Next NW 2012: Real/Time is this weekend, December 7 to 9, only (at Velocity Dance Center; tickets), and brings you, as Velocity often does, a collection of new experiments from an intriguing cross-section of the dance scene. The festival continues, on screen, at Next Dance Cinema on Monday, December 10 (at Northwest Film Forum; tickets), with even more participants, including the irrepressible Alice Gosti. (A kick-off party-slash-benefit, Velocity Is Burning, is December 6.)
On the choreographer side for Next NW, you have Shannon Stewart, thefeath3rtheory (Raja Kelly), Babette McGeady, Erica Badgeley, Molly Sides, Sarah Butler, and Paris Hurley + Markeith Wiley’s The New Animals. They’re collaborating with a host of composers and visual artists, such as Tito Ramsey, Benjamin Marx, William Hayes, Barry Sebastian, Derek Ghormley, Jeff Huston, and Adam Sekuler and John Niekrasz.
I’d had a chance to see one of Stewart’s collaborations with Huston and Sekuler, “An Inner Place That Has No Place,” in April, and its appeal has only grown in my memory. (That work is returning to Velocity in April 2013, as Stewart’s part in the SCUBA tour.) By way of a preview, I met up with her at rehearsals at Velocity, to discuss what her new work would explore, in 12 minutes or less. It turned out to be David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me.
Rehearsal featured Stewart talking to her dancers about how to act when “the narrative of what we’re doing starts to disintegrate,” and teaching them how to be creepy Northwest trees. “It’s the air moving your branches,” she told them, and they practiced feeling gnarled.
A cold November rain had the Kawasaki studio’s skylight sounding like a snare drum, and that and a 4 p.m. twilight conspired to bring back in a rush what was so eerie about Twin Peaks, as Stewart and her dancers took on the characters of FBI agents drinking coffee, stern and glaring older women, a traumatized high school girl. A wordless chorus smoked languorously, put a hand up in self-defense, retreated.
It’s not at all an accident that so much of the dance reads like Lynch’s movie, because, as Stewart explained, when she saw it years ago, she made a a visceral connection to Lynch’s project — here was something so like dance, unable or unwilling to put itself into words precisely, but instead of courting the audience’s interest, it piled mystery upon mystery. It met small town melodrama, and murder, with a cool distance, less an investigation than an improvisation, a provocation. The dance was with your expectations.
Stewart was struck particularly by the way Lynch reversed foreground and background — the Northwest gloom, its emotional textures, became a character, and the characters became the scenery. Taking Lynch, or what she knows about him, as a starting point, she began to ask herself what his process would be like. In the event, she’s borrowed his movement vocabulary from the first 30 minutes, and made something new.
(At the same time, Stewart, who studied with Deborah Hay over the summer, is working on developing another piece — or not, leaving room for honorable failure — that arises from following Hay’s practice daily. Giving herself over to these two influences, she hopes, will help advance her discovery of her personal choreographic style.)
The drum solo that the dancers had to learn went 6 beats, 5 beats, 8, 6, 13, 7, 3. People kept visibly slipping into a trance surprised by that fleeting coda. “Complicated counting,” supposed Stewart, is her way on contrasting cold on hot, not letting the audience find a safe “place” to observe.
In the film that she and Sekuler have in Next Dance Cinema, 1922, a Steadicam roves through an empty old house; it’s an observer and dancer, creating a space from its single vantage point. Stewart says something about how the audience will “metabolize” what it sees. It’s also about memory, its rewards and ruts, and about how to move from one space into another. “The challenge of contemporary work,” she mused, partly to herself, “is to push forward. A finished style isn’t helpful.”
