On the Mainstage at NW New Works: Let's Dance

At my last count, Seattle theater groups outnumbered Seattle dance groups by about three to one. In this year's NW New Works Festival, the ratio is almost exactly reversed. Whether this indicates a lack of involvement or a lack of innovation in theatrical work can provide endless speculation.

In the absence of much experimental theater work, movement-based work dominates this year's festival and this weekend's Mainstage shows at On the Boards confirm the primacy of dance. Featuring new dance work by Part & Parcel, Paige Barnes and Jessica Jobaris' General Magic group and one lone theatrical-musical piece by Portland's Holcombe Waller, this weekend's shows run the gamut from the subtle to the explosive, occasionally within the same show.

Part and Parcel's By Guest & By God is the closest thing in the festival to a pure dance piece, if such a thing existed. Choreographer/dancer Allie Hankins has used a very limited gestural vocabulary in this piece. Even more limited are her dance partner, Mary Margaret Moore's movements, which stem from a rather plain basis in reality: Ms. Moore was struck by a motor scooter recently and has not yet recovered enough strength for many of her traditionally powerful moves. Rather than lament the fact, Ms. Hankins has turned this limitation to her advantage. By using the inability of her dance partner to do the same duet movements, she has made the piece more powerfully evoke the loss and separation between the two dancers. It is a profoundly effective piece and emotionally deep without either irony or indulgence.

Irony and indulgence have been left to two other pieces, Holcombe Waller's extraordinarily subtitled Surfacing Chapter 2 and Jessica Jobaris and General Magic's burlesque of psychodrama you're the stuff that sets me free. Holcombe Waller's piece is something like a new form of singspiel. His beautiful, lilting singing style takes on the hard, matter-of-fact subject of Judith Malina's grandson, Tameron, ascending the heights of a mountain as he tells the story of his grandmother and her friend, the legendary Dorothy Day. His delicate voice speaks of such indelicate dactylic lyrics as "beautiful peaceful anarchist-communist revolution" in a way that evokes irony. But this is not cheap irony. This is the irony that proceeds from an actual exploration: how can we make this beautiful idea with an ugly hyphenated name sound like a beautiful idea, and convince our modern-day cynics of its truth? That he pulls it off as well as he does is rather remarkable. It has the roots of a fascinating piece. I have no doubt he will convince many in his quest to master the material.

Indulgence is the name of the game in Jessica Jobaris' you're the stuff that sets me free. It is, on casual glance, a fairly simple dance piece about psychotherapy in which all eight of its principals get to indulge in a wild, sprawling mess of a dance while they occasionally blurt out obscene rejections of other people's decency and any attempt to make legitimate contact. This is difficult material to organize effectively. Ms. Jobaris admits she has a thing for on-stage mayhem in her work. Audiences, of course, love a spectacle like George W. Bush loves to fracture the English language and Ms. Jobaris' main tendency is to go for the obvious and the spectacular. And yet her subtler metaphors work better than her obvious ones. The tug of war scene, with two men tied together by a rope that stretches between their groins is an example. The tug of war itself to me is fairly uninteresting and obvious. The aftermath of the scene, where the loser gets more attention than he can handle, is where Ms. Jobaris finds something magical. As it stands, there are inconsistencies of tone that undermine the piece somewhat, but it is still a pretty fine work.

I am still puzzling a bit over Paige Barnes' piece, War Is Over. One level of it is so straightforward and easy that I am inclined to mistrust my own interpretation, figuring there must be something I am missing. The entire piece holds its center around a boxing metaphor--or several metaphors--in which a woman is fighting with herself. The use of multiple projected images on screen behind the dancer makes this quite explicit. Then it takes a turn into a series of earthbound, sensual images that are quite striking and memorable and ends with an inversion of the first section, where the dancer begins to box with her shadow which turns out to be, well, herself of course. For me there is a connection missing between the three sections that would raise it above the obvious. I submit that the fault probably lies within me and not the wonderful Ms. Barnes, whose dancing is very beautiful.

Dance work at the festival is very strong. Since there is a lot of it, this is good. Even for people who are not traditionally attracted to dance, there are enough fresh influences in even the dance pieces, not to mention a lot of crossover between the other arts and dance to satisfy anyone who is looking to get a peek into contemporary currents in our local performing arts.