Last year I caught (and was summarily knocked out by) PALMS, a theatrical piece choreographed and directed by Paige Barnes at the Northwest Film Forum. It was my first exposure to the work of the Seattle-based dancer/choreographer, and happily not my last.
Barnes has been marrying her distinctive style of interpretive movement to innovative multidisciplinary projects for quite awhile. She collaborated with Seattle Chamber Players in 2011 on a work inspired by surrealist polymath Jean Cocteau’s ballet, Marriage at the Eiffel Tower. 2013’s Naked found her and musician Amy Denio performing nude in front of an audience of also-nude women. And more recently, she incorporated animation by Stefan Gruber and Sage Mailman, sonics by musician Evan Flory-Barnes, recitations by poet Vanessa DeWolf, and her own studies in Chinese herbal medicine into her two-month artist residency at the Seattle Art Museum’s Sculpture Park last winter.
#shanghaipulse, Barnes’s latest work, saw her return to the Film Forum November 9, in a presentation that further intertwined her knack for coloring outside established artistic lines with her medicinal studies (she completed her MS in East Asian Medicine at Bastyr University, and runs her own herbal medicine/acupuncture practice). Like PALMS, it made for an exciting and creatively resonant experience.
Barnes has often embraced technology harmoniously in her work, and #shanghaipulse was no exception. That integration of technology, physicality, and imagination began pre-performance, as attendees were guided by map to spots nearby and within the Film Forum to view dances on their phones. The delivery method set the tone for the evening—emotional connection delivered with oft-entrancing artistry, welcome self-awareness, and surprising accessibility.
The program’s first segment, #danceadayinshanghai, was comprised of several videos recorded on Barnes’s phone during a three-week stint in Shanghai studying Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Each minute-long video showcased Barnes performing a dance in a Chinese locale—sometimes alone, sometimes in public places swarming with bystanders.
A few of the videos were previously teased via Barnes’s Instagram and other social media, but they made for absorbing and impressively cohesive viewing when assembled into one full 24-minute film. The end result provided as clear an emotional window into Barnes’ impressions of the country, and herself, as any written journal or documentary travelogue ever could.
The clips also looked surprisingly cinematic on a big screen. Atmospheric doorways and corridors figured strongly, with Barnes navigating full light and evocative expressionistic shadow alike with a combination of ethereal grace and primal directness. In one sequence straight out of a full-on feature film, the camera roamed with serpentine smoothness, through a well-trod urban park area, to settle on Barnes dancing at the center. Yet another, especially gorgeous medium-long-shot dance took place amidst a moody, rain-spattered Chinese evening, as Barnes pirouetted and slid her fingers through puddles while cars passed nearby—modern dance taking a cue from film noir.
Barnes essentially directed #danceadayinshanghai, assembling and editing it from footage shot by her as well as several friends/fellow students. Between her sense of editorial pacing, flashes of knowing humor, switches from high-speed to slow motion, and canny use of ambient and looped sounds (the latter courtesy engineer Julian Martlew), she demonstrated experimental filmmaking chops to match her instincts as a movement artist.
Once #danceadayinshanghai came to an end, Barnes displayed her ongoing fascination with merging medicine and movement by improvising a dance based on the live pulse reading of a random audience member. It was a striking display of her resourcefulness and insight as a performer. Barnes painted a layered portrait of the soft-spoken female subject with movement, in a dance that moved freely from gliding deftness to alien beauty to coiled tension without ever feeling contrived.
Spectators who missed Barnes’s SAM Sculpture Park residency received a first-rate summary of it after the live reading. The night’s second video compilation/film, #pulsereadingproject, followed Barnes’s readings of several visitors’ pulses at the Sculpture Park, the improvised dances that followed, and excerpts of the site-specific works she executed in collaboration with others.
The most striking thing about the myriad pulse dances was the incredible distinctiveness of each one. Barnes’s movement always bore her inimitable signature, while still generating moods and motions that—like their subjects—were never the same twice. And the glimpses of the extended SAM presentations (augmented by Flory-Barnes’s haunting ululations and standup bass, DeWolf’s vivid poetry, and Gruber’s and Mailman’s wonderfully textural animations) gave ample proof of Barnes’s collaborative spirit.
As collaborative as that SAM installation was, though, there was no doubt as to the guiding force behind #shanghaipulse. Whether mugging playfully in front of a rounded mirror, finding grace and birdlike nimbleness in equal turns along an urban sidewalk, or trailing elegantly wraithlike behind a hotel employee in Shanghai, Paige Barnes is myriad forms of poetry in motion, and a multidisciplinary creative force to be reckoned with.
