WILDER MILDER DANCES
That’s the kind of question Rachael Milder asks in her solo Unravelling, the first dance of two by Milder performed at Link’s Hall. Danced to Robert Sherman’s keening music for string quartet, it opens with Milder standing motionless with her back to us, a flowing piece of cloth pinned to the back of her leotard and draped. Somehow the lighting, her stillness, and the drape give an impression of integrity and solidity, as if she were a painting or statue so entirely of a piece it’s impregnable and immutable. Slowly she begins to turn, her gaze directed back over her shoulder, her head following the rotating column of her body. In keeping with her stillness her eyes are unseeing, yet somehow she looks frightened.
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It could be that self-containment itself is frightening: it can’t be maintained by living, moving beings. As if to confirm a sense of anxiety and insecurity, Milder begins a halting walk, and though her steps are big she seems hobbled; meanwhile one hand makes caressing circular motions toward her stomach, as if she were trying to comfort herself. Suddenly leaping, the drape ballooning out behind her like a sail, she opens her mouth in a silent scream, but her face turns so quickly impassive again that the scream seems almost a hallucination. Later, when she pushes her face through the fabric of the drape, the effect is again hallucinatory: by highlighting the bony structure of her face–the nose, the teeth–the drape transforms her head to a skull. When she pushes her fingers into the cloth, the bony tips straining outward are what we see. Ironically the drape, by concealing, reveals the body (and perhaps the person) in a new way. Still later Milder pulls the drape up around her like a bowl, and looking down into this big shape seems to dance with it: a new, larger version of herself.
The last work on this program, Milder’s Palatial Larks, is a lark indeed, a cartoonish allegory rendered by seven dancers and a six-piece world-beat band, Mnemio, playing onstage and occasionally dancing themselves. The story features a conflict between three godlike creatures in filmy togas (Terry Brennan, Karen Forss, and McCarthy) and three pushy little clownish birds (Krenly Guzman, Suet May Ho, and Marisa LeRette). A bird child (seven-year-old Christine Leung) arrives on the scene and effects a reconciliation between the two groups: in the great chain of being, the gods would be rational angels and the birds vital, intuitive animals, and of course their union produces the human, perhaps the artist.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Susan Swingle.
