“One great thing about the Seattle International Dance Festival: It puts talents on your radar that you may have missed, even if they’ve been performing here in town for years now.”
Michael Upchurch
Three Yells, June 10, 2018
This all-female Seattle-based company led by Veronica Lee-Baik works in wizardly collaboration with video artist Robert Campbell. For SIDF, they revived Lee-Baik’s 2016 piece “Her Name Is Isaac,” billed in the program notes as “a multidisciplinary dance work that confronts the journey of being a woman in a man’s world.”
“Isaac” opens with nightmarish imagery as pairs of dancers, tethered together by stockings over their heads, make moves as elastic and apt to snap as the nylon bindings that connect them. Mimed screams and martial-arts grunts are part of the action.
The movement ranges from butoh-slow to gymnastically fleet, and in both instances it’s ferociously executed. Despite its stated theme, the piece leans more toward the abstract than the illustrative: Whatever demons these dancers are confronting, they don’t take the form of onstage male aggressors.
Still, the atmosphere they inhabit is charged and combative, thanks especially to the musical score (composed in part by Lee-Baik) and Campbell’s protean, painterly screen projections. The high point is a section titled “Monsters, Robots & I,” in which savage electronics alternate with gently lilting piano intervals, triggering movements that range from frenetic flailing to traipsing ballet steps
In the final phase of the piece, Lee-Baik’s seven dancers emerge with their heads stocking-covered again and their fingers painted red as though dipped in blood. They laugh, they grimace, they gossip with theatrical grotesquerie. The last stretch of “Isaac” could certainly be tightened. Nevertheless, the piece makes an impression that’s hard to forget.
Khambatta Dance Company, June 10, 2018
“Endangered Species,” which debuted earlier this year, and “Stop. Drop. Repeat.” suggest that Cyrus Khambatta is in a new phase as a choreographer – and it’s a good one. Both pieces feature six dancers in tight, undulating unison who then go intricately out of phase. Body swivels, head swivels, shoulder ripples and fierce synchronized foot stomps are punctuated by mini-solos that are little gems of nonsequential movement.
The performers are crackerjack athletes, especially Sean O’Bryan and Sean Tomerlin in a duet in “Endangered Species” that blends notes of tenderness, confrontation, abandonment and support. They’re pushed to their limits of endurance with repeated brusque lifts and continually twining contact.
“Stop. Drop. Repeat.” – if I’m reading it correctly – imagines loss and bereavement as a kind of crime scene. It has a shocker of an opening, too good to disclose. Soloist Michaela Federspiel then sets the tone with twisting, crabwise contortions that speak of deep unease and struggle, while Chloe Khambatta (the choreographer’s 8-year-old daughter) appears as a young innocent who doesn’t fully register what she’s seeing.
As the piece develops, the movement is often spring-coiled with whiplash effects. As the dancers lead with their necks, their shoulders and their hips, their sensuality is curiously contradicted by their clockwork unison. In the closing moments, Federspiel and Chloe Khambatta return to center stage. The final image is soberingly effective, in part because it’s so offhand. This is pure dance with an intricate nonstop throughline.
Michael Upchurch and Marcie Sillman work on behalf of SIDF 2018 to provide
Dance Diary entries.
Michael Upchurch is a longtime Seattle arts writer who has written about dance, visual art and books for an array of publications, including Crosscut, The Seattle Times, Seattle Gay News and Cascadia. His recent fiction has appeared in Moss, Foglifter, Bellingham Review and Southwest Review. Visit him at www.michaelupchurchauthor.com.