FOR NOW BUT NOT FOR LONG

We walk the winding pathway between five towering curved rusted steel plates. Richard Serra, describing his sculpture Wake, encourages the viewer to move “between them, through them, and around them as they undulate… your body moving in relation to their surface that moves.” The audience walks through the narrow channel and for a moment everything is obscured by these monumental walls. An opening between the walls reveals nineteen dancers standing in a single file line, their bodies stacked perfectly between. 

BRKFST Dance Company co-founders Joseph ‘MN Joe’ Tran and Lisa ‘MonaLisa’ Berman, have come from St. Paul, Minnesota for six days to build a 50-minute site-responsive piece here at SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park. The cast is made of dancers from SFD+I, Velocity Dance Center’s summer dance festival. for now, but not for long explores the history of this location and landscape, which was built on the brownfields contaminated by Unocal’s oil and gas industrial site. The piece explores “regeneration, decay, attraction, repulsion” as well as “how our individual lives are woven into and affected by reinvention.” 

I take a seat at the concrete ledge and look down to notice the ground has an unnatural recurring pattern, the gravel appears to be carved away into repeating semi-circle lines framing perfectly round circles. I wonder what caused these marks in the ground. 

Moments later, the performers break from their line into smaller groups and spread throughout the courtyard with a unison phrase. As if to answer my question, they latch their ankles to their knees, swipe their legs around, carving a semi-circle in the ground and tap their feet into a swivel, leaving a fresh circle in the gravel. Each dancer’s footwork leaves a new mark in the ground, repeating the pattern.

What is the footprint of a performance? Besides the gravel markings, this performance leaves almost no material trace as the dancers guide us on a path through the pavilion, courtyard and nature walk, through the valley of ginkgo and evergreen “living fossils,” amidst long-standing sculptures like “Eagle” (Calder, Alexander), “Mary’s Invitation” (Ruffner, Ginny) and “Persephone Unbound” (Pepper, Beverly) or Ai Wei Wei’s semi-permanent exhibit “Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals” on view through 2027. 

I recently learned that the concept of a “carbon footprint” was originated by BP oil as a marketing strategy to divert the onus of climate change from fossil fuel oil companies onto the individual. As the dancers scuff and dig and drag their feet along the gravel, they pick up a cinematic amount of dust, the air becomes thick and dense, reminiscent of the exhaust haze or smoke season’s hazardous air quality levels. A single dancer kicking up dirt seems insignificant, but even just multiplying the action by the full cast creates such a tangible effect, the dancers in the foreground remain clear while the dancers further away are hidden behind the opacity of the dust. 

While the dancers move through the piece as a collective group, for now, but not for long has notable motifs of a solo body contrasted against a shifting mass of bodies. In the opening sequence, the cast slowly decomposes to the floor, pulling and rolling their bodies backwards through the long pavilion, and rolling their way up the stairs. Dancers periodically rise up to stand for a brief moment before melting back down to the floor. As the group melts up the stairs, one dancer emerges from the clump and remains standing, looking forward for a long time. Rather than highlighting the individual, this serves to contextualize that the clump, or a population at large, is made of individuals.

Later in the piece, the dancers break into small cypher groups. BRKFST’s pedagogy honors fundamentals from breaking culture, with abstracted and contemporary dance vernacular, and builds off of and incorporates the movement style expression of their collaborators. Given that most of the cast has only just met one another earlier this week, and that many of them likely arrived with minimal to no previous experience breakdancing, it is really interesting to watch them use breaking technique and footwork, while staying grounded in their own dance languages and expression.

The cast cheers each other on, gassing up the dancers in the middle of the circles, before everyone regathers as a clump, the browns and rust reds of their costumes blending with the  firethorn and thimble berries in the surrounding landscape. As the dancers scuttle along the path, they braid into an intricate formation where the leader is constantly shifting. Someone’s shoulder brushes up against a fireweed shrub sticking out into the path, and the white silky haired seeds fly into the wind. It is hard to quantify the footprint, the effect, the material change resulting from for now, but not for long. My internal landscape, and I imagine the other audience and performers, certainly changed. Mingling after the show, there is a lively energy of connection, a joy of being gathered outdoors in this beautiful space, having seen a piece created with so much intention and play in such a short amount of time. 

The thing about the “carbon footprint” is that it is true that the individual has a responsibility, and that our individual actions create lasting effects. But it is also true that the aggregate community, made up of individuals, magnifies beyond the sum of any individual’s footprint. The formations, personality, and scale of for now, but not for long, was only possible because nineteen dancers and two choreographers joined forces. As a collective we create immeasurable change, and that change cannot be done without each person’s actions. In a few seasons, when one of those fireweed seeds roots in the ground and is growing its own flowers, ruminating on their life and origin, they might faintly recall an ensemble of dancers meandering by, and a shoulder brush, which sent the seed into motion through the air. 

BRKFST’S for now, but not for long was presented through Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation in partnership with Seattle Art Museum at the Olympic Sculpture Park on Sunday July 19, 1pm. To learn more about BRKFST dance, visit their website. To learn more about this event and SFD+I, visit Velocity’s website. Featured photo by Erin O’Reilly.