Tag Archives: OnTheBoards

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

Chasing the Elusive & Shape Shifting with Kyle Abraham at OtB

Two hands meet and broach questions: Is masculine power inextricably woven into hip-hop? What is the role of the feminine in this worldwide cultural phenomenon? How does hip-hop meet queer? Kyle Abraham and his dance company, Abraham.In.Motion, are at On The Boards this weekend (through April 22, at 8 p.m.; tickets: $20) playing these questions to laughs, stopped breath, and more than a few plucked heartstrings.

Before those many meetings of hands the audience is prepped for a pop-culture encounter by pre-show club music that approaches nightclub volume. Once the dance begins, however, the sound mix is mostly arty electronica, though the moves range from popping to pointe work.

The dance quickly establishes Abraham’s concerns with a strong narrative of men finding tenderness and facing oppression and violence together. Hands meet for a suspended moment, the dance changes, relationships shift, and the community passes judgment. The narrative is reinforced by projections that both elaborate on and actually join in playing the danced scenes.

The performance takes its form from jazz’s correlated chorus—or more precisely Moby-Dick, though Stanley Crouch would suggest that it’s all the same, which is entirely appropriate. Abraham (the choreographer, not the Biblical Ishmael’s father) is chasing the elusive and the shape shifting. One scene demonstrates that hip-hop is very much a know-it-when-I-see-it affair only to be followed by dances that question what we know and what we’re seeing.

Where Melville alternates semi-scholarly cetacean treatises with the story of the Pequod, Abraham vacillates between declarative pieces dominated by male dancers and more abstract sections dominated by women. The chapters sail past with a surprise at every tack. Dan Scully’s lighting gets a lot of mileage out of a back curtain of vertical blinds. Language enters the mix and performs a duet with the choreography, asking those same questions with deeply committed acting.

Words bring laughter at the contrast between what is said and what is true and between the instruction given and the ways it may be followed. The words finally evolve into rap that Abraham delivers with such professional chops that a flub at Thursday night’s performance might have seemed planned if only the recovery had been repeated.

From electronica and rap Abraham and company eddy to a cover of Miles Davis’s Flamenco Sketches. The music leads the dance to one final moment of stunning grace. Could it be that Abraham has found peace with his whale?

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

tEEth Packs An Emotional Wallop At On the Boards

On the Boards‘ presentation of Portland dance company tEEth‘s Make/Believe packs an emotional wallop as its four dancers wrestle with power, voice, and microphones. Angelle Herbert’s choreography, together with Phillip Kraft’s sound design, openly lays claim to the audience from the get-go and doesn’t release its hold for a moment as the dancers struggle to find their literal and figurative voices.

Make/Believe has all the fundamentals of a great performance; there’s drama, character and a refusal to let the audience get away with passivity. Have no fear of (or hopes for) being asked to get on your feet, but don’t think you’ll escape emotionally either. This show will not let you off the hook and the only thing more devastating would be if they were to shut the audience out. Witnessing these performers struggle to communicate engenders pity, horror and fear as well as delight, sympathy and laughter. The physical, electronic and emotional obstacles that choke back words and make speech inarticulate let through just enough meaning to send ripples of laughter through the audience as we recognize a phrase out of that special garbled language in which only dental care workers and drive-through clerks are fluent.

In addition to Kraft’s composition, sounds come from the dancers, who carry microphones in their mouths, around their necks, and between their legs. Sometimes they actually hold them in their hands, yet even when speaking directly into the microphone the dancers work hard to disrupt our understanding of the sounds and their sources. This draws attention to the non-vocal sounds of limbs and breath. The movements make their own music only to have that music overwhelmed by the amplified soundscape, suggesting that the sound derives from the movement rather than the conventional reverse. With the music at a volume that becomes palpable the dancing takes on the silence of distance.

With the exception of a few lifts, both graceful and harsh, and one extraordinary leap, the movements remain grounded and often focused on the torso. Minimalist unison quartets go from languid to fierce, followed by staccato sections with rapid emotional shifts, before breaking into alternating duets and a few solos.

The dancers’ roles are often highly gendered and sexualized. The women take prominence as characters but the men frequently stifle the women’s voices. Though this dynamic is subverted in a variety of ways these scenes create some of the biggest emotional impacts in the performance. The violence and intimacy of some movements inspires questions of who is in control amongst the dancers, in the performer/audience relationship, and between the individual dancer and her own voice—to say nothing of the technology that keeps threatening to gag and garrote.

There is one really deafening moment during the performance, so it’s helpful to take note of the earplugs available next to the programs as you enter the Griffin (I didn’t take a pair but came out okay: any tinnitus that followed didn’t make it to curtain call).

The technical side of the production is stellar. Alex Gagne-Hawes’s lighting includes extraordinarily sharp focus and extreme shuttering, while Kraft’s soundscape, could almost stand alone as a performance.

This is not dance made purely for an esoteric dance-knowing crowd. It’s accessible without pandering, moving both intellectually and emotionally, and playing here for far too short a run: In addition to yesterday’s opening-night performance, Make/Believe is presented tonight and tomorrow.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

12 Minutes Max: The Test Results Are In

Josephine’s Echopraxia. Photo by Tim Summers.

A house of fans, friends, family, and the merely curious filled On The Boards’ Studio Theatre Monday night for the 2011-2012 season’s fourth and penultimate edition of 12 Minutes Max. This OtB institution offers twelve regional artists a twelve-minute slot of lab time for testing new material on audiences, and “testing” is no euphemism. While the crowd was enthusiastic there were no obligatory standing-O’s at this show; the performers earned the responses they received, and more often than not those responses were positive.

The evening was heavy on dance, light on theatre and music, and featured a pair of performance pieces incorporating movement and declamation. Sarah Burgess provided the musical act playing low-key pop piano under a smoky Norah Jones knock-off vocal. She’s a pleasant and comfortable performer who, one hopes, may aspire to greater achievements in her future lyrics.

Dances included a solo, a duet, a trio, and a quintet. Kaitlin McCarthy and Kiplinn Sagmiller danced McCarthy’s choreography using a precise vocabulary of movements to create a narrative of tenderness and aggression that escalated steadily with acts of kindness subverted to violent ends, resulting in the total division of roles between the empowered and the subjugated.

Shellie Gravitt gave the audience a go-go dance by way of Beckett (perhaps that’s go-go of Godot’s Didi and Gogo). The clown act consistently resolved into a vainglorious reassertion of dignity, enacted in the astonishing beauty of the dancer’s torso slowly rising up over squatting thighs, perched on massive high-heeled shoes only to launch once more into the impossible and ludicrous contortions of the act. After an unperformed transition, masked only by the proscenium wall, but revealed in shadows and the unmuffled sounds of costume and prop transitions, Gravitt reemerged, freed of footwear and with a therapeutic rocks glass at hand. This dance was free and easy, instead of striving to achieve an impossible task.

The other dances included one of transitions between mechanized and organic qualities in a nuanced dynamic of encounters received and compelled within Vancouver’s three-woman ensemble Triadic Dances Works. The other involved Geoffrey Johnson’s ensemble of five performers in athletic and grounded movement, often arranged around a still center with a motif of hand flutters punctuating the sequences. The costuming was remarkable for including a variety of faded t-shirts printed with lettering and images, which helped place the experience of the dance in a very accessible and informal world.

William D. Brattain, or TIT: The Irrealist Theatre, gave the audience a strong performance piece spiraling off from the Fibonacci sequence and conceptions of gender and language that was supported in the physical work with well-integrated form and content and enough authentic personality to win the audience’s sympathy. Meanwhile, Joyce Liao’s Llevame Contigo was a more obtuse piece involving childlike play and ruminations on horses, intermixed with prerecorded voiceovers and followed by primitive and simple dances.

This sort of an evening can be a technical nightmare and the transitions between scenes deadly. I’ve long been of the opinion that scene changes must be totally fascinating or completely invisible. Given the large percentage of dance pieces in the evening, the transitions were relatively smooth and quick, but the slow transition into The Town Theater’s Missed Connections was slow and fascinating, a dance piece unto itself. Unfortunately, the rest of this piece didn’t compare as favorably. The set consisted of a pair of triangles in blue painters’ tape laid out on the floor in a formal choreography seemingly borrowed from the preceding dance.

Nick Hara and Ciera Iveson performed their composition derived from Seattle Missed Connections postings, a forum with which other groups, such as NYC’s Royanth Productions and Ars Nova, have had success. The performance of the text was often engaging. Iveson and Hara committed to their characters, calling out into the theatre for affection and connection, though never so much to suggest that they expected a response. This was all very nice, but the actors were locked onto those triangles. What might have happened had they broken free and had an interaction with one another?

At the end of intermission, The SunBreak’s Arts Intern Emeritus Leah Vendl’s name was chosen out of a glass vase full of entries, which won her the responsibility of guest-curating the next edition of 12 Minutes Max (April 8-9, auditions March 11). If it’s anything like this latest edition, there will be plenty to like—and anything you don’t like will be over soon enough. That and the $8 admission are a small price to pay for the chance to contribute to local performance development and possibly to be the first to see the next big thing.