DEEP MAPPING

The Sky is the Same Color Everywhere or on the Rapture of Being Alive. The title of Alice Gosti’s site responsive performance alludes to “deep mapping,” a term described in the program as one used to comprehend the many layers of human experience of a place over time through a wide variety of narratives. The five-hour performance simulates the durational aspect of deep mapping inside the downtown Seattle site: the 2+U courtyard, a confluence of contemporary and older architecture recessed like a concrete canyon near the Seattle Art Museum. As I scan the courtyard, a soaring opaque glass wall draws my eyes up to warm wood-ceilinged prows that cut negative-space arrows of sky. Ringed by retail-lined balconies, two grand staircases descend to where benches and tables angle through the space dotted by delicate trees. The site has many levels and vantage points to stimulate constantly shifting points of view, perspectives, and paradigms. The Sky is the Same Color Everywhere I repeat to myself and think about how it reminds me that in a way the site isn’t of preeminent importance. We could be in Pakistan, or Chile, or Alaska. Everywhere people are loving, dying, struggling to eat, making art. 

Somewhere in the city, sirens keen shrilly as eleven performers of Gosti’s company, MALACARNE, amorphously collect near an old brick building covering themselves with blankets so that they blend or disappear anonymously in the surroundings like unsheltered people, blocked from the sky of possibilities, from each other. Shrouded, they lose individuality, and their flimsy walls dissuade us from gleaning anything of their uniqueness. Seattleites, we know the unease of walking by someone sleeping on hard cement, cushioned only by a blanket, but their story too is a thread in the deep map of our city.   

“AWAY UP!” An adamant cry echoes around the branching concrete pillars as a man with a powerful presence sloshes water through a banister. It spills like a waterfall, a benediction into the courtyard below. Blood red rags trailing from his waist, the man moves to a staircase and tips a pail of water down the railing ramp like a desert arroyo after rain, the promise of life anew. The man is ritualist Timothy White Eagle, a mixed-race Indigenous American who incorporates Native American, Pagan, earth-based spiritual practices into his performance art. White Eagle, like all the other performers of the evening, collaborate with Gosti to create the work. 

White Eagle points to a woman in the audience as if asking her to witness, take accountability, step forward, to participate. There is gravity in his gesture and the audience is very still. The woman nods and the performance surges into a new score. White Eagle clacks wooden sticks together calling the dancers out to the courtyard where they walk backwards clockwise in a circle, opposite the Earth’s spin, unwinding time. The dancers have white makeup between their eyebrows and eyelids like personal horizon lines and wear jumpsuits of vermillion, jade, or mustard. 

The dancers dissipate to the banisters along the balconies where they swing arms over the railings like pendulums or animal tails, elbows slip on the railings like falling asleep in class, they shoot legs through the balusters, their hands shake, I think of our animal natures raging against the machinations of the spirit-numbing modern rat race.

As if caught in a river’s current, the audience is swept up to a rooftop-like space where the dancers’ focus is far away beyond the skyscrapers and glinting waters of the Sound as they alternately step back and forth like metronomes. They seem entranced in doing something, but we don’t know why, like being trapped in a routine. A dancer covers her mouth with her hand. Speak no evil, I immediately think. There is a series of lifts that ends with the dancers held upside down against concrete pillars, perhaps a representation of breaking free from our normal outlook on the world. 

The dancers move into a clump on a sky bridge, each facing a different orientation, where they engage in a series of gestures like washing water over their heads, wiping their lips, pulling something out of their chests. They are so close, but they never hit or interact with each other, kind of how we can go through a day in the city within inches of hundreds of people and maybe never make eye contact. It is deeply satisfying when they periodically grow, reaching toward the sky together. 

The clump moves to a stair landing where they are backlit by shifting pearlescent clouds doing similar simple gestures. The repetitious movements become like a mantra, like watching the surf—they allow my mind to empty and perceive something new. I begin to appreciate how the durational aspect of the performance permits the audience to absorb nuances that otherwise get lost when choreography flashes by. Being outside, we also have time for other sensations to seep in–like the cold. The audience members are wrapped in down jackets and ski hats against the “Juneuary” weather. The discomfort makes the experience more transformative and less performative. Audience members eat snacks, dinner.

The dancers scatter and we are drawn back to the courtyard by the plaintive wailing of post-punk vocalist Paris Hurley. While the glass wall behind her ripples colors like a cuttlefish, Hurley creates an eerie, haunting soundscape that paints a National Geographic-like reel in my mind’s eye. I think of the wide-open steppes of Mongolia, barren cold places…Finland in winter…She is joined by singer Amy Denaio and they sound like seagulls or puppies crying then like running wolves panting, snarling, growling and whimpering. Hurley wipes spittle off her chin. She guides the audience to walk in a counterclockwise circle. We are really looking at each other now. She asks us to scream our joy into the center. It is time to step up, be vulnerable, to share a bit of what we’ve been absorbing. I appreciate hearing the different sounds people make—what their faces look like. Sometimes I find it so strange that I can be experiencing something huge inside like grief and no one may know it; it is a release to yell until my vocal cords feel ragged.

Above us, Gosti’s dancers and performers from Path with Art line the railings. Path with Art is an organization that provides free arts engagement to help people who have experienced trauma. The performers move through gestures from daily life like flossing their teeth, driving, going to sleep, and wiping their feet on a mat. I think of the phrase “chop wood, carry water” wherein success lies in doing simple things over time. People emerging from trauma, I know from personal experience, can strain to do simple things like getting out of bed. Seeing the Path with Art performers do these acts along with Gosti’s dancers is an inspiring reminder that we all have our struggles, but it can lighten the load when you share it with community. When the performers begin to mirror each other, there is palpable joy and I know we are witnessing that to be seen is truly the rapture of being alive.

A huge energy shift occurs as Cheer Seattle, a group championing the LGBTQIA+ community, runs into the space. At first, I thought the group’s appearance was unplanned like a photo bomb, but it soon became clear their role is intentional and parallels MALACARNE’s mission to create transformative performances “that fight reductive ideas regarding class, sexuality, gender, ability, and ethnicity.” Cheer Seattle’s tricks are breathtaking, and I realize they are just a different expression of how the MALACARNE dancers connect across space. Once I saw two sets of dancers spinning in the same helicopter lift but they were not within eyesight of each other—one set was around the corner in an alley. It seemed metaphoric of how the human experience is simultaneously happening all over the world.

White Eagle returns dragging a metal bucket tied to his waist with a red rag like an umbilical cord. Chanting, lying on his back, looking at a slice of sky, his hand moves in an arc like the sun across the sky. I think of Indigenous ceremonies that honor the four cardinal directions that represent not only stages of life, but also home, security, passion, new beginnings, and emotion. When I think about it this way, I realize that Indigenous peoples have been doing deep mapping of the dreams and memories of sites for a long time. White Eagle’s closing ritual calls the dancers back.  

The show ends with the dancers holding each other perpendicular to the cement wall so that they are staring at the stars now dotting the sky. For me, they are activating the deep vertical space of this site that extends from below the concrete of the courtyard to the earth the Coast Salish and Duwamish peoples have stewarded for generations. That extends to the heavens that stretch over our multi-colored, multi-faceted world. The site hums, our cells buzz, the audience leaves but we are newly connected to community and place.