SOMETHING LIKE THE SUN

Spiraling up the staircase to the Open Flight studio is like a journey into a chambered nautilus—a marvelous and beautiful feat of nature. The three solos on tonight’s program Something Like the Sun, by Cove Barton, marco farroni leonardo, and Hannah Rice, share nautilus-like delicate and organic symmetries even though each dance evolved independently. 

The three dancers move discreetly on the edges of the studio as the audience filters in, filling the chairs and cushions on the floor. The sun warms the space through an east-facing wall of windows, and the performance begins subtly like melting butter. 

Barton and Rice move into the audience, leaving leonardo in an upstage corner dancing in flowing, swirling, and dripping movements to water sounds. A forest creek babbles out of the small sphere of a speaker clipped to leonardo’s chainmail shirt. They select different music from their phone and put on a black leather spiked bondage mask. Now they are performing club dance moves in a minimalist style. Lyrics like Let’s go! Crush it! Speak to the devil. Jersey. I’m from Jersey. draw laughs from the audience. The music changes again and leonardo does a rapid booty dance. The music shuffles rapidly between tracks as they stumble around, chainmail scraping the wall, rubbing their face with their phone like a bar of soap. Then like clouds scudding across the sun, leonardo moves toward the audience, pulling the curtains closed as they reach each window creating a softer, calmer atmosphere. They leave the last set of curtains open where Rice is wedged between a ballet barre and the window. 

In relay-race like passing of the baton, the focus shifts from leonardo to Rice. An appropriate transition, as the two were cohorts during the 2024 Flight Deck residency in which Rice developed most of tonight’s solo.   

In silence, Rice slithers under the barre to the next window, opening the curtain. She sits on the window ledge, armpits on the barre. Lifting her feet, she slides to the next window. Now there is a bright white stage light, something like the sun, shining from behind the audience, illuminating Rice against the large windows. The scene is reverential. She opens the last curtain and falls hard to the floor rolling onto her back. Swiping her arm, smoothly rolling over her shoulder, she rockets into a shoulder stand so vertical she looks like a lawn dart plunged into soft soil. Rice holds the stand for such a long time, my eyes play tricks on me—her head and shoulders look like another body. The soundtrack, mostly a collage of white noise created by Casey Adams, now sounds like things are dropping around Rice. Bicycling into plow pose, her fingers tremble to her heart. Standing, Rice walks quirkily to the back wall where she enters a handstand, her legs at 90 degrees with a projection of fingers brushing grass behind her. Standing again, Rice removes her sheer shirt, buttons a khaki shirt at her neck. In relevé holding her arms in a T, she evokes Christ on a cross. Moving slowly backwards toe to toe, we listen to a recording of a poem of Rice’s. The poem is beautifully earthy, spiritual, and irreverent at the same time. Lines that catch my ear: 

Have you ever been here? You can hear the humming of your breath, wet with consciousness…soaking the fruit of the loom. You are a body in this hollow stillness…

As Rice recedes, Barton advances toward the audience, arms also held in a T-shape. A few more of the poem’s phrases—God healer, and God forbid—underscore the two dancers’ cross-like imagery as they pass each other and Barton begins their solo. 

Barton steps nimbly in between the first cushioned rows of the audience sniffing and alertly scanning the horizon like a deer. Pine branches that they place at the back of the stage help create a sense of forest. Vaguely reminiscent of Najinski and Nureyev’s L’apres midi d’un Faun, Barton exquisitely toggles between ballet traditions—jetés, arabesques, pas de chats, miming of calling and listening—and grounded yoga and modern vocabulary. They leap behind the branches like a cat hunting, effortlessly move through head and shoulder stands, pigeon pose, lunging to crouch. The music shifts to a club sound similar to leonardo’s dance. Barton responds, abruptly moving in a disjointed broken way. Their focus switches between interior and exterior, sometimes almost challenging the audience. They shake showing effort. I think about the effort it takes to be human, even as Barton effortlessly hinges down to a squat and then up again. 

Barton’s easy facility blending dance techniques in an exploration of the natural world bears striking thematic similarities and style to Rice’s solo. The dancers developed their works individually, Barton on the East Coast, Rice on the West. Post performance, I spoke with Rice and she said that she and Barton were roommates throughout their time at Cornish and for a while afterwards. Their past shared artistic collaborations and continued friendship produces tangible threads in their aesthetic choices.  

 A dried rose, yolky yellow, is clipped to the paper program handmade from recycled materials by Rice and Casey Adams—an act of care reflecting an intimate program basked in friendship and artistic mutual respect.  

Something Like the Sun was performed on Sunday, April 27th at 6 p.m. in the Open Flight Studio.