Written by Anne Lawrence
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| (Photo: Rachel Grant’s Hail Mary for the Millennials Photo by Tim Summers) |
The Bridge Project is one of Velocity Dance Center Seattle
MaryAnn McGovern’s SPRAWL Part 2 made it clear that McGovern is a choreographer to watch. She’s a Chicago native who recently moved to Seattle Midwest . The nominal subject of the work is urban sprawl. That might sound like an unpromising idea for a dance, but for McGovern, it’s just a springboard into something more abstract and ultimately quite moving. The work began with a quartet of female principal dancers performing a coordinated sequence of turns, spirals, and handstands with an inwardly directed focus. They were then joined by a community cast of nine dancers—think Greek chorus—who loudly announced the names, founding dates, and early population figures for several Puget Sound cities (“Kent”; “Issaquah”; “Seattle”) and later the 2010 population figures for those same cities. The community cast also gave directions to the quartet (“Grow”; “Extend”; “Disregard”; “Isolate”; “Displace”); some of these directions seemingly were enacted, at least in part, as the quartet continued to perform its movements. Eventually the focus of the quartet dancers became more external, their movements became bigger, and various community cast members began moving in unison with them. All this was accompanied by well chosen musical selections, culminating in a piece by Zoe Keating. By the end of the work, everyone was moving in unison, and it became evident that McGovern had crafted nothing less than a metaphor for the creation of community through art in the face of mindless urban expansion. Feats of choreographic magic like this are rare and very special.
Alicia Garcia, a senior at Cornish College
Rachel Grant’s Hail Mary for the Millennials was less successful. Much of Grant’s movement vocabulary was, literally and figuratively, pedestrian: Her cast mostly walked in unison in 12-step, clockwise circles, facing forward, over and over and over again. One of Grant’s dancers described this movement as hypnotic to perform; unfortunately, it quickly became uninteresting to watch. Occasionally a dancer would break out of the pack to shake an upraised hand, make a wry face, or inspect the torso of a fellow dancer. Most of the sound score consisted of a contrived and irritating faux voice-message recording, ostensibly addressed to Grant herself and dealing with debt collection. Toward the end, this was mercifully replaced by excerpts from recordings of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons (1955) and Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land (1944)—according to Grant, music from the Great Depression that alluded to current economic conditions. Overall, Grant’s work felt perplexing and not very satisfying.
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| (Alice Gosti’s Intermezzo Photo by Tim Summers) |
Alice Gosti’s Spaghetti CO. – Intermezzo seemed to be a continuation of the approach she utilized in Are You Still Hungry? at NW New Works in June 2011. That approach involved assembling a group of talented dancers and creating a messy, chaotic spectacle centered on them; actual dancing was deemphasized, if not absent altogether. The messiness in Are You Still Hungry? was created with spaghetti, tomato sauce, and red wine, which the dancers threw and spat at each other. The messiness in Intermezzo was created by sprinkling the dancers liberally with flour as they sat on or around an overstuffed chair in the lobby at Velocity, whereupon they decamped to the auditorium, trailing flour in their wake. In Intermezzo, unlike Are You Still Hungry?, some of the dancers briefly engaged in some actual dancing. They also performed an a cappella rendition of TLC’s Creep, to no discernable purpose. Sadly, Intermezzo seemed like a terrible waste of a fine cast—and of an opportunity to create a dance work of real substance. Gosti is capable of making much better work than this. She should stop cooking up tasteless spaghetti and devise a new recipe.
