Life Can Be a Quagmire in Salt Horse's Man on the Beach

Beth Graczyk and Jens Wazel in Salt Horse's "Man on the Beach." Photo by Tim Summers.

Tuesday afternoon, a couple hours before dress rehearsal, I sat down with the three core members of Salt Horse Performance in the lobby of the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway to discuss Man on the Beach, the company's second evening-length work, which opens a two-week run on Feb. 26 (Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; tickets $12/$15).

Proper seating being in short supply, dancer/choreographer Beth Graczyk explained the inspiration for the piece while sitting on a wooden box; Corrie Befort, also a dancer and choreographer, was perched on the middle rung of a folding ladder, while composer/sound artist Angelina Baldoz was relegated to a miniature chair that, much to the amusement of her cohorts, raised her a scant half-foot off the floor.

"I went down to the beach with some family members," Graczyk recalled of a day almost two years ago in Port Townsend, "and saw this man who kept repeating these very simple gestures over and over again. And the way that he was set against the ocean, he was in perfect silhouette, and nothing was surrounding him. It was so particular, because it seemed like the whole environment really framed him, like he had gone there of all places because that's where he could be who he really was. And yet he was so internal, it was like there was a little sheath or bubble wrapped around him."

That image—a solitary man with long arms, alone on a beach, carrying on with a portrait of a woman—captivated Graczyk, and when she brought it to her collaborators, they were likewise transfixed by the mysterious man who was stuck in his own life, trapped in a personal drama. 

"These characters" in Man on the Beach, explained Graczyk, "have a tether in this idea of being alone, or being stuck inside of something. And there's both something terrifying about that from the outside—seeing someone stuck so thoroughly, and not able to let go, or to be able to see what's around them, or to move on, progress, or change—but there's also something beautiful about that if you can see it from the inside, or a different perspective, that maybe that person is actually completely satisfied, completely whole, and nothing does need to change."

Salt Horse was founded in the mid-2000s by Graczyk and Befort, who had been performing together in other choreographers' work for several years. In the beginning, Salt Horse was a trans-Pacific project, as Befort was living in Japan, where her husband was stationed from 2005 to 2008. Graczyk would fly to Japan to perform, Befort back to Seattle, to perform short works. In 2008-2009, they presented their first full-length work, This was a cliff, and toured it as part of the SCUBA National Performing Network, of which Velocity Dance Center is a presenting partner, while developing Man on the Beach, which was originally presented in a shorter form as part of the 2009 Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards.

Photo by Tim Summers.

From the original image, Salt Horse built out Man on the Beach to focus on three separate men. One is the titular character, performed by Jens Wazel. But playing with the idea of being "stuck," in a memory or an emotional place, they created two other figures.

One, performed by Michael Rioux, is a man trapped in a sort of psycho-emotional feedback loop on himself. He first enters trapped in a costume that's a veritable bird's nest of tubing emerging from and linking back to his face, "as if he's actually reinserted into himself," Befort explained. "In the end, he's actually free of all this impedimenta, but it's as if we've said, 'Okay, that was there, we showed you that visually on the outside, but what if that's now all still inside? What if he is still so hyper-stuck in himself that although you can't see that anymore, now he's going to begin to multiply outward?'"

The third—and most mysterious—figure is paired with Graczyk's character. Performed by Serge Gubelman, he appears in various states of manifestation, from a faceless physical presence to a disembodied and disassembled suit, to nothing more than a video projection. "We're always playing with, how real is he?" Befort noted, "And is she conjuring him?"

In addition to the three men, a chorus of three other dancers—Allie Hankins, Danny Herter, and Shannon Stewart—fill out the piece, performing as everything from wildlife to clones.

Although Graczyk and Befort are dancers by training, Salt Horse's work is anything but limited to movement. They bill themselves as "dance/sound performance," but I prefer Befort's alternate description for the group as "visual theatre." Both Graczyk and Befort have an acute eye for the visual quality of the work, and use costume and scenic elements to push the boundaries of the movement. Citing choreographer Sheri Cohen, with whom both had worked, as a major influence in terms of making them think about how to make work read visually, Graczyk explained that: "From there, we started to say, 'Well, what else can we do with that? Why do we need to just stick with dance? Can't we add an element here and there?' So our imaginations started to be more manifest physically and visually, rather than just writing about an image and then sort of constructing it visually with our bodies, and having this image that's so abstract you don't know what it is."

Graczyk and Befort found a strong collaborator to their visual and movement work in Baldoz, who originally sat in on a piece with them as a musician before becoming a core member of the group. While most contemporary dance tends to treat the score as almost an afterthought, meant to heighten or highlight the movement, Baldoz is an equal partner in Salt Horse's creative process, present at all the rehearsals. Approaching her work as sound sculpture, Baldoz is as likely to prompt Graczyk and Befort to generate movement with her own work as she is to craft something to accompany their choreography.

"I have a way of working that was sort of established with the first piece," Baldoz told me, "which is essentially that I'm at every rehearsal, and I get a lot of inspiration just from watching them move. So I'll just start making something that feels like what that would sound like. And then I just start layering and layering and layering. That's one way I work—starting with these sculptures, these sound sculptures. So I have a lot of those little sculptures I've made, that I'm working with."

Photo by Tim Summers.

"There's also a lot of input from them," she continued. "There's often a particular thing they want to hear, like the marble in the jar—I think that was Corrie's idea. And Beth really wanted to hear bells. But for me, I think compositionally, sculpturally, so the shape of the bells was very specific in terms of how I wanted the sound to be."

When Man on the Beach showed at Northwest New Works, it was greeted with what felt like guarded praise from critics, who on the one hand noted the powerful imagery and themes of loss and absence which permeate the work, while on the other hand treating it as almost obscure, weird and abstract for its own sake.

"I feel that sometimes writing about our work has been that we're really strange, and that we are doing really kind of odd, spooky things," Graczyk said. "But we're investigating strange things or odd things or shifting perspectives in order to unravel or uncover how something could be perceived differently. It's offering a different lens to let you see something you might just walk past every day and never really look at. As a way to heighten your own awareness of everything, to reinvigorate your sense of how you're receiving information in the world, and how that's a plastic thing, it's malleable."

"We're not just weird for weirdness' sake," Befort added. "That's not our goal. We're just trying to raise awareness of the strangeness that's going on around us all the time."

"There's an interesting play between really blatant imagery," said Befort, "and really subtle imagery." That's definitely true. While overall the piece has a surreal, dream-like quality to it, heightened by disembodied clothing or the weirdly lengthened arms of Wazel's character, frequently it's in-your-face direct, particularly with Rioux's character, whose inward focus manifests itself with him multiplying onstage into a series of clones.

"We are also extremely interested in humor, and in awkward and impossible and absurdist imagery, as a way of jostling you out of your accustomed lens or perspective," noted Befort. "And doing it in unexpected ways that we hope will make you wake up, because we definitely have a dream-like logic that we like to follow. The narrative is distinctly dream-like. However, into that is infused this sense of humor, so that although there can be quite dark images going on, there's also this flip side of that which can actually be quite funny."

"It's a complicated piece for sure," she continued, "and I think that we are really excited by allowing a lot of mystery to be in the work, and we don't like to answer a lot of questions, we like to allow people to answer the questions. We hope we guide them really clearly, so that they arrive in places that feel really whole, like they've been given all the information they need. But definitely the desire is not to go in, bang out answers to the questions we've posed. We hope we've just given richer questions."