(Photo: Steven Schreiber)
On December 17, The Seattle Dance Project and the Fremont Abbey Arts Center co-presented modern dance pioneer, choreographer, and dancer Molissa Fenley. Fenley’s sculptural, languid choreography was showcased by SDP dancers and by Fenley herself in this studio performance at Fremont Abbey, the setting for which encouraged an intimate feel between the artists and the audience.
The first two pieces of the evening, Planes in the Air and Mass Balance are part of The Prop Dances, a five-piece series in which visual artists were asked to create a prop or props the dancers could either carry or wear. Fenley then created a separate piece around each prop.
Planes in the Air, billed as a work in progress, featured Seattle Dance Project dancers Betsy Cooper and Alexandra Dickson. Each wielded a large semicircular fan, moving to the chimey, gamelan-like music by cellist, composer and former Kronos Quartet member Joan Jeanrenaud. Slicing the fans through the air horizontally and vertically as they strike Indian-influenced poses with arms raised or behind their backs, they create planes in the air–and not the Boeing kind.
Fenley is known for her sense of space, and the knife-like fans bisect the space into above and below, left and right, reality and dream. Each dancer had her own set of movements, but there were moments of synchronicity (which would have been tighter with a bit more rehearsal time) and moments of contact when the dancers struck their fans together.
Fenley’s next piece, Mass Balance, is a meditation on natural imbalance–specifically between the accumulation of snow and the ablation of glacial ice. Fenley, lean, stoic and strong as hell, arrives with a 10-foot wooden dowel above her head while the dissonant electronica plays. Her movements are slow and deliberate, like Tai Chi. In a post-performance interview with PNB’s Peter Boal, Fenley spoke about her the influence Japanese Noh theatre has had on her work, and it’s evident. The wooden dowel creates a horizon–a plane–against which her body is oriented.
In Fenley’s hands, it’s a javelin, a rising waterline, and a measuring stick that chronicles the shrinking of the glacier off in the distance. Held in the center, the dowel looks nearly weightless. When she holds it near the end, however, it still looks weightless–which takes some serious strength and concentration. Fortunately she has loads of both. Fenley’s adagio movements are punctuated with short bursts of quick movements, finally ending the piece with the dowel as an extension of her outstretched arm. At last, she and it are on the same plane and at peace.
The final piece, Regions, was broken into three movements: Chair, Ocean Walk and Mesa. Premiered in 1995 at the 92nd Street Y, Regions came out of injury. In 1995, when premiering a work at the Joyce Theatre, Fenley suffered a serious knee injury. Chair was created when her drive for creating dance outpaced her recovery.
The piece began with Fenley seated in an armchair, arms extended. Pivoting in the chair, she rotates into a series of poses that don’t involve her putting weight on her knees. In the chair, above is sky and below is water. Fenley is caught in between and again on her own plane.
Ocean Walk and Mesa again showed her regaining strength as she slowly, hypnotically walked among a series of tiles that were arranged to define the space that she ultimately broke. In one moment, she swoops to the ground, extending her arms to embrace an imaginary beloved on the floor. Her movements suggest gulls, waves, swimming. It was hard to know when Ocean Walk ended and Mesa began.
In a the post-show interview, Boal remarked that on nights off when he was dancing at New York City Ballet, his colleagues would go to watch Baryshnikov at ABT, and he would go watch Molissa Fenley. Eventually, he said, Baryshnikov would cancel his performances and go watch Fenley too.