Amy O'Neal and Ellie Sandstrom in "too," this Thurs.-Sat. at NW Film Forum. Photo courtesy of amyo/tinyrage.
"Also, I'm really fascinated with ninja lore. Like a lot of people," said Amy O'Neal, and we both started to chuckle. Having just watched Ellie Sandstrom and her rehearse at the Northwest Film Forum, where O'Neal's dance piece
too will be the second installment in their new "Live at Film Forum" series (this Thurs.-Sat.; tickets $12-$15), we had retreated to Caffe Vita to talk over coffee, and were getting sidetracked discussing
In the Fray, the solo dance piece O'Neal will be debuting at this year's Northwest New Works Festival.
While she offered the cerebral description of the show as being "about how we create fictitious fights with our self," she had politely gone on to explain how the movement was coming out of her longstanding interest in fighting (though she admits to never actually having gotten into a fight), boxing (which she was "obsessed with" for two years), and, of course, ninjas.
"A lot of times, when I'm dancing or teaching, I'm imagining dancing with swords, or having some sort of imaginary foe that you're dancing with," she said. "A lot of times, I'll be like, 'Okay, this leg comes over here'"—she mimed something swinging toward her head—"'imagine someone's kicking over your head and you have to duck that. Imagine the ninja stars coming at you, you have to get down to the floor or that thing is going to stick you in the head.' I'll use things like that in class so that people will do something, they'll put themselves in a scenario so that something's at stake."
Born in Texas, O'Neal was an Army brat who spent her childhood moving around the South and Mid-west, with a couple years in Ankara, Turkey thrown in, before moving to Seattle at the age of 19 to study dance at Cornish. For the past ten years, O'Neal has been the choreographic driving force behind Locust, a dance/video/music collaboration with composer Zeke Keeble, with whom she's toured nationally and internationally. In fact, Locust is part of this year's SCUBA touring network, which will be the first large presentation at the new Velocity Dance Center this May.
But a couple years ago, O'Neal began developing work outside Locust and her collaboration with Keeble, and her new company amyo/tinyrage officially debuted at the 2009 TBA Festival in Portland with too.
"It started with these duets that I was starting to film and accumulate," O'Neal explained. Over the course of two years, she filmed site-specific duet performances with other artists at residencies and festivals around the world. The first film was made with Salt Horse's Corrie Befort in Japan, and went on to include, among others, collaborations with Melanie Kloetzel in Pocatello, Idaho, Sarah Gamblin in Denton, Texas, and Tommy Smith and Reggie Watts in New York. But ultimately, it was the invitation to perform at PICA's TBA Festival last year that "really put a fire under my ass to do something with it," she said.
Editing the videos into a sort of globe-hopping montage, she invited dancer and choreographer Ellie Sandstrom to help her develop a live performance based on the video duets, with musical compositions by Ivory Smith and Ollie Glatzer. While the original filmed duets explore a variety of ideas and spaces, in too, the contrast between the live performers and the original videos inherently becomes an exploration of our increasingly mediated experience of the world, which in turn dovetails with the original film O'Neal made with Befort in Japan, which is the single longest segment in the performance and the most filmic video component.
"I am super fascinated with how sexuality is expressed in cultures in general, but Japan in particular just blows my mind because of how incredibly oppressed people are sexually, and how extreme they wind up expressing it," O'Neal explained of the fetish-porn inspired film she shot with Befort in a love hotel outside Tokyo. "It happens here, too, but it's just that aesthetically, how that manifests is so different there."
On the last night of a brief trip to visit Befort in Japan, where she was living while her husband was stationed there, the two went out, bought Sailor Moon costumes, and rented a suite in a love hotel to shoot for four hours. Whereas most of the other films are shot to capture O'Neal and her collaborators moving, the love hotel film is more of a series of sculptural poses of her and Befort, inspired by the more precise and subtle gestural movement of Japanese performance. Unfolding with the aesthetic of a music video, the camera cuts between Befort and O'Neal posed on a rotating round bed with plastic sheets, and people floundering about under the covers in a bed.
"The love hotel, and having it be a part of this piece, it just got me thinking about Internet porn, about how people are attracted to things they're removed from, how people are attracted to things they can't have," O'Neal explained of how the original film came to inform the overall development of too. "How people obsess over things that they never have a relationship with, a real, physical, tactile relationship. The tactile things in our lives are shifting a lot, down to how we engage with one another."
The length and aesthetic contrast between the Befort film and the rest of too proved to be a challenge in terms of how to structure the piece overall, so to pull the audience from the first, montage segment to the second Japanese one, O'Neal includes a brief karaoke party for the audience. Not only is O'Neal is an avid and rather intense karaoke singer (as evidenced by her performances at the second edition of Eric Fredericksen's Speak and Sing at On the Boards a couple weeks ago), but the act of imitating and adapting a recorded song mirrors the same process she and Sandstrom go through by re-creating a filmed work. So, after the first segment, the audience is invited to sing karaoke while O'Neal and Sandstrom improvise movement.
But all that being said, O'Neal is one of Seattle's most accomplished dance artists, and the ideas and themes are coming out of her exploration of movement, rather than vice versa. In performance, O'Neal's work is fast-paced, energetic, even hyperkinetic modern dance with a healthy dose of funk and hip hop thrown in (O'Neal teaches Velocity's ever-popular "Bottom Heavy Funk" class), an antidote to so much of the work out there that's too formal, abstract, and slow-paced to really physically engage the audience.
"That's just been a part of me since I was a kid, and it just keeps coming into what I do," she told me. "It was me watching a lot of Michael Jackson videos, and Paula Abdul, and listening to early Nineties hip hop and dancing with my friends after school and making up stuff. And then when I was in middle school, living in Turkey, I was sneaking out and going to nightclubs all the time. And that's when I knew that I was a dancer. Because I just needed to express myself that way, and I needed to be in an environment filled with lots of different kinds of people that were just letting off steam and emoting. And not in a structured class—I didn't find myself as a dancer in a class. And it's important to me that I keep a sense of that joy."
Subscribe to our Front Page Stories
Most Recent Comments