Scott/Powell Performance Premieres Home
Performer Belle Wolf
Using seven dancers and a sparse set, Home is a moody, dark, energetic piece of work. The lights come up, revealing the backdrop to be beautifully painted panels of wood, swirled with shapes of gold and brown. The dancers move on and off the stage - first in pairs and solos, then together as a group - segmented out physically and thematically but joined overall by the cohesiveness of Scott’s movement: a focus on the legs; quick fast kicks, upper body directional jerks with the arms flinging around in response; fluttering fingers and twining necks. It's wild, tribal and frequently bird-like. Pairings have equal weight in hostility and harmony; group work is usually in canon. And Powell punctuates the imagery with a dreary, moody soundscape.
It’s definitely atmospheric; sort of dreamy, abstract and open to interpretation. For guidance, one could read the program insert on the inspiration for Home, “as an environment rich with dreams, memories and stories: a point of origin or destination; a place to flourish, grow, or decline; the place where one lives; the center, where something secret is kept” … or not. The emotional pull of the piece is certainly independent of its theme; unlike, for example, Morgan Thorson's Heaven, which showed at On the Boards earlier this year.
We watched a documentary on John Cage and Merce Cunningham recently, and Cunningham talks briefly about his theory regarding points in space: movement not spatially oriented by the audience as the “front” but rather in relation to the direction each dancer happens to be facing. In that sense, Home is very much in a front-facing, presentation mode. It’s also clearly compartmentalized into sections and sub-sections. We’ll borrow steal a word from our performance companion and call it “episodic”; although Home has a strong physical continuity, by the end of the piece we started to emotionally lag. The intensity remained, but the connection was gone, likely due in part to Home’s five scene changes, parade of changing characters and quickly shifting terrains.
Through May 23rd, 8 p.m. // Erickson Theatre, 1524 Harvard Ave. // $12-15, tickets here.
Full disclosure: I’ve had a prior relationship with performer and visual collaborator Michael Rioux.
