Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Dance Zoetic Dance Ensemble, Wormhole collaboration proves productive
Posted by Andrew Alexander on Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:58 AM
The opening piece “Normaltown” was especially strong: a trio of dancers enacted the games of children at play, a rural setting and carefree existence suggested by the kicky traditional country music score. However, their innocent games developed into erotic rivalry and a romantic triangle as the children grew up, and it began to take on more serious undertones, but in a surprising twist never really lost its underlying sense of play and delight.
The evening continued with other strong pieces like “February 15,” involving five women in the same dress. Their eerie and silent entrances, one by one, each one seemingly brought onto the stage by the one before, like some sort of mechanical reproduction or cloning, gave no hint of the energetic elements of the ensuing lively, frenetic dance itself.
I'm a sucker for a great prop, smartly deployed, and that's precisely what the final piece “Click” provided: a dancer in a white (wedding?) dress, so enormous it hid other dancers beneath it, as they made it billow and swell like ocean waves. The dancer who wore it seemed simultaneously empowered and weighted down by it, she was ultimately able to free herself, and the release of all the women contained inside made the evening end, appropriately, on a very positive, freeing, communal and expansive note.
Scott Runkel's powerful images projected on a screen throughout the show served to unify the pieces which were disparate in tone and composition. Particularly powerful were the family album photos: there's something so touching and sad about such pictures; the people in them smile, but we know most of them are long dead or now much older, the time and place and people in them are gone or irrevocably changed. The way Runkel manipulates them—tears them and brings them back together—really brings out that quality, and having live dancers in front of them in the here and now just made the whole set-up even more resonant.
Did someone win the lottery and decide to open a theater? That's the way it seemed to me on Friday night when I visited Fabrefaction Theater on Brady Street for the first time for the show. The space is fantastic, all industrial chic with Knoll benches in the lobby, a real glass box office, a sleek bar, a 150 seat proscenium stage space and a 70 seat black box theater (on the drive there I was imagining a cold warehouse and donated couches covered with dirty sheets). None of these things are easy or cheap for theaters to come by which made me wonder: who's the generous, arts-loving millionaire and how do I get his number? Anyway, it's an awesome, sleek, state-of-the-art, theater space for Atlanta. Perhaps I'm a little late to the party: the website says it's been there since 2007, but it was my first visit, and I just thought it was a great place to catch Zoetic, and I hope Atlanta audiences are as affectionate as I am about this space. Check it.
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