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| ABOUT TRaC |
MultiTRaC Fall 2002
Beautiful Discord Strikes Many Notes Within Our Own Lives In these newsworthy times, when specific crises consistently dominate the media, Dance Theater Workshop has made its recent collaboration of three dance pieces a comment on our society's constant, generic evils: gender roles, greed, and the fear of intimacy. On October 29th and November 5th and 12th, DTW portrays this painful portrait of very human motifs, exhibited in manners often very different from everyday human behavior. The performances start as bluntly and abruptly as they end. In the first, the lights go up on a girl sitting rigidly on the floor with her hands covering her face. Though her hands struggle to open her eyes, at times successfully, and her arms grasp her infinitely heavy legs, she cannot, for the life of her mechanical body, seem to control her movements in any natural way. The themes of ignorance and control play throughout this piece, titled "Hi, My Name is Clio," named for the girl who appears soon after the first, pushing a mechanical white toy dog with her feet in front of her. Clio seems confused, unaware of the specific purpose of the dog she is accompanied by. She pushes it with her with no specific purpose, merely entertained in its company. By the end, Clio will be begging herself to appear as she covers her eyes, afraid of the answer to her own unnamed question. The creators of this dance leave it up to us as the audience to decide what Clio is asking, but what is clear is that Clio, unlike the scared but open-eyed child of the beginning, is now for more terrified of herself through the influence of some outside force. The force? Society. In a male-dominated society the creators of this play exhibit the incredible loss of control and the mechanical quality women take when accepting the role assigned to them in ignorant confusion. The women wear ragged skirts with holed-up pink polka-dot armbands, portraying the mixture of grotesque femininity and subservience they have in our society. Sound effects complement the piece to create a most melancholy and depressing effect. As Clio asks her question, she dumbly echoes the laughter of the sound effects, eventually realizing that no, she is not in on society's joke, but rather the butt of it. She wearily gives up hopes of understanding, quite like the lost child that Marilyn Monroe gave a pseudo-pedophilic outlet for the men of our society. The men would prefer the women have the naïveté of a child, without losing the adult look (expertly portrayed by the inexpert-looking makeup). Other than the merits this piece has as a social criticism, the dance on the whole is rather extraordinary. By repeatedly using the wild and uncomfortable movements of a doll in a seizure fit, we see the most desperate emotion, identifiable with almost any struggle. When the girls are calm, they show a melancholy, theatrical performance, trying in a manner that is almost painful to watch, to erect themselves to a position of some control. From a dancer's perspective however, this is a completely ironic statement, for it takes extreme control to be able to achieve the look of mechanicality and flexibility these dancers do. Constantly internalizing the outward struggles the girls portray, such as the attempt to exercise control over one another, they exemplify the blame that is often inwardly assigned by women of our society. One calls herself lazy aloud, demeaning herself as she has learned from outside forces. In the end, the girls find it easier to manipulate a new batch of toy dogs, much the way the world has manipulated them, with the dog headed in whatever direction the girls' feet assign, dumbly and without argument. In the second piece, "Late Night Future," another power struggle is portrayed, and it is the even more generic struggle of greed. The group of four dancers starts moving slowly intertwined, speeding up dramatically to create a sense of urgent competition. Ironically, when we watch them in the beginning their interaction almost seems loving, tender, and if one does not look closely enough, it could easily be assumed that they are all kissing. When the movement speeds up however, the various dancers struggle to be in control of each other, pushing their way through to make room for their own bodies. Occasionally, a dancer may be caught with his pants, quite literally, down, because they have let their guard down a second too long, and attempted to refuse the imminent will of the capitalistic greed that lies within them. When this situation occurs, the other dancers are never distracted enough to let up from their own mission of being the most prominent among the bunch and pay no attention to the bare-bottomed individual. Though somewhat similar to the first in its interactive and often brutal choreography, the second was much weaker. It failed to bring very much originality to the table in terms of both theme and choreography, and its repetition took away from the piece rather than contributing to it. In the end, it was simply too long, and intermission was a welcome rest from such heavy subject matter. Finally, post-intermission, came the third piece. The most esoteric of the three, this piece entitled "Foible" is a group of five pieces in all, three women and two men. The groups enact barely recognizable everyday movements, such as smoking a cigarette or entering a restaurant, between the shallow and quick emotions sometimes expressed in their faces. Through the dance, we can see that none of the dancers is completely at ease with their partners. At times a hand is pushed away, a handshake is refused, or help is brushed off, in favor of going it alone. This dance, though the most concurrent as a whole, also has the greatest sense of veiled and realistic competition, readily apparent in nearly every exchange. This kind of panic, this kind of fear, portrays distrust between people who often could make the best allies. The music, different from the techno/found sounds of the other dances, is here either classical or that of a live accordion. The accordion is a superb choice for this dance, for, as it rises and falls in a complex combination of chords and individual notes, the dancers too reach highs together and lows apart, grappling with a choice of which the better of the two might be. The piece ends with two of the dancers poised in an acrobatic, yet painful looking position that is almost primal, with a look of fear and confusion in their faces. All three pieces often lead back to this idea of confusion. After all, our lives within our society often allow for many ironies that are too hard at times to digest. If we deal with it in a progressive manner as the choreographers of this dance did with their radical direction we will often be the most afraid of and the most satisfied with the results. Control is the name of the game, and each dance displays magnificent control over meaning, movement and the way in which the two create discord and harmony in our lives.
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