A Sold-Out SCUBA 2010 at Velocity Dance

Velocity Dance Center has to be thrilled–their first big show in their new space at 1621 12th Avenue played to two sold-out houses over the weekend. Admittedly, that’s about 90 people each night, but if follow contemporary dance in Seattle and can subtract, you know that 90 is a lot more than, say, 25. A nice way to break in the Founders (Michelle Miller and KT Niehoff) Theater.

Jacinta Vlach

This show, SCUBA 2010, was part of Velocity’s national indie touring network (its partners are The Southern Theater in Minneapolis, Philadelphia Dance Projects, and ODC in San Francisco). While building a coterie of loyal fans is essential for a small dance group, sometimes boosterish love and acceptance gets a little stifling, artistically. Getting to tour in front of people who don’t know you or your city’s dance scene can be invaluable.

For audiences, it can be a blast, too. Friday night was the first time in my life that I’ve seen a dance work based on Orwell’s Animal Farm, created by Jacinta Vlach, founder of the Bay Area’s Liberation Dance Theater. LDT’s core interests are “identity politics, race relations, gender inequalities, and marginalized communities,” so Animal Farm is just the ticket. 

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That said, you don’t need to have the book in hand to get the gist of the dance. In addition to a pulsing score by Abdullah Ibrahim and Cinematic Orchestra, there are declamations about power’s use and abuse (in a full version, video projections explore the revolutionary spirit through poster art). Vlach’s choreography here is for three–two women (Vlach and Olivia Eng) in cotton jumpers dyed to look like “workers” blue overalls and a man (Rashad Pridgen) in a white linen jacket. “Fusion” is a word that’s used to characterize Vlach’s recipe: hip hop, modern, step, ballroom, tribal dance–but the results are what count and what you get is hybrid vigor. All three dancers keep your eyes glued to them–you can see why they were invited to Jacob’s Pillow.

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What about Orwell? It was exciting to see a choreographer pull a book out and have a conversation with it. I wish more would dig into this kind of sustained artistic discourse–modern dance can feel like a succession of Scenes from the Artist’s Personal/Rehearsal Studio Life. In Animal Farm, the personal becomes personality, straitened by social mores and power structures. You can drink, dance, and romance, but the political slap in the face still stings. Amid all the flying footwork, the dancers’ arms–fluid, vibrant, mercurial in intent–took on a sharply defined life of their own.

The Amy O’Neal/locust performance was called crushed, and–as is ninja O’Neal’s wont–featured “hyperkinetic modern dance with a healthy dose of funk and hip hop thrown in” (thanks, Jeremy). It opens with a video of grasshoppers entangled in either sex or combat, and just as you’re drawn into the conflict, a boot stomps ‘em. (Sound effects, music, beat box, vocal, and cameo dance duties are provided by Zeke Keeble.) This is the outline of the concept, an exploration of being blindsided, and the consequences for blindsider and blindsidee. After a while, the work’s physical impact wears you down, like seeing that car commercial with the blindsiding in it for the 20th time. 

O’Neal’s work frightened me a bit–while she may charm you in person with her ninja fetish, there’s an MJ-esque, aggressive formalism to that funk and hip hop, anger buried in perfectionist striving. (Late in the show, she has her dancers–Ellie Sandstrom, Amy Clem, Jessie Smith, Benjamin Maestas–executing kicks at speed in such close quarters that I worried about them.) It’s dance that knows you can’t look away. But for contrast, O’Neal might turn to a simple, stock figure: someone walking off, slowly dragging someone attached to their ankle. (The juxtaposition deepens the drama here; in her previous back it up, it was more mystifying.)

locust “crushed” excerpt 2 from Amy O on Vimeo.

At least initially, I find myself thinking of its structure as prologue, aftermath, collision. The ensemble, almost-martial dance that begins things sets you up, but is followed by the entanglement of collision (not so much erotic codependency, as having your bumpers locked). Then O’Neal deconstructs the collision, inside boxes of light furnished by Ben Zamora–again and again the dancers try for the spotlight, only to be smacked, thrown, or whomped aside by another dancer. 

The way dancers are thrown to the floor is brutally believable–I found the repetition hard to take. But this is the sense I’m making of it, as a traumatic replaying of the “hit,” that far after the accident keeps its never-saw-it-coming fascination. I’d have to see to the show again to see if I’m, in fact, doing violence to the structure to view it in this way. But since there’s a video doubling of the events (the dancers, seen down a hallway, are jumped and tackled there, too), I think there’s some encouragement to the notion of a conspiracy of memory and re-enactment, variations on a theme.

However you choose to make sense of it, it’s an intense, eerie piece. There’s a particular move in it, a kind of sinuous vertical sine wave that reminded me of the slow-motion instant when you (used to) hit rewind on a videotape and the illusion of reality warped.