This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
On April 15, Beacon Dance presented “Moving Bodies/Moving Hearts/Moving Minds” at the Westside’s B Complex. The approximately two hour performance offered a delightful sampler of everything that has been exciting audiences about Atlanta contemporary dance this season.
The bill comprised six works, followed by a 15-minute talk-back with the choreographers. During the talk-back, D. Patton White, artistic and administrative director of Beacon Dance, compared organizing the program to arranging pictures on a gallery wall. With a subtle touch, White built a balanced composition from a diverse collection of art.
Credit: John Ramspott
Credit: John Ramspott
The first three works shared a choreographic fascination with how to represent subjective experience. In the opening piece, “River of Consciousness,” Carly Wynans with four dancers -- Aryanna Allen, Leah Behm, Leo Briggs and Merryn McKeough -- explored the phenomenology of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder through movement that contrasted ease and effort, flowing intensity and hesitant stillness.
Particularly memorable were the duets in which Behm and McKeough repeatedly followed a deceptively organic contact sequence by Allen and Briggs with one in which they appeared to learn from scratch how to share weight, starting with the tentative touch of one dancer’s finger to the other’s forearm.
In “i kamyo,” which closed the first half, choreographer/dancer Humlåo Evans (they/them) and the other ensemble members -- Paula Winter and Alfredo Takori -- were spaced so far apart that it was impossible to keep them all in the same visual field. Winter and Takori -- at upstage center and downstage left, respectively -- danced portraits of individual striving and conflict.
Evans stood just in front of the wings downstage right. Noah Hill’s fantastic lighting design created a firelight effect that barely outlined Evans as they performed domestic labor using traditional Micronesian tools. “i kamyo’s” blocking constantly drew the viewer’s gaze away to another subject, mirroring what Evans described as a foregrounding of cultural material to avoid delving into their individual experience, which percolated just beneath the work’s surface.
Second on the program, White’s “Voices Assemble!” was simultaneously deeply unnerving and breathtakingly gorgeous. For most of the piece, a discordant electronic score contrasted jarringly with warm lighting and vibrant, vaguely folksy costumes. The dancers -- AK Bayer, Lynn Hesse, Susan Keller, Alex Spitzer and Curtis Tention -- performed in an atmosphere of oppressive surveillance, watching each other and revealing self-consciousness at being watched.
In one section, Bayer, Hesse and Keller remained standing while Tention executed floorwork. Several times the three approached Tention, gesturing toward, and poking and tickling him. Then they would quickly turn away, retreat downstage, and ostentatiously pretend to mind their own business. The ambivalence of the movement and the dancers’ facial expressions raised questions about whether Tention was a willing participant or a persecuted victim.
Even when the music turned upbeat -- Sinatra’s “Young at Heart” -- the lyrics, insisting on differences between outward appearance and inner feeling, acquired sinister overtones.
Nonetheless, in spite of its overall mood, brilliant flickers of sincere, tender human contact punctuated Voices Assemble!throughout. Dancers occasionally smiled warmly at one another, or leaned gratefully into a supportive touch.
Credit: John Ramspott
Credit: John Ramspott
After intermission, the dancer’s relationship to space and other bodies within it was a clear unifying theme. Spitzer’s “A Fragile Marble in the Night” opened the second half with a turn toward the immense universe. Dancing before a stunning projection of a galactic star cluster, Spitzer, Hesse and Lisa McKusker circled the stage slowly, looking outward, away from one another.
The soundless glide of Spitzer’s electric wheelchair and the other dancers’ gauzy tunics recalled the empty weightlessness of outer space. With a painterly use of line and color, though, the choreography directed the audience’s focus gradually inward. The dancers became beautifully attuned to each other’s lines as they connected through lovely, harmonious tableaux while the galactic projection faded.
In “Variation on a Theme,” Toya Willingham layered three solos in which dancers used a box as a prop. The box was alternately a stage, a cage, a crutch, a crib. In the final section, where the three dancers -- Grace Ford, Mia Mercaldo and Caleigh Santa Maria -- performed their solos simultaneously, the boxes seemed to symbolize alienating social and emotional partitions. The dancers shared the stage, but their seeming togetherness was an illusion of choreography and timing.
Jacquelyn Pritz’s “inexhaustible,” a joyful celebration of sibling love, closed the program. inexhaustible began with dancers Patsy Collins and Julio Medina chasing each other around the stage and daring one another with trust falls. Their playfulness at first was improvised and genuine. As their relationship evolved, however, trust falls and high fives transformed into lifts and shared weight work, reflecting how repeated interactions and long-term habits create patterns of behavior in relationships.
Hill’s lighting expertise contributed, the lights deepening in complexity over the course of the piece from uniform daylight to multi-hued twilight, lending gravity to the mood. Collins and Medina were well-matched, pacing each other through growth from the youthful abandon of the opening improvisation into the more careful but still powerfully graceful choreographed sequences of the final section.
“Moving Bodies/Moving Hearts/Moving Minds” accomplished the actions of its title with beautiful dance, a truly diverse cast and expert production and stage design. It was complex and challenging, yet thoroughly accessible. A sundry crowd stayed for the exceptionally lively and productive talk-back, offering thoughtful contributions and questions emerging from what many participants described as a profoundly moving experience.
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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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