"In Memory of the Deathtrap,' by Pink Hair Aff

Nine crumbling women, a crumbling house,
and a real estate agent eager to unload them

JIM RUTTER

I don’t put much stock in collectively produced art. Some companies, like Pig Iron or New Paradise Laboratories, have achieved great success with thematically unified, ensemble-developed pieces. But too often the opposite result occurs: Divergent personalities and artistic visions clash, spoiling each individual’s efforts and creating a distorted and uneven mess.

So it was with a bit of trepidation that I entered a dilapidated house on the 2100 block of Christian Street to see the dance collective Pink Hair Affair’s second creation, In Memory of the Deathtrap, which featured six pieces by seven different choreographers. I had seen Pink Hair’s first work, the appropriately titled We’re Pink Hair Affair, during last year’s Fringe Festival, billed as a debut showcase of the company’s talents without attempting to collaborate on a unified theme.

In Deathtrap, however, these recent UArts grads clearly wanted to coordinate their individual choreographic efforts into a thematically unified evening, using the Christian Street house as the stage for site-specific choreography that blended elements of theater and performance art into the dance.

Our guide, the real estate broker

After making the audience wait outside for about 15 minutes, the pesky, pink-wigged real estate agent Miss Jones (Kaleigh Jones) fashioned the evening’s overarching thread, leading us through a crumbling house that she clearly wanted to unload. “Imagine this place in its ideal form,” she asked rhetorically, before pointing out the broken banister, the radiator in the middle of the floor (where a wall used to stand), and the severe water damage threatening to collapse every ceiling.

While we gawked at or (with Jones’s encouragement) touched the paint flaking off the walls and avoided the broken panes of glass, the house’s nine inhabitants laid bare the emotions of their everyday lives with little seeming regard for our presence. Here, dances evolved naturally out of the ordinary activities of young women living together, from the passive-aggressive grudge-argument in Christina Gesualdi’s cleverly scripted “The Green Room” (where the obnoxiously asked question, “Where are you going?” was rejoined by, “To get a sharp knife”), to a pair struggling to maintain a surface semblance of order while cleaning in “The Office,” by Lauren Mathis and Anne MacGillivray Wilson.

As the dancers contorted themselves within the rooms’ tight confines, writhing against a doorjamb, turning a (very cool) full cartwheel up a set of stairs, or even playing with an unscripted cat, the walls pulsed with life and the floor became a miasma of young emotion. Even the music flowed naturally from the iPods, boom boxes and clock radios. The only contrived (though hardly artificial) note of the evening occurred when Jones occasionally disappeared to take a phone call from a prospective buyer.

When roommates fight

After Jones guided us to the upper floors— warning us not to lean on the railing— the upstairs pieces fared better than those that launched the evening downstairs. Christine Steigerwald’s short performance piece, “Listing Lazily to the Left,” portrayed a young girl’s longing as she sat wistfully on a rooftop wrapped in a string of lights, juxtaposed against the similar sight of the city skyline.

Rachel Slater’s engrossing “Reflected refracted redone” came closest to pure dance without diverging from the sense of the evening. Here, four women sat in cushioned chairs before Slater’s choreography presented the equivalent of an argument among dancers. Starting from the same point of view in their synchronized movements, they slowly began to drift into different patterns that then escalated into a tantrum of disorder before each returned to her original place, not in conclusion or agreement, but like the aftermath of many fights between roommates, only signifying a return to a tenuous ceasefire.

Not everything in this program captivated so nicely. Though Jones, like any good real estate agent, amused with her banter, I found her annoying by the end of the tour, especially when she asked the spectators to repeatedly chant the virtues of safety. Yes, I realize her behavior typifies the profession— which is why I customarily avoid dance recitals by real estate brokers.

Nor did all of the dancing transcend the ordinary. Wilson’s unerotic “I Am Your Question” portrayed two young women sitting on a mattress, flipping through the channels, moving to the jingles of (pre-recorded) commercials as they explored their sexuality— their hands or lips nearly touching before pulling away as a late-night talk show resumed. Frustrated, they sublimated their sexuality into aggression, and Wilson’s choreography devolved into a fight that lasted about ten minutes too long.

Young, confused and broke

Too often the site-specific performance work I’ve seen appears like an academic exercise: The choreographer takes a novel location and figures out how to mold a dance to it— a feat often achieved without infusing any greater theme or emotional resonance into the work. By contrast, Pink Hair Affair’s Deathtrap— though occasionally seeming like little more than an episode of MTV’s “The Real World”— achieved an integration of its theme: nine women inhabiting a crumbling house, a site reflecting the structure of emotional lives equally in need of repair.

In this respect, Pink Hair Affair took the ordinary activities of confused and broke young people, and elevated them into scenes of uncommon poignancy, reminding me of the 19th Century transcendental ideal, as expressed by Thoreau: “It is something to be able… to make a few objects beautiful; but to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.”

Director/choreographer Wilson deserves special commendation for ensuring that the script unified the work of these seven choreographers into a thematic whole. As the last piece ends, Jones has sold the house, and the dancers tumble reluctantly down the stairs for one last dance in the deathtrap, their movements filled with the remorse of young women who realize that the chaotic days of youth—represented by either dilapidated buildings or disordered lives—are slowly coming to an end.