Photo: zoe | juniper
On the Boards honcho Lane Czaplinski told us they’d have all the votes counted by midnight–that’s the fast pace The A.W.A.R.D Show! requires—and they came through.
Zoe Scofield’s zoe | juniper won Thursday night’s dance off, but there remain (sold-out) Friday and Saturday night competitions before the finalists regroup on Sunday night. I think you can still get tickets to Sunday, and there is a wait list for tonight and tomorrow, if you’re desperate. Jeremy has already written the full preview of events, so we’ll just skip ahead to what transpired last night, at a buzzing hall full of everyone who’s anyone in Seattle dance, plus the people who date them.
On the Boards staff were not kidding about the sold-out status; every seat was filled, latecomers dropping into single seats where available. After a brief introduction and audience direction (your program comes with 1) an audience survey on your dance-viewing habits, 2) a sheet to fill with comments for the choreographers, and 3) your ballot for the night), Lane exited, and the curtain came up on an excerpt from “A Crack in Everything” from zoe | juniper.
It featured less dancing from Scofield than you’d expect, as she’d broken her toe a few days before, and had had to improvise. As she and Juniper build a work from their “photographic investigations,” Scofield explained at a post-show Q&A, they decided to emphasize the visual.
First you saw Zoe, a red cord in her teeth, then the lights blinked out, and she appeared against a blackboard downstage, a spotlight casting her distorted shadow on the board. With chalk, she slowly drew outlines of her shadow, creating a Zoe mandala. Raja Kelly began his dance with a red cord in his mouth as well, staying upstage. Kelly’s movements were angular, his elbows in tight or wide. Stage lights going up and down were supplemented by what looked like a bank of red-hot heat grills in the darkness. Kelly took a seat in a chair across from Scofield, while a video avatar of his dancing continued on the blackboard–interestingly, his avatar only appeared while moving, at rest, he vanished. The contrast between the dynamic lines that kept him visible and the static, chalk remnants from Scofield was stark. Unexpectedly–for everyone, I think–Scofield and Kelly, seated, now directly facing each other, began to bark in each other’s faces with lusty abandon, spit flying. (“I bit my lip,” Scofield admitted afterward.)
The Cherdonna and Lou Show, uniting the talents of Jody Kuehner and Ricki Mason, went in a vastly different direction with “It’s a Salon!”. It’s a party in their living room (a fluffy rug, a huge cluster of lamps downstage, a tiny piano), and they entered with Cherdonna (Kuehner, with sky-high platinum wig and space-age bachelor pad fashions) loudly declaiming how excited she was for the party, having just gotten back from the Tacoma Dome, which had been turned into an olive plantation providing Queen of the Nile olives. Paying little attention, diminutive Lou sat at the tiny piano like Schroeder, which gave Cherdonna (donning a second, coppery little Scotty of a wig over the first) a chance to sing a desperately plangent version of “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” while towering over Lou like something from a monster movie. That was the comedic high point–Donald Byrd, seated next to me, broke from chuckle into laughter at the outrageousness of it. The party went wrong by degrees after that–a broken bottle of champagne, an hors d’oeuvre escapee–and after a hopping, compulsive dance frenzy, the two never got on the same page. Lou retreated into pelvic thrusts, while Cherdonna lost her shit in the corner.
Crispin Spaeth‘s “Only You” was, refreshingly, a straightforward dance work. An unstable quintet (Scott Davis, Kristin Hapke, Annie Hewlett, Elia Mrak, and Kathryn Padberg, all gifted) danced out a series of pas de deux, each elaborating on the instantaneous relationships with variations on a movement (dips, back-to-front unisons). It began with languorous, flowing gestures and weightless hops onto a partner’s back or into his or her arms, and used the look of contact improvisation to explore the yearning to get into another’s skin. At the Q&A, Spaeth said she was interested in the immediacy of attraction, before reality intrudes in any way, and her dancers pair up with remarkable ease, interrupting other pairing-ups (the men tend to swoop in and physically walk off with a woman, while the women catch an eye), in a series of omnisexual hookups that closes, finally, with two men, one on the shoulders of another, leaning a little and making the other take a step forward or back to maintain balance.
Pelvic thrusts returned in Shannon Mockli‘s “and another war broke out,” with a musical narrative by Laetitia Compiegne Sonami. Sarah Ebert and Shannon Mockli, clad in what looked like American Apparel black lace outfits, danced separately for most of the piece, before “meeting” in a moment of unison that was still inflected by each dancer’s personality. Mockli said she was struck by Sonami’s deadpan delivery (the piece details sexual and romantic history, with occasional threats to shoot a lover, while wars break out), and wanted in the dance to develop different lines that would eventually, but temporarily, intersect. The audio transmogrified from spoken word into drops of electronic notes sparked by the words; at first it sounded like a wireless mic with a bad connection but by the time I heard cymbals, I figured it out. Mockli’s modern dance vocabulary felt a little humdrum in comparison, though it was enlivened by a touch of ballroom timing in the hesitation, then sweep of a step.
