Here in the vast primordial and ancient plains, time has not yet awoken, words have yet to be needed. We are witnessing the first spark of mammalian sentience, as two tri-pedal bodies languidly walk through the land. They are the only two beings that inhabit this world. With an easeful gait and an invulnerable affect, they amble to and fro with no fear of predators or threats.
Photo by Effy GreyA Body (Un)Becoming is a duet performance, installation, and biomaterial fabrication directed by Beth Graczyk and performed along with Leah Wilks. Graczyk, a former Seattleite who has been frequently returning to share her work and research, brought this piece to Base: Experimental Arts and Space for one night only.
As you enter the space, you step over a threshold of fragments of eggshells. These are part of a recipe that uses ground eggshells to make bio-degradable New Orleans Mardi Gras beads. The beads are strung through the space in four long columns, like dangling vertebrata. Both the beads and the dance explore what is possible when working with discarded substances – in this case how eggshells and “the aging female-identified human body… challenge fixed ideas of being and utility, proposing humanness as a permeable state — fragile, reforming, and ongoing.”
Every moment in this dance happens either at the pace of discovery or evolution, leaving a lot of time for the viewer’s mind to drift in and out of our own imaginative landscapes. In the very first moment of the piece, the lights fade up to Wilks’ body curled in a fetal resting form underneath one of the columns with their bare back exposed. For a long time we live in that moment, and begin to notice the subtle shifts of stillness, the air that shifts the eggshell spinal column, which casts a shadow that curves over their gently undulating back. This movement evolves, as they sit up, still more of a form than a figure, face obscured upstage, to let the column caress and skim across their back and ribs.
Eventually, they find their feet, and with one palm elevated as a perceived head, with their back channeling and articulating their movement, the three other limbs alternate to walk forward and then backwards through the space. Graczyk enters, and the two walk together. Time is slow and easeful. As they find each other’s bodies and then feet, Wilks begins to shift and entwine as Graczyk latches their ankles and the palms of their feet together, a task that begins to shift from the initial sense of stasis.
Photo by Seth NihilGarments are pulled on stage, and as they put them on, there is simultaneously something discovered and something lost. Previously indifferentiable, Wilk’s yellow flowing frock and Graczyk’s red sweater bring out different personalities and new struggles. In particular, Graczyk’s top has the eggshell tiles tucked into slits in the fabric, so that whenever her body moves a few fall out. They play and struggle with shaking, jumping, and brushing the tiles off of them. I think of the never-ending nature of self-maintenance tasks like hygiene and grooming, how our bodies keep shifting and stinking and growing and depleting. As the program names, this piece is exploring how discarded matter transforms though “pressure, heat and attention.”
These clothed bodies transform into anthropic bodies, with recognizable physicality, and facial expressions that reveal inner monologues and opinions. There is an exciting sloppiness to this section of the dance. Both very technical and expressive dancers, their movement is intentionally imperfect. Rather than going for the jump that would land gracefully, they push a little further and fall out of it. Graczyk’s body thumps and writhes on the floor in a continued effort to eradicate the tiles from her sweater. As their bodies collide, we see their arms splay and the impact of their weight pushing against each other. It feels slightly transgressive to not be “polished” or “neat” as it is more common to see bodies gracefully meet each other with intense but crafted momentum. Watching them trip and wobble a bit as they move together is a clear disruption from the conventions for flawless movement.
Photo by Effy GreyAs this piece is explicitly about the feminized body, a bare chest is poignant. Wilks and Graczyk start the show topless with their backs and chests fully exposed. The lights are a dusky whisper and you grow quite accustomed to this natural state of their bodies. Until the moment the dancers put garments on, it has not even felt important that these two creatures have chests. But in a blink of a moment, Graczyk flashes one of their nipples at Wilks, and all of a sudden we are watching something that has now been covered up become exposed. The transgression of revealing the chest becomes a powerful gesture. Another layer of the title clarifies for me as some voice in the back of my mind pipes in “oh! how very unbecoming for a lady!” In doing this, the performance again disrupts the societal narrative around the material reality of the dancer’s bodies.
In a not-quite resolution, the charged and conflicting dancers expend their last bursts of energy and they slowly melt back down to their tri-pedal forms, Graczyk slipping out of their top as they return to an ambling state. The lights fade as we watch them unbecoming what they had just become.
A Body (Un)Becoming ran at Base: Experimental Arts + Space Tuesday October 21 at 7pm.
The program for A Body (Un)Becoming at Base: Experimental Arts + Space can be found HERE.
