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You know how in horror films they were doing this thing where they'd delete frames and speed up or slow down the film to give the "evil" an eerie, inhuman quality? Zoe Scofield does that live, pretzeling, twisting, writhing, blank face dusted white with a silver streak down the center, her eyes disturbing pools of black under the lights. Yet...a hand reaches out to softly enfold the nape of a neck, there's a surrender, a leaning back. (For more on Scofield, check out Brendan Kiley's interview.)
The full title of the Scofield/Shuey/Henderson work is the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. It's at On the Boards tonight and Saturday (8 p.m., $18) It's a rigorous, beautiful, daimonic ritual of a dance where something is made, produced in front of you, and then slightly freaked out, you talk with other people later about how cool the effects were. Meanwhile there's this dakini in your head, staring back at you like in that dream you don't like to talk about where you woke up sweating and gasping for breath.
Of course, the dancers (Christiana Axelsen, Ezra Dickinson, Lizzy Melton, Zoe Scofield and Allison Van Dyck) are also sweating and gasping. The show begins slowly, with a gorgeous, transporting visual effect (Juniper Shuey's handiwork)--there's a scrim, spirit dancers, and an uncanny feeling of elevation--and Scofield sitting as if meditating, but it's all uphill physically from there. We wanted to throw energy bars at her troupe by the time the 70-minute piece wrapped up where it began, with Scofield sitting on a bare floor.
There may be a theme to the devil you know is better than the devil you don't, but there's not a narrative. Except for a few duos where the dancers do communicate a relationship's pushes and pulls, the focus is on developing and deepening the meaning of movements. There's unison work so tightly directed that it seems everyone's breathing on the same beat.
Scofield integrates ballet, modern dance, and yoga poses into her own movement vocabulary, which emphasizes both a purity of line and its traumatic disruption. A sweeping, controlled gesture gets broken by a tremor or spasm. Besides finesse, there's also sheer power on display: sometimes the dancers elevate, from a dead stop, into two full rotations then land and freeze. And sometimes, they gallop across the stage like a herd playing follow the leader.
Besides Scofield's group of five, there are another seven women dressed in white shifts with a mini-train at the back (courtesy of costume designer Chrissy Wai-Ching) and white, elbow-length gloves. Scofield's group starts out in basic white, but finishes in fur loincloths with multicolored tails. It's hard not to see (with the "feral ballet" label in play) a social dichotomy, and a hard-won, wild-and-proud confidence.
We suspect that in part Scofield is doing what any innovative choreographer needs to do early on in a career, which is dance out an origin story--the point of which is to explain the story itself. It's not autobiography in a tell-all way, but an announcement of what matters to you, how you do things.
What's striking, too, is the interpenetration of the artistic elements; Morgan Henderson's sonic landscape, a collage of instrumental, electronic, and found sound, picks up the theme of repetition, of practice, but it also slaps and stabs the dancers at times. Jessica Trundy's lighting design evokes a chessboard, a cell, a moment of divine inspiration. When confetti falls like snow, it looks great, but as it collects the dancers drop and play in it, kicking up not-snow slips of paper, now more like leaves.
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Just FYI Chrissy Wai-Ching didn't do the white gloves. She designed all of the silk garments worn in the performance including the bustles at the end.
Nice review!