Salt Horse's Titan Arum: Character-Centric Exploration, Unmoderated Meaning

While some dance falls squarely in the realm of "dance", and while some theater remains undeniably "theater", many of Seattle's performance artists are busily blurring the lines between both. Salt Horse (a dance company in the sense that they use dancers and choreography as their main artistic medium) is one such troupe, specializing in visual imagery and character-centric exploration. Their newest work, the evening-length premiere of Titan Arum, blossoms in the company's trademark style: scattered sound dialog, scenario-based improvisation and strange, ghostly creatures.

Co-directors Beth Graczyk, Corrie Befort and Angelina Baldoz have built Titan Arum out of an exploration of the world's "mythic powers", with a cast of characters like the Dormant Fire Goddess, Matter, Flux, Desire, Magnificat and Agni/Soma. If that annotation seems off-putting, don't fret. These artists aren't overly concerned with a uniform takeaway; this is not performance-as-entertainment. Rather, Salt Horse's expertise lies in the ability to fashion elusive, shape-shifting work of unmoderated meaning: an experience where the viewer's perception reigns supreme.

Six dancers (Alia Swersky, Allie Hankins, Jessica Jobaris and Shannon Stewart, along with Graczyk and Befort) dally in and out of Washington Hall's dimly lit arena, flanked by six stationary musicians (Stuart Dempster, Greg Campbell, Lori Goldston, Tari Nelson-Zagar and Jaison Scott, including Baldoz). Dancers rotate onstage as shifting mythical characters or as part of the supporting cast. Each creature embodies its own purpose: panics in a different state, shadowboxes a perceived enemy, and even as you begin to make progress puzzling out each creature, it has vanished, replaced by another fractured soul. A four-limbed nymph weaves a tangled path downstage, her clacking limbs still echoing even as the next scene begins to unfold. Up on the balcony, a woman flutters, mothlike, around a solitary light bulb. Other creatures heave, stumble and fall, punctuated by the mournful sounds of the cello, the ghastly clanging of a bell.

Yet even as Titan Arum's themes are loosely tied together by sound and shape, the act of defining, of identifying the effect, falls squarely to the viewer. Consistently, with every project, Salt Horse creates a theatrical hallucinogen, a Boggart-esque experience which welcomes subjective perception. A watcher may feel confounded or duped, isolated from the experience, or may emerge feeling enlightened, confidently proclaiming a perceived meaning.

This approach is intentional. Salt Horse constructs thematic presentations which require a willing receiver to complete the circuit and assign meaning. Even the dancers themselves, improvising much of the material, breathe interpretation into the display. From Salt Horse's website:

The choreography emerges from image or scenario based improvisational structures that require the creation of very specific physicalities. For example: "You have birds in your head" or "the room is disintegrating" ... Salt Horse often employs scenic "magic tricks" in their works. These arise from a desire to disrupt the audience's expectations in a way that invites them to question how they are perceiving what they are experiencing. It is a tool to open up the audience's imagination, and empower them to make choices in how they interpret the work.

This form of reception can become exhausting: the minute one disengages, the dancers reveal themselves to be finite shapes of flesh and bone, the piece's themes as artistic jibberish. But to test Salt Horse's validity as an expert illusionists: go see one of their shows, and decide for yourself.

May 13-15th (Fri.-Sun.) and 19-21st (Thurs.-Sat.), 8:30 p.m. // Washington Hall, 153 14th Ave., one block north of Yesler // Tickets $18, $15 students/seniors