Headlong's "more' at Live Arts Festival (2nd review)

Headlong Dance Theater sought to challenge its long-standing collaborative process, as well as the audience, in its new 2009 Live Arts Festival work, more, a provocative and sometimes haunting work that references both old and new directions for this 16-year-old company. The group took new risks with structures and content, like the use of stasis and silences, but also continued a long interest in exploring dualities of existence that center around our bodies and movement.

Headlong is one of the few performing groups in Philadelphia— whether in the dance or theater worlds— whose mission includes the public unveiling of its creative process. Headlong's free open performing sessions at First Fridays in Olde City, and its on-stage unraveling of the making of dance— often with ironic and hilarious impact— were an effort to reveal the artistic process to audiences.

For their current work, the Headlong dancers undertook a two-year association with the analytically verbal New York choreographer Tere O'Connor to shake up their long-time collaborating habits and to document them for the dance community and larger public. (See www.danceworkbook.org for video segments. This website even provides some exercises we can do at home, including discerning the "it-ness" of a wall.)

O'Connor comes with a host of interesting ideas for choreographer and lay person alike, such as discerning potential meaning and structures out of experimental movement, as opposed to creating a work from a particular narrative or emotion. The process required each of the three Headlong co-directors— David Brick, Andrew Simonet and Amy Smith— to create, entirely separate from each other, works for the same dancers and then perform them on the same program last spring, sort of the way the Surrealists collectively assembled images or words in a compositional sequence. Having shaken their creative juices into a new collaborative cocktail, the three co-directors and their dancers then created the new Festival work presented at the Arts Bank this month.

High energy, high anxiety

More begins (and ends) with less: Devynn Emory, in a barren space that could be a rehearsal or performance space, commences a fierce solo, with repetitive arm-swinging movements, that suggests a high energy as well as high anxiety. But this energy gets sidelined, literally, as she moves downstage so that a living room carpet can be unrolled in the center space with chairs, sofa, tables and other accoutrements of domestic life. The imperatives and space of a life of the ordinary and mundane are quickly interposed and juxtaposed with those of the creating and performing artist. Yet in their conception of this piece, both the performing artist and the mere mortal artist— eating, sitting, waiting— inhabit the same space, and the same bodies. And there's the rub.

In this living room writ large, we are presented with a slew of duets and ensemble dances, accomplished with virtuoso speed and precision by Nichole Canuso, Niki Cousineau, Emory, Jaamil Kosoko and Kate Watson-Wallace. These dances are often short, frenetic and gestural, quickly appearing and disappearing into the landscape of this domestic setting. These burst out and co-exist with the mundane, such as Watson-Wallace's vacuuming.

The dancers also simply sit— often in a small group on a vinyl sofa, perhaps waiting, perhaps listening, perhaps thinking, within bodies that possess the potential for extraordinary movement. They are bodies structured and shaped by the space of their furniture, their habits of living, and life's other imperatives, into the ordinariness of stasis and silence. The contrasting states of being and movement reveal and heighten these dualities within the same person.

Enter the microwave

What, you may ask, is revealing about a motionless body? The Headlong crew answers the question when Cousineau, having brought a microwave on stage to cook her meal in real time, stands in her own silence, captured by the appliance, while three other dancers, sharing the same space, motionless in silence too, look skyward, in anticipation of something that may be extra-terrestrial or perhaps exists only within their and our imaginations.

Christina Zani, whose Achilles tendon was seriously injured during rehearsals, plays a central role while encumbered, or one could say enhanced, by wearing an orthopedic boot, and also using a wheelchair. By movement and metaphor, her performance reflects the intersections of our vulnerable and fragile lives and bodies with our efforts to transcend our bodies' limitations. Zani performs some graphic and somewhat risk-taking demonstrations of choreography for her fellow dancers, who crowd around her in avid anticipation, only to return to their living room sofa, never having executed her directions. Have they been appeasing her? Has Zani asked them to do the physically unattainable? Are they ultimately rejecting her?

Memories of Merce

Zani's seeming isolation and rejection as the "other" brought to mind Merce Cunningham's in his 1980s work, Quartet, a piece for five dancers in which Cunningham's age and physical infirmities set him apart in an awkward isolation that ultimately compelled his exile from the much younger quartet. But in more the bonds of community, in and out of the performance world, keep Zani integrated into the dance, loved and even healed by her collaborators (an actual scene of healing may be the emotional focal point of the work).

Other epicenters, such as a head-to-head duet almost at the lip of the stage by Emory and Kosoko— where Emory lovingly shares some of her straight cut hair with Kosoko's forehead— also display loving connections amid conflicting lives and imperfect bodies.

Delight and torment

In many ways, more continues Headlong's fascination and exploration with life's tormenting yet delightful polarities. In the 2006 festival work CELL, (in which I performed), a solo audience member was directed for more than an hour by a cell phone caller who had the audience member under continual surveillance yet offered the audience member serendipitous opportunities to grow experientially through discovery and play amidst indoor and outdoor city spaces. Headlong's 2007 Explanatorium had us terrestrials explore the supernatural and the inexplicable.

In more, at one level the ordinariness of domestic life is juxtaposed with the life of the artist. But what makes this dance and choreography— art that BSR's Jim Rutter has questioned— is that these meanings are communicated through bodies in and out of motion, and through movement gestures and movement vocabulary.

A Doris Day wrapup

Just when we think we may have gotten more, Headlong provides us with what initially appears as a disjunctive ending: The carpet and furniture get tossed into a corner, the floor gets literally ripped from the stage, and a small corral over a green surface is built to allow a spotlit Emory to offer up a dance of delight as a latter-day dancing faun— half animal, half human, warmer, and more undulating in curvaceous movement than her opening dance.

We are left in the magical world of the extraordinary and of pure, delicious movement. Resonating in our minds with the Emory dance is the show's use of Doris Day singing, "More" ("More than words can ever say…")— an old pop song with a cheesy ring perhaps, but one that, in this context, helps explain why we still need dancing and feeling in our lives. ♦



To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.