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Kristina Chan in Tanja Liedtke's construct. Photo by Chris Herzfeld.
The old adage--variously attributed to everyone from Leo Stravinsky to Martin Mull--that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" has always struck us as a sort of challenge for dance to step up to. While we don't dispute that the majority of music writing is lacking, dance, like architecture, is about physical forms, so it would seem perfectly reasonable to suppose it was possible. That said, we'd never actually seen it done until last Friday, when On the Boards presented the late Tanja Liedtke's construct, in which they not only dance about architecture, they actually dance the architecture itself into existence.
We've seen a fair bit of dance in the last several months, everyone from Kidd Pivot to tEEth, but Liedtke's work simply blows the rest out of the water. We've never seen choreography with so much character before, so much personality, to say nothing of such a broad sense of humor.
The show opens with a site gag that dives straight into the titular theme. The three dancers, Kristina Chan, Alessandra Mattana, and Paul White take the stage, and immediately the two females go stiff as boards, turning into mannequins, and begin to topple over. White rushes about, propping them up, catching them as they tip, stacking and piling them, and ultimately, with the aid of an electric drill, begins controlling and manipulating them until he finally "bolts" them into place.
While the narrative focuses on "small-scale tragedy" (to borrow Brendan Kiley's phrase), fundamentally the work explores the way in which we construct our lives through the spaces in which the banal details unfold: from romance and casual sex, to homes and family, and, finally, death. Incidental lighting elements (including work lights, Christmas strands, and flashlights), random set pieces like window frames, and piles of wood are used to build the locations for the scenarios: a window (and all the things you can see through it), a beach house, a romantic night under the stars.
While most dance pieces are content to limit themselves to using the human body to make their points, Liedtke ventures far off the beaten path. The dancers resort on a number of occasions to shadow puppetry to tell their stories, to earnest and sincere effect. At another point, the work becomes unintentionally topical, when White, playing the role of a realtor, begins hawking his (worthless) wares to the audience in a makeshift auction. The music, by DJ Tr!p, plums the depths of schlocky mood music to create a truly affecting score, heavy on charming little plucked guitar melodies. In one of the work's most moving segments, the three dancers doff their shirts and, beneath the glowing strands of lights, enact a menage-a-trois, conveyed through a series of every-which-way embraces, heavy on the heavy petting. The image of their hands--cast in shadowy bas-relief by the upwardly titled floor lights--moving across naked skin is one of the single sexiest and most romantic bits we've ever had the pleasure to see onstage.
From the opening comic routine to the final arresting image of Chan trapped inside a wooden lattice-work funeral pyre, the sheer force of personality in the work is overwhelming. Liedtke was not an artist content with simply creating a bare-bones skeleton of a work, an excuse to let her fellow dancers contort themselves about and show off the fine-tuned tools that are their bodies (however occasionally gratifying it is to watch a human being take his or her body to acme of physical perfection). Instead, Liedtke envisioned dance performance as capable of thematic and narrative power far beyond the standard today, making her loss all the more tragic.
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