LIZ LERMAN/DANCE EXCHANGE AND MORDINE AND COMPANY DANCE THEATRE
A recent performance and residency by the Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange is typical of the kind of package put together to get foundation funding. Four members of the company, not including Lerman, were in residence for a week at the Dance Center of Columbia College, running a workshop for local senior citizens and local dancers. Kimberli Boyd, the company’s associate artistic director, asked the 26 participants to create stories and movement about “the American dream,” then made a dance from their material.
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The untitled dance created in the workshop, also shown at the Dance Center, was quite short. In it the stage is filled with people moving and talking: the old people walk across it telling whether the American dream worked for them; the young people say that the dream is unrealistic. The old people leave and the young people dance until they’re exhausted, explaining again and again why the dream is unrealistic. The old people reenter from the rear, slowly walking in single file while making hand and arm gestures, and eventually take over the stage from the exhausted younger dancers. The argument between young and old is finally resolved by a young woman who says, “My parents told me to have the ability to dream and the responsibility to carry it through.”
The performance on November 20 made Lerman’s emphasis on social work even clearer. Boyd decided to turn the performance itself into a workshop: she led the audience through a simple warm-up, created a simple eight-movement dance, did a few variations on the movement, and persuaded some audience members to come out onto the stage to improvise. Although Boyd’s stated purpose was to show the process followed in the workshop, it seemed to me that the actual purpose was both to pad the show and give the audience the “feel good” experience of a dance class. Again, social work won out over art.
Decker’s music is based on an idea also borrowed from Trisha Brown: the dancers’ movement triggers elements of the music. When a dancer breaks the beam of an electric eye, a computer decides randomly whether or not to start a short section of synthesized music stored in its memory. Brown did not explore the idea, but Mordine and Decker highlight the idea and make it work. The piece starts with a single dancer walking across four light beams, triggering each one in turn, cluing the audience in to the trick. The rest of the dance makes playful use of the triggering.
