Somewhere between the One and the Five

On Thursday 27 March, I happily enjoyed attending a performance of You, a work for five dancers by Minneapolis choreographer Morgan Thorson that also featured Jessica Cressey, Genevieve Muench, Morgan Thorson, and Max Wirsing; dramaturg Maren Ward; and lighting designer Lenore Doxsee.  This performance also marked the first performance of any work at Bedlam Theatre’s new location in Lowertown.  A fantastic new space, indeed!

Before I get too far ahead of myself, of all the art forms, dance is the one that I tend to know least about.  In my 32 years, I’ve not gone to very many dance events.  In fact, I can count with the fingers on one hand how many dance events I’ve gone to: a student dance recital called Dancescape in Winona, MN, a performance of The Nutcracker by Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet, and a performance by UW student dancers at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, WI.  Oh, and during my undergraduate days I took a 100 level dance appreciation course.  So, not very much at all.

But, I must say that I rather did enjoy this performance of You.  Although this isn’t quite high praise considering the history of my dance viewing, this performance of You was by far the most poignant and engaging and captivating of all dance events I’ve attended thus far.  So much so, in fact, that this performance of You has awakened within me a desire to attend more dance events.  And that all previous dance events I’ve attended just haven’t been been very… um… well… they haven’t been very good at all.  (The Joffrey excepting, of course.  But ballet is so stuffy and dusty, and it takes itself far too seriously.)

I went into You in the best way possible: I didn’t know anything about what I was about to see.  Indeed, I didn’t even know the title of the piece until I googled more information about it just a couple minutes ago.  My initial reactions were that this piece was a vibrant celebration of us, without even knowing that the piece was called You.  The first opening section was merely the dancers, one-by-one, emerging into the space with wide strides, smiling, making direct eye contact with the audience, wearing a kind of ensemble of running or biking clothes of bold colors, all to an energetic tune from the 1980s, and all five of them continued in this way all together, bouncing their way through the space and through each other en masse.  The direct acknowledgement of the dancers of the the audience was immediately inviting, breaking down those awful barriers of audience v. performers in an instant.

This led way to an immaculately timed slowing of the dancers’ pace, the 1980s energy a memory, all five of the troupe very nearly staying within each other’s steps as their steps decreased in stride and increased in time between steps, until they all stopped, stood tall with their weight upon their bones, closed their eyes, practiced mindfulness of breath a la Buddhist philosophy, until–out of somewhere–one of the dancers began to dance wildly yet joyfully as if in a club all by herself, improvising to a music not heard, but yet familiar to us all, silently vibrating walls and ceilings throughout the space.

As it began with the one dancer, then formed to a group of five, within this moment of the one dancing wildly all to herself while the others continued with their meditation, we’re reminded of the one once again, and this seems to be the heart of the entire piece: the group and the one and the one and the group and the group learning from the one and the one learning from the group.  Throughout the work, dancers would split off into groups of two, the fifth disappearing, and the pairs either trying to outwit each other in a kind of pleasant sibling rivalry with their mutual imitation or happily dancing together in marvelously timed parallelism.

When I started contemplating what I saw after the performance, I couldn’t help but think that–unless I’m missing something–dance, by its very nature, has quite a challenge to communicate exactly what it is that it’s communicating.  Music, for example, tends to have a kind of immediate intelligibility, especially if we adore what we’re listening to.  Theatre also tends to have a kind of literal nature about it, due to the fact that great swaths of theatre are spoken in a language we know.  Visual art as well, at least for me, tends to invite immediate reactions, whether it’s paintings of bored people holding baskets of fruit or an image of a red square.  There’s something deeply personal about how these examples compel the eye to move with the lines.  (Then there’s the whole realm of interpretation where the literal meaning of the words of a play, for example, open up different reactions within different people, and some see what others don’t while others see what some don’t.  And naturally, I could be totally wrong on all points above, in which case, maybe you should stop listening to me.)

Dance, however, even though it exists in a medium of movement that is familiar to us all, always felt like it had to work extra hard in order to communicate its story.  But, this performance of You opened my eyes to the fact that good dance, indeed great dance (not the stuff I had seen previously), does indeed communicate things just as well as the other arts.

So, bring on the dance!  I’m coming!