CHOREOGRAPHERS SAMPLER
But not anymore. Or not for long. The Choreographers Sampler, inaugurated last year, ends this year, with final performances this weekend (there will be a party after the last performance, on December 9). And so ends MoMing, a place that has always valued the whimper as much as the bang. Maybe more. This Choreographers Sampler is a noisy one, with performers slamming against walls, slapping their bodies against the floor, hooting and grunting and chortling and singing–the music more often than not is people’s voices. The five fine, brave pieces (one with a prelude) have been made by a total of ten people, many of them working in collaboration.
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Three of the four Sock Monkeys–Kay Wendt LaSota, Bryan Saner, and Jeanette Welp–enter through the door and shut it behind them. They back up to a wall, thrust their hips forward, and arch back so that, with the tops of their heads touching the wall, they’re looking up. An ordinary slow walk across the space, eyes and heads down, develops into a fancier walk, the toes and ball of the foot pushed caressingly forward along the floor, the foot brought caressingly behind, and the big toe brought up to touch behind the knee. We’re so close to the performers, and they’re so brightly lit, that our attention is focused on their smallest movements, even on how they must feel as they’re doing them; the effect is highly tactile. They reverse directions and do the same phrase facing us–and suddenly we’re no longer voyeurs but people who can be seen ourselves in the bright light. Because Gas Works Wall so often plays off the three walls surrounding it, it’s odd and vaguely threatening for the audience to feel that it is itself the fourth “wall.”
The premise here is that the two women will dance in unison but with small deviations. They start facing us, both rhythmically swiveling their hips and striking their heels against the floor, first the left, then the right, over and over. One stops, seems to begin to walk away, turns back, and returns to the rhythmic stamping–but this time she and the other are mirror images. Their accompanist, Pennington McGee, comes in with the first sounds of his minimalist score, sounds that first resemble soft static and then the shhhhh of cascading seeds; and the dancers proceed through many variations on movement in unison: identical movement but facing or moving in different directions; identical movement at different times (in canon), or at different tempi, or both.
In Full Sun is a naked-seeming dance that makes punishing physical demands on its performers. The choreography is mostly a series of twisting falls, the weight carried fully into the floor and then fully picked up so the procedure can be repeated; the look is circular, just as the poem gives an impression of circularity. (It’s possible to feel that the act of rising is “being,” the fall “nonbeing,” but as in the poem, the two melt together.) Variations on this general pattern are certain tangled looks–the three dancers are stacked, for instance, one in a handstand, another holding her legs, and a third crouched on the second woman’s back–and moments of openness, as when the three women, widely separated onstage, become still, the only sound one dancer’s vibratory thudding of her heel against the floor.
