Works: Erosion: Aftermath
Six female dancers emerge as distinctive individuals through their physicality, living in a storm and its aftermath. Their various psychological responses propel movement that creates community, isolation, nurturing, tantrums, fear, rebuilding, and support. The dancers connect to form a community or disconnect into individual selfabsorption, causing individual highlights or the entire dance’s expansion, acceleration, or erosion as one large, single organism. They veer from walking calmly to throwing themselves around out of control; they confront, impede or comfort each other leaning back to back or catching a fall; or they simply observe one another. Developed partnering, phrases, and interactions during intense passages “challenge the retina” and create a “puree” of movement that seamlessly connects. Personifying physical properties of natural elements, movement disintegrates, dissolves, absorbs, collides, condenses, attracts, and resists. There are sculptural, weighted, foreboding, chaotic, aftershock, and apocalyptic moments. In conclusion, dancers lead a ceremonial procession with planks to construct a square, step inside implying a coming home or common ground.
Set (with or without) is four distressed pine boards dancers carry, use for ritual, and for building a communal frame. Personalized earthy objects or “fort sanctuaries” personify the dancers’ ideas of home: construction, comfort, and deconstruction, discomfort. Ominous wind and sound effects, swirling and rhythmic intensity, and nurturing sensitive strings comprise John Yannelli’s composition; Lighting is shadowed, which highlights a psychological/apocaplyptic nature. Costumes are either period, reminiscent of Dorothea Lange photos and Grapes of Wrath, or distressed earthy layers bleached, burlapped, tea dyed, and designed by David Moyer.
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