Defying Gravity
Even when you aren't a green-skinned witch!
The woman sitting next to me last week said it best.
“Bebe Miller is the best thing to hit Seattle’s dance community,” Claire declared after the opening night of In Tandem: A Trio of Duets at Seattle contemporary performance venue On the Boards (OtB) on December 18.
Miller’s duet, Fable, created with and for Angie Hauser and the jaw-dropping Darrell Jones, was the capper of a show that also featured a new work by San Francisco-based Maurya Kerr called comet, whom I love. Between these two was Fast Craft: Satellite, made by long-time collaborators Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters, with directing contributions from Amelia Rudolph and Miller.
Lincoln and Seiters literally defy gravity as they swing in tandem in their harnesses, swirl empty plastic bags overhead and deftly deploy handheld golf balls in a series of sight gags. In program notes, Seiters writes that her research “focuses on what dance does rather than what it means.”
I’m not clear what this particular dance means, but Fast Craft is definitely both funny and captivating. It is especially interesting to watch how the two dancers synchronize their moves.
According to the same program notes, most of Kerr’s work with her company tiny pistol focuses on the lives of Black and Brown people, although comet, whom I love is more of a universal dance about relationships and doesn’t seem to be a story about racial identity.
The two performers, Alex Carrington and Chelsea Reichert, are like sea creatures to me, continually revolving around one another, occasionally pulling apart or being thrown together by the force of unseen tides. Their movements are precise and often beautiful, but their dance is more of a protracted moment in time than a story with a full arc.
I feel Miller’s Fable to be the evening’s highlight, starting with dancer Hauser in conversation with the choreographer about the purpose and meaning of what we’d see. Like Lincoln and Seiters, these three artists have a long history together, and this duet draws from both their personal and professional relationships.
A 20-year-old black-and-white video, projected on the stage’s rear wall, introduces us to the dancers, who stand in the shadows until the video ends. As the performance unfolds, we see a gentler version of Hauser and Jones’ videotaped interactions. They skip around the stage, and seem to explore their physical limitations, balancing on one foot while stretching out their other three limbs. Or, as Hauser posited in her pre-dance chat with Miller, perhaps they were demonstrating, not performing?
If you’ve read anything I’ve written this fall, you probably know that I’m fascinated by how artists develop as they age, how they incorporate their own lived experiences into new work that they create. In Tandem poses a related question: How do long artistic relationships influence collaborations? How does knowing a collaborator for years or decades influence their public interactions?
Obviously there’s a trust that develops, and a better understanding of each other’s artistic drives. But I think artistic partnerships must also build from a growing body of shared knowledge, and the mutual pull between collaborators. Gravity, if you will.
One dictionary definition of gravity calls it a force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth or towards any other physical body having mass. In the case of this trio of duets, I’d expand that definition to include attraction to the intangible “spiritual body.”
When we talk about long relationships, gravity includes our trust and knowledge, and our beliefs that a person can spin in the air with us, will catch us when we fall, and will be there to amplify our artwork beyond what Gustave Flaubert called “crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
Back to Claire’s assessment of Bebe Miller’s contributions to Seattle’s dance scene. Miller and her collaborators most definitely melt stars. The range of movement artists who came to OtB to see the opening night of In Tandem was all the proof anyone needed that both Miller, her collaborators and the other artists on the bill were well worth the efforts it took to brave the dark, cold mid-December night.
Love it Marci!!!