Salt Horse's Man on the Beach Will Quietly Shake You Up
We’ve all seen that man on the beach. An odd, solitary figure enveloped in his own existence, enraptured with his private nothings, unsettling enough to make you feel strange. This familiar image is so strong that it inspired Salt Horse co-founder Beth Graczyk to create a performance piece based on a one-time encounter with such a man; so strong that when we attended Salt Horse’s Man on the Beach last weekend we were surprised how quickly this image leapt from our subconscious to help contextualize the main elements of the show: isolation, oblivion, entrapment, frailty and loneliness.
Salt Horse is a resident performance company formed by dancers Beth Graczyk and Corrie Befort and musician Angelina Baldoz. The company has an unusually specific mission statement: “Salt Horse is a Seattle-based dance/sound performance company that creates visually rich, sensation-based works that illuminate the quiet, unseen, or hidden aspects of nature and the human experience.” This well-respected company has a reputation for the dreamy, the ethereal, even the spooky; meshing sound, image and movement to create a powerful multi-layered experience. Man on the Beach is indeed eliciting an excited buzz among Seattle’s dance community. Everyone wants to see it; everyone wants you to see it.
Good art does not dictate meaning, and Man on the Beach, while structured around a core message, remains open to interpretation. Yet Jeremy Barker’s interview/preview, published last week in TheSunBreak, is helpful in understanding the purpose behind the project:
"These characters" in Man on the Beach, explained Graczyk, "have a tether in this idea of being alone, or being stuck inside of something. And there's both something terrifying about that from the outside—seeing someone stuck so thoroughly, and not able to let go, or to be able to see what's around them, or to move on, progress, or change—but there's also something beautiful about that if you can see it from the inside, or a different perspective, that maybe that person is actually completely satisfied, completely whole, and nothing does need to change."
We could probably write a lengthy essay dissecting the imagery put forth in Man on the Beach. This is not that essay, although we did have several general impressions. A selection: Jens Wazel’s portrayal of the “man on the beach” type character was utterly haunting. We loved it, probably because - as we said before - it resonated with so much truth. Furthermore, Wazel’s stumble across the stage, his upper body trapped in a tangle of clacking green chairs? Brilliant.
We found Graczyk to be a wonderful mover: fluid, sexy, possessed. We longed for more of the headless man character, but we found the animals distracting. The second-to-last sequence, where imagery and movement is cloned from the likeness of a single dancer, felt over-worked and ineffective. Yet throughout, Baldoz, seated in her floor-level miniature music studio, creates an amazingly layered live soundtrack; bringing another facet of depth to the project. Unrelated: at some point we found ourselves thinking “wind chimes.”
Again, we are deliberately excluding our interpretation of Man on the Beach; we want those who go to make up their own mind. And to the people at Salt Horse: looking forward to more of your work in the future.
March 5th & 6th, 8 p.m. // Erickson Theater (Harvard Ave. between Pike and Pine) // tickets $15, students/seniors/military $12
