A story hastily pulled from the back of the digital drawer where it was accidentally shoved some weeks prior with the best of intentions to return to in more timely fashion, only to unfortunately be forgotten: er…so, starting Friday, June 17, the marvelous performers of Seattle’s ticktock aerial dance are launching their newest show, domestic variations, at Fred Wildlife Refuge (through June 26; tickets $15).
I first caught ticktock last summer, right around this time, when two of the three members, Elizabeth Rose and Jill Schaffner, journeyed to New York to take part in a progressive aerial dance festival. Aerial, of course, is mostly known as a circus act (indeed, Schaffner and Rose are both better known as past or present members of the Aerialistas). But various artists working in the field have been seeking for some time to expand the vocabulary of the sideshow act by borrowing heavily from the world of modern dance, producing complex, metaphorically powerful movement pieces that range freely across both the stage and above it.
But to judge from the festival I saw, most of them are doing a piss-poor job of it, their experiments little more than meta meditations on the form, or deliberately anti-dramatic deconstructions of circus style acts. Not so with ticktock–their work is sophisticated, thoughtful and complex in a way that shamed most other acts I saw. Within their work, Schaffner, Rose and Bridget Gunning, also known for her work with Manifold Motion, among others, present choreographically complex pieces in which the aerial component is applied, albeit in healthy doses, much like you might expect to find ballroom or folk incorporated into the palette of a contemporary dance work.
In domestic variations, performed on an original sculptural aerial apparatus, the three performers tackle the idea of “home,” performing as three individuals who’ve lived in the same space at different times. It’s not something to be missed.
