SEMBLANCE OF A LOOP

A black and white topographic map-looking projection morphs on the back wall of the Base Theater. I go on a Rorschach ramble. The image branches slowly like dendrites, tree-like nerve cells that carry electrical impulses. When the projection swirls like a flock of birds or a swarm of krill, I consider the infinite implications of the title Semblance of a Loop. The evening is a collection of works by Mary Sigward made in collaboration with the artists. I read later that Sigward minored in biology and is interested in the intersection of movement with the natural world, which perhaps influences all the imagery on screen. As the house lights go down, my perceptive filter ombres from digital to human.

The dancers’ forms solidify out of the low light. Costumed in neutral olives, dark blues, and grays the atmosphere is murky and liminal. Rhea Keller slowly and sinuously stretches through beautifully suspended arabesques. As she interweaves with fellow performers Nathan Cook, DeShawn Morton, Kaitlyn Nguyen, and Mary Sigward, they remind me of how we feel our way through the unknowns of life amongst our fellow humans. Then stark light highlights the edges of their skin like astronauts on the moon. A hand opens and light shines through it like a nova. Suddenly the quiet harmony of the scene dramatically changes when Keller shines a light on the back wall, catching Cook as if a deer in the headlights. Cook stiffens and rocks back and forth like a metronome. The movement quality change primes me for a new message. Cook crouches and watches Keller who walks slowly across the stage, ascending and descending through relevé, her hands held in a crown-like position over her head. I think of the Shakespeare line, “Uneasy is the head that wears the crown.” Then as if to erase or blot out the weightiness of the crown, two dancers enter holding a gauzy fabric aloft. Then the other dancers sweep in and a surging partnering section ensues. By literally lifting each other, the isolation of carrying the crown disappears and I read a new hopeful message of communal efforts.

During the interlude with house lights still on, a different projection all blue and white pulses in the background. It looks like wind blowing on fur, waving kelp, or melting film. It’s not listed on the program, but a single dancer, Nia-Amina Minor, clothed in white walks from the center of the stage toward the audience and bounces back to the center making looping, sine wave-like patterns. Her eye contact with the audience seems to inform her path. I think of how in life we have plans and a certain trajectory, but when we collide with the unknown it can redirect our journey. Sometimes she twitches like she has a nervous tic, sometimes her feet seem stuck and her hands come to her head. She reminds me of a free radical, a molecule capable of independent existence, highly reactive and unstable. 

Keller and Lael Battiste dance the second piece on the program titled an arrangement in a system to pointing. There is a rare synchronicity of their movement that alternates between organic swaying shapes and angled, precise movements. Upon Googling the title, I find it is a line from a Gertrude Stein poem which talks about how “All this is not ordinary…not resembling. The difference is spreading.” In contrast to the poem’s message of spreading difference, the image that sticks with me from the dance is when Keller and Battiste walk together like one winged creature–like a new idea poised to take flight.

The ideas in this duet dissolve into the next, In Translation, danced by Nguyen and Sigward with contributions from marco farroni. As eerie sci-fi sounding music plays–bass saxophone squeals and discordant keyboard–the dancers melt to the floor in fourth positions and move like elastic animals in a slow waltz. I feel like I’m watching the black and white projection from the beginning transfigure in human form. I’m not quite sure what the choreography means, but I feel like I am taking a sound bath and that the subconscious reverberations and questioning is the point.  

The rhythmic energy shifts into a higher energy in the last piece on the program, Nebeneffekte, and the dancers (Battiste, Nguyen, and Emily Walter) gleam in their pearl-colored crepe pants. They repeatedly swipe down their arms from their shoulders as if ridding themselves of unwanted burdens, cobwebs. Perhaps they are wiping away side effects, which is the translation of the German title. I note Walter’s sure confidence in particular as she moves on and off the floor effortlessly keeping a constant direct, frank eye contact with the audience. I catch snippets of lyrics from the song “Extreme Love” by Holly Herndan. “We are not a collection of individuals, but a macroorganism living as an ecosystem…the world is completely inside us.” I mentally squint and visualize the arc of this evening’s entire performance from the first piece’s neutral-colors, living in the conformist gray zone, to the last piece–visually iridescent and energetically resplendent. With that in mind, I am left feeling that we as “macroorganisms” contain what we need to evolve.