Amelia Reeber and the Closing Night of The A.W.A.R.D. Show

Amelia Reeber in "this is a forgery" at the Northwest New Works Festival in June. Photo by Tim Summers.

[Reposted because Amelia Reeber won The A.W.A.R.D. Show! for 2009.]

"At first when I heard about it, I was like, 'Yech! Gross!'," Amelia Reeber said of The A.W.A.R.D. Show!, making a mock-disgusted face as she sat on the floor, vaguely attempting to warm up with a variety of massage balls. "And I just immediately went to reality shows and So You Think You Can Dance and all that crap. It just didn't sound right to me. And then I started thinking, 'You know, gosh, I'm always applying for grants, and then my work gets judged and I either get money or I don't.' And most of the time they're looking at your videos, and half the time it's not even what's on your video, it's the quality of your video. So in this way, it's great to have people in the same time and space as you, and seeing the work live."

She paused. "But I think I didn't realize how much the audience was involved, so that kind of makes me a little queasy. I can't quite think of it as competition at all, because I'm not competitive, I don't think art--or cooking--should be competitive, and so I have to completely remove all of those frameworks that are put in and replace them with my own."

Apparently, whatever Reeber did worked. Last night, her piece Dream Life took the audience vote, making her the third finalist for "winning" (if that's the right word) the first Seattle edition of the fairly controversial The A.W.A.R.D. Show at On the Boards (which closes tonight at 8 p.m; tickets $15). Founded in New York in 2006, All week, the antipathy the Seattle contemporary dance community feels about being put in competition with one another for a lucrative $10,000 prize (semi-finalists, including Reeber, are guaranteed $1,000) has been bubbling to the surface.

Thursday, Brendan Kiley posted a story on the Slog with comments from some of Seattle's top choreographers, including Zoe Scofield, Amy O'Neal, and Corrie Befort, voicing their varying degrees of ambivalence to the idea, as well as pointing out past controversies in other cities. By Friday, Kiley was acknowledging the success of the event, at least in terms of drawing audiences (referencing The SunBreak's Seth Kolloen), even as the first winner, choreographer Deborah Wolf's exploration of the twisted world of Edward Gorey, seemed to confirm the suspicion that humor and accessibility were the audience's primary consideration, to the potential exclusion of other, more subtle, work.

Reeber, originally a native of Detroit, moved to Seattle in the early Nineties following in the footsteps of a sibling. "I thought my life would be just so much better and I'd unfold and blossom as an artist if I left Detroit!" she said with a sarcastic laugh.

After having given up dance for most of her teens and twenties, Reeber went to the University of Washington in the late Nineties for dance at the age of 29, and worked as a solo performer afterward, as well as founding the company Foot in Mouth and collaborating with Pat Graney. A few years ago, Reeber began working with choreographer Deborah Hay, one of the founders of postmodern dance in the Sixties, and was in New York performing in Hays's If I Sing to You just last month at the Baryshnikov Center.

"It's been great because I feel like my approach very much parallels her, and it's very comfortable playing along with her process and her intention and philosophies," Reeber said of working for Hays. "Even though we make work differently, and our aesthetics are different, we're still very much so in the same pool in how we use and envision the body in our work."

In terms of her own work, Reeber most recently performed this is a forgery as part of On the Boards' 2009 Northwest New Works Festival this last June. Dream Life, her piece at The A.W.A.R.D. Show!, has been in gestation for about as long. The inspiration came several years ago, when Reeber was taking a bath. The television was on in the other room, turned to a home improvement show, and, being "too lazy to go turn it off," she just sat and listened to the inane, fast-cut audio without the benefit of seeing what was going on.

That audio eventually became the soundtrack of Dream Life. Taken almost straight from television (with added sonic elements by composer Jeff Huston), a cheesy narrator, heavy on the irony, tells mini-stories about couples' struggles with their fix-'er-up properties, with interview cut-ins from the homeowners and a seemingly psychotic soundtrack that veers inexplicably from twangy country to hard rock for no discernible reason.

Onstage, Reeber by turns interprets and counterpoints the audio component. If something's becoming a slog, she trudges slower and slower around the space, until the next cut to chipper, fast-paced music sends her speeding about. Frequently, she'll pause to mouth the words of a female interview subject. But the constant pressure is downwards, as the details of the home-buying and home-improvement stories build into a unexpected nightmare, until Reeber collapses out of stress as the soundtrack disintegrates into noise.

According to Reeber, it took own home-buying experience over the summer and fall to find "that kind of emotional underbelly and desperation" she needed to fully inhabit Dream Life.

"How can people buy a house more than once in their life?" she asked in exasperation, as we began discussing the home-buying process, the housing market, and the stress of committing so much money to something. But the personal stress aside, that very simple--and common--life event became the emotional core of the work that most impressed the audience last night. True, Reeber's work is funny and has personality, but it's not simple or playing for yucks. She's not a comedian, she's a artist with a precise and exacting vision, who like most choreographers sees her work as communicative and approachable. But she still believes, "I'm not responsible for, or even going to waste time making assumptions about, how people will respond."