the men, it reminded me of the previous day’s class when we had done some experimenting with partnering and lifting. I knew then that the success of the lifts was fully dependent on total trust and total commitment to the action. Timing too proved crucial in the lifts, but I think the timing of our experimentation with them in reference to my seeing the performance was crucial as well for my full respect for the section.
The second half of the performance was the Joe Goode Performance Group’s 2008 piece, Wonderboy. The piece had an element of magic to it. The puppet proved to be no more vulnerable or susceptible to manipulation than any person, the dancers conducting his extending arms and expressive head nods faded away and he has his own performer. The piece opened with the puppet situated in a window-frame structure, with long, flowing white curtains expressing (through the voice of the performer on the microphone, stage left) his passion for the world he sees, not lives, through his window. Of course, the puppet sat unmoved when the dancers left him but he didn’t seem vacant.; he established his presence and kept it. A synthesized voice told his story of eye contact with a boy, innocently naughty. The encounter came across as confusing, frightening. A woman in a bright red dress took the stage and with her motions she emitted the emotions that lay in his tormented voice as he asked Who can stand these things? answering, I can’t, I can’t. She spun with the initial force of a top, with the keen ability to top on a dime, dive to the floor and recover as if it she’d been standing still the entire time. She exploded through the space, overshadowing the partners who occupied upstage. She was grasping for anything, unsatisfied with the air around her and settling with her own body, holding it tight. She stood out, but looked lost; she cried out, but remained unrescued.
At one point, the puppet sat with his back to the audience, watching the dancers perform a contrived cheerleading routine. They made stiff Vs with their arms, topped off with pompoms and shouted vulgar insults at him. The insults overlapped each other, but never drowned each other out, instead the scene increased in volume and malice.
Eventually, the puppet leapt from his window. He was able to mimic the movements of another male dancer, helped by eight hands. He gained acceptance and confidence through this process. Symbolically, two sheer, white pieces of fabric extended from the ceiling, transforming the stage into a much bigger window for him not to view the world through, but to get to the world through. And he did exactly that, flying over the audience and into darkness.
The bildungsroman of the young boy gaining comfort with his sexuality and self was clearer to me in Wonderboy than any message I must have missed in Maverick Strain. In either case, with or without storyline, the Joe Goode performers kept me wide-eyed and holding my armrests to keep from getting up, getting closer, and seeing more.

Photo: http://www.maryellenhunt.com/artsblog/labels/Joe_Goode.html

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.

Photo: http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=angella+foster&init=quick#/photo.php?pid=30257838&op=1&o=all&view=all&subj=46584896450&aid=-1&oid=46584896450&id=1068391131

Tzveta Kassabova’s "Locus"

More extremely than any performance I have seen, Tzveta Kassabova’s Locus required audience involvement. I do not mean involvement in the sense of participation in choreographed phrases, but involvement in the sense of encompassing you in the performance space, enveloping you in the disturbing, whitewashed asylum created in the front-most section of the dance wing of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on October 2, 2008.
The collaborative actualization of Tzveta Kassabova’s concept Locus, ushered the audience members along a path of bubble wrap, taped to the floor in a boxy figure eight—constantly moving. Initially, the incessant popping created by dozens of feet popping the small, air-filled pockets was overwhelming. The loud cloud of static droned out the mobile woman reading from an open binder. As I filed into a narrow room with haphazardly stacked, white furniture with visible brush strokes, the thick smell of drying paint overwhelmed me. More overwhelming however, was the woman contained in the narrow room. Her blank stare showed no awareness of her peculiar surroundings—tall shudders leaning against the wall, tables resting precariously atop each other. She seemed devoured by the friction created between her outer wrist and the wall mirrors as she slid it along. Her steps were planted and deliberate, but her face showed no intent; the disconnect was startling.
Keeping up with the flow, I did not remain in the narrow room long. I left the absent-eyed woman and entered a larger room. A studio with high ceilings, mirrored walls, and corner windows. The bubble path took me behind a curtain of window frames, through it I could see a single dancer. As I rounded the corner, stepping in front of the frame curtain, I was still physically separated from the dancer, both by space and a large, square cage structure. She threw herself about in the cage, with deliberation and control. Forcefully, she would turn her body or race to the corner, stopping just shy of touching the bars. Her lack of contact with the setting was in stark opposition to the woman in the narrow room.
As if on a conveyor belt, I was carried out of the room and into a hallway where a projector shone an intense white light directly into my eye line. Only when I put my hand to my brow as a shield did I notice another dancer, plastered to the wall opposite the picture projection. Her hands struggled to grip the flat surface. When an unexpected soprano note shot into my ear, I became aware that the woman reading from the open binder was now behind me, in the audience line. She had been wandering around like a free radical in the scene, and suddenly she was back in unison, filed in with the rest of us.
Four dancers in all, occupied the whitewashed setting, along with the narrator, and a violinist who, like a ghost would disappear around a corner, music still audible. At one point, I was struck to see two dancers inhabiting the largest room on the bubble path, the studio. Their movements were not always synchronized, each moved on their own path in their own manner; however, when they shared a sequence their movements were startlingly identical. It was as if the velocity of each right arm swinging was precisely the same. The precision was paradoxical though, because they did not seem aware of each other’s presence.
The most noticeable thing to me about the movements of all the dancers was that they did not seem prescribed. Raw, organic, instinctual, not prescribed. This drove me to think of the experience, not as a performance, but as a glimpse of another world. A disturbing, though-provoking other world. I think it was the proximity to the dancers and the movement that solidified this feeling. If the same props and movement had been set of a stage, the removal of self and involvement would have changed my perception entirely.
The most paradoxical element of the piece hit me when I caught a few words of the walking woman. I kept hearing her say the words change and direction. Appropriately, the dancers were doing just that, pivoting on a dime. But me, I was stuck on the same track I had been for the last fifty minutes. Why hadn’t I turned around? Why hadn’t I stopped to observe something longer? Or decidedly removed my feet from the conveyor belt that was, after all, not even moving?
At one point, I realized the ground below me was no longer crackling. The bubble wrap had been all but compressed, save the occasional, lone pop. It was then that the dancers unrolled a new path for us, of fresh bubble wrap, leading outside. I could no longer see them, but I knew they were moving. Just like when I exited the narrow room, the studio, or the hallway I knew their motion was continuous. There were no wings for the dancers, or me, to rest in.
Photo: http://locusproject08.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/costumes-424.jpg

Ryan Chrisman's "Place(d)"

Ryan Chrisman’s group of college dancers performed her master's thesis piece, Place(d), outside in the dance courtyard of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on March 6, 2008 . The dancers used the trees, bushes, benches, and terrace of the courtyard that was the stage. The dancers began all separate, unaware of each other, exploring the space where they found themselves. They curiously touched and played with their setting, pulling branches to watch them spring back, tipping benches to see how they teeter, and experimenting with the freestanding drums and hanging chimes. After experimenting with their surroundings, the dancers began to experiment with each other—meeting, mirroring, engaging, Short phrases were repeated in pairs. I was unclear as to whether the pairs were ignorant or apathetic towards the others. Suddenly, a game of hide & seek broke out, all dancers playing together. They ran joyfully around the courtyard, laughing, breathing, smiling. Eventually the male dancers was singled out, his phrase with deep plies stolen by the other dancers, pushing him out. Their movements now the same, but in round. The dancers’ cream and tan cozy costumes followed their bodies and pulled back with them. As if they were called inside, like a playing child for supper, the dancers exited the courtyard and framed themselves, one in each window. There was a rhythm to the smack of their knees against the glass, the streak of their hands down it; they enacted their yearning to return to the place where they had bonded as now they were each isolated. Bidding their stage goodbye, the dancers reached their heads back outside, soaking the location for all it was worth before they were drawn away for the last time. The piece was emotional and charged with a playful energy. This was recaptured in the video supplement shown inside after the completion of the piece.


video: Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, http://www.youtube.com/user/cspac