Through My Eyes: Brown's 2011 Festival of Dance, Stuart Theater

For some reason i like to write about dance

Here's what I got down tonight:

Enter Comma Prepare is not a minimal dinner party but rather a social event, gone mechanized… Like any good film about drugs I found the dancer body/mind state to be contagious. "Is that what -yes sometimes thats what- I'm like" runs through my head. It is almost a simon says with audio instruction, video projection, tables and well dressed Brown students. Dancers follow prompts like robots, only they each interpret 'left arm back' a little differently, and when malfunction or overload occur, they shut out the input by masking face with hands. Although somewhat silly and alyrical, Enter Comma Prepare has an eery familiarity.

Another modern work by the Dance Extension starts with sound continues with action linked to sound like a code. But the tight correlation quickly disintegrates. Also humorous at moments and grey in mood, Ms. Sokolow and her dancers direct attention to subtlety with ease: the sound of fingernails tapping, and chin protrusions. Not your typical dancers-on-chairs-piece, associations with flopping fish gasping for air, and alien-amphibian frogs are as organic as it gets.

Watching first and reading later, I felt Overlay was certainly a collaborative exploration of related movement by pairs or groups of dancers. Apparently it was. It's irony was much appreciated.

INTERMISSION

Enter muse, chaos, goddess Kali and all her fullness. When a work credits three individuals and one theater troupe with "conception, choreography, text, music and direction" you can assume there will be a lot going on. Indeed. There were puppet makers, an aerial coach and a masquerade coach. Some viewers will need coaching too. This being my second experience of a Michelle Bach-Kubali premiere, I was as prepared as one little human could be.

Advice to viewers: Don't work too hard to follow a 'story' though it may be presented as such at first. Instead let the presence of the story simply lead you in. It will give way to the conviction of the performers and the emotional/elemental -dare I say alchemical shifts swarming around you.

If you try for the story you get something like this: boy in civil war corresponds with younger sister or sweetheart? dies of typhoid fever. girl and her doll morn. live in haystacks? turn witchy. Doll escapes or gets stolen. Then tells us her side- tortured servitude as comfort giver (slap cuddle slap). From there it is sexual, animal, dark chaotic and amorphous. Choreography is fast and emotional, a landscape of individuals, hearts beating wildly in all directions, a pack of beasts prowling.

What is certain is this: Luna Rise was a massive undertaking which clearly and generously embraced collaborative process as a method of investigation. The live music was awesome, and the entire cast and crew were dedicated with a willing-to-go-there-not-knowing-if-theres-even-a-there-there attitude. No doubt, inspiration and deep inquiry can be this messy, and this beautiful.