Portland's tEEth Put on a Fantastic Show @ OtB
Portland's tEEth with Grub. Photo by Aaron Busch.
Virtually all dance performance is, in one way or another, an exploration of the human body: the dancers are lithe and athletic--look at the movement, the balance, the elegant contortions that the body, fine-tuned as an instrument, is capable of! But Portland's tEEth (at On the Boards tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m., $18), in their world-premiere work Grub, have another way to explore the body: through sound.
At one point, a pair of female dancers stand passively and sing a simple la la la melody. They're not even particularly great singers, but there you are. Behind them, two male dancers stand; first they simply cover the singers' mouths, muffling the sound. Then they flutter the effect, like an Indian war cry. Then they stick their fingers in the singers' mouths, they pick them up and bounce them up and down, they lay them on the floor (it's much harder to sing lying down), then walk on them, right across the stomach. Finally, in the ultimate stress position, the males lie on the floor and support the females at the shoulders and ankles, so they're attempting to sing while simultaneously holding their bodies rigid.
Needless to say, the point wasn't the quality of singing (though it was impressive that the females could continue at all). With each subsequent stress, blow, and contortion, the ability to sing, to force the air out of the lungs and resonate it through the mouth, becomes harder and harder, and in the wavering, suffering simplicity of the dancers' voices, the audience was able to understand, to think about and evaluate, the human body in a way that a ballet dancer could never communicate.
It's a simple and elegant little invention of a clever, dynamic, and at times disturbing performance group who deserve all the praise they're getting. The nominal subject of Grub is something to do with the dehumanizing effect of mediated human interaction, the idea that with cell phones and email and social networking sites, it's possible to interact with other people without ever actually having to interact. That said, as is often the case, the "subject" seems more the inspiration than the point, which is good, because literalism can be every bit as boring as pointless abstraction. Formally speaking, the through-line to Grub is the constant--and cleverly executed--desire to show two things at once. The singing (this was only a small part of the show, most of which was non-vocal) is one example: it reveals something about the body, its muscular, biological structure, that you can't see, but you can hear. Even standing or lying there, perfectly passive, there's something complex and amazing going on.
Another example comes from the use of live videocameras. There were at least three of them around the stage, used in different ways, but one particular moment stands out. One of the female dancers, a large woman very much so against the typical dance type, performs a solo piece that's incredibly powerful. She lies prostrate on the ground, she struggles to pull herself across the stage. She's emotionally anguished. You get the picture--anyone who sees this sort of performance has seen this a million times and it's almost always more tiresome than the last. But what made this particular sequence so powerful was that the dancer held a small camera trained on her face as she did it, with a live feed projecting it on a screen about the stage. The video has the familiar quality of a webcam, the extreme close-up, the weepy, sweaty, pained face recalling countless YouTube videos. And the effect is amazing, if hard to put into words--you get to see the same thing two ways, a drama that unfolds physically with the dancer's body, and one the unfolds on the face.
Why we keep using the word "dancer," we don't know. This is dance primarily, but Grub is bigger than the choreography, and the choreography isn't typical in the sense that usually with experimental or cutting-edge dance, there's basically a hatred of anything like a "traditional" dance form. But here, there's constant references to tradition, from ballet to a waltz. Really, tEEth is a dance-centric performance art group where movement is perhaps the most important, but hardly the only, element.
The group was founded in 2002 by dancer/choreographer Angelle Hebert and composer Phillip Kraft, whose electronic score for the show was amazing, and it feels like an effort on their part to take their unique skills and build out from there. Grub's use of technology, particularly the multiple video feeds and blue-screen effects, expands the group's vocabulary and allows them to do more with what they were already working with. To get all lit-crit about it, tEEth have created a polyvalent work, which is constantly referencing and interrogating its own themes and ideas. It's dynamic and creative and funny (someone in the audience yelled at the rest of the crowd for being afraid to laugh) and definitely worth seeing.
