Between the end of summer and the start of the fall season, one annual dance event always seems to mark that transitional window. The Flight Deck showing at Open Flight Studios culminates the three residencies granted to artists who have been working in the space through the month of August. An intimate set up of folding chairs and floor cushions allows an up-close look at these works-in-progress, and because things are still in development, it always gives much to chew on.
Photo by Jim Coleman.The first artist-in-residence to show is Ben Swenson-Klatt, with their work, The Multitudes I Contain. The piece, which takes inspiration from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, was created in collaboration with the cast: Walden Barnett, Sophie Martin Hurwitz, Daniel Kiley, Maya Mohr, and Poppy Yozh.
Sheer, sea foam green drapes criss-cross the space. Inside this web, forest green fabric covers a small mountain of shifting bodies. A single, clear voice rings out from beneath:
Awake awake in the quiet of the morning
The song is an original written and performed by Walden Barnett in the tradition of Sacred Harp/shape-note singing, an American a cappella style developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the song continues it sets us in a place of beautiful simplicity, a kind of grounded humanness.
Someday someday just you and I
The five dancers emerge from the fabric, partially obscured by the swags of sea foam, caressing their own skin, rolling, swimming, and moving with amorphous lightness through the space as the singing stops and peaceful guitar strumming comes in over the sound system. They adorn clothes that are scattered through the space, and begin to dance in a loose unison: breathy bounces to swirl to reach.
The piece unfolds in this manner, with soft solos or duets splintering off to a playlist of gentle emotional pop songs. The dancing is peppered with lines and monologues as well, at first describing natural locations—a riverbank, a fort in the forest, a day at the beach. The lines veer into hopes and dreams of the dancers, with particular emphasis on remembering and envisioning queer joy and home-making, earnest recitations accompanied by mimed gestures and hopeful, open faces.
Daniel Kiley. Photo by Jim Coleman.Given the political and economic circumstances, the pull towards wanting to craft an art piece where everything is beautiful, and we can just be together in our soft queer bodies, feels very real. I too want to wax poetic about a riverbank, to gaze into my love’s eyes, to have a home of my very own where I can have coffee on the porch. These are things basically everyone wants. But despite the content of this work being very relatable, I felt pushed away by the delivery, which, to me, veered into saccharine. Now, this could be because I am a born cynic who is not good at being “touchy feely” and it’s possible that I am just not the target audience for this! But it got me thinking about the challenges of making utopic art, and how that might be one of the most difficult kinds of pieces to pull off, and how even an unsentimental person like myself might be brought along into this world.
The issue with portraying utopia, from a compositional perspective, is the lack of tension. There’s a lot of underdeveloped angsty dance that’s not really saying anything but kind of gets away with it simply because dystopic pieces have tension already built in, and tension is the building block of dynamics. So I wonder about how even a few small shifts to this work, to add contrast, might have helped include the less sentimentally inclined among the audience. Aside from the singing portions, the tone and quality was very similar throughout the work, and bringing a few strong, sharper images into focus would help cut through the dreamy wash. What arrangement of bodies, what spoken line, what action really gets at what needs to be said? Can that be given more attention and stage time to crystalize and resonate? Can complication be added to the material so it sparks curiosity and not just everything at face value? The vulnerability of tender earnestness is something I love in art, but it can easily become cloying. How do these big-hearted lines interact with the dance material on stage—if they are both saying the same thing, perhaps one is redundant. Or perhaps we need to start somewhere else in order to journey our way to being in utopia together.
Photo of Tabitha Steger. Photo by Jim Coleman.The piece finishes with the dancers (now including Swenson-Klatt) circling the audience and singing traditional song “Appalachian Round.” The notes resonate in the large studio, layering on top of one another in a gorgeous and grounding unity. But inside this, I can hear the way different notes rub against each other, in slight tension with each other. I don’t know much about music theory, but there’s something that feels pertinent here to the desires of this piece. Some later reading reveals that Sacred Harp harmonies break all the rules of traditional European cord spacing. So I think about rule-breaking. And queerness. And I read about the way the shape-note is a way to make communal, participatory singing more accessible to people who can’t read music. The singing is based on following a leader at different intervals rather than hitting a prescribed note. That this is a practice grounded in group togetherness, rather than performance—I think there’s some useful inspiration in there too. How can the audience be inside this world too, and not just witnesses to it?
Second up is Tabitha Steger with her solo piece I have, I must, I am. She begins center stage, her arms reaching to the sides as she inhales, slowly drooping down as she exhales. The repeated action inflates her arms higher and higher each time, until they finally drop into an oozy, sensual caress. What follows is a series of rapid mood shifts, each new image springing fully formed from the one before. A gesture like an incremental swinging of a baseball bat, a sudden stop to glance over the shoulder, then gooning at the audience. The rhythm of each gesture seems to be a pull to hold, and then a release to something new. A swiping wrap of her arms around her midsection repeats with more and more franticness, until that releases to a repetition of the opening image. Steger’s playing with the qualities and specificities of each gesture in a way that keeps me interested, and it works as an abstract study. If Steger wants to use this material for meaning-making, more context is needed. I also think playing with where these gestures occur in space could add another dimension to contain and delineate these images.
The final act is Slowness Étude from Giordana Falzone, who completed her residency, but was unable to make the showing due to jetting off to grad school in Europe. In her stead she shared a video of her in the studio, exploring what she refers to in the program notes as “the glacial pace.” We the audience are instructed to participate in a sonic meditation by Pauline Oliveros as we watch: listening to the sounds of our environment, and then plugging our ears and listening to the sounds inside of us.
Screen capture from Giordana Falzone’s film.The short clips show Falzone turning slowly to the side, a hand unfolding, a step. As far as slow dance goes it is not actually that slow. It reminds me of people I see doing Tai Chi in the park. But it is slow enough that I start to tap into other things. A breeze gently blowing her hair, her collarbones rising and falling with breath, light dancing on the walls and ceiling from the East facing windows. A morning captured in video, now here in the evening. Because of the sound meditation, I am here in the present time too, attending to the sounds on University Way below. The whine of bus breaks, a distant horn, an airplane. Car radios overlap a pop song of Middle Eastern origin with a base-heavy R&B song. I start to get interested in the slow descent of Falonze’s heel, the tension of its predictable but delayed arrival. In many ways there is nothing remarkable going on here, but it is an important reminder of the kind of attention and engagement that is possible when more is asked of us. Perhaps nothing remarkable needs to happen if curiosity is invited, the world already is plenty.
The 2026 Flight Deck Residency showing took place at 3pm and 6pm on Sunday, Sept 13 at Open Flight Studios. For more information, visit their website. The program can be viewed HERE.
