The Stranger Reviews Glimmer. . . And KT Responds

One Week, Four Dances
Sex, Death, Party, and Forgery
by Brendan Kiley
(Published in The Stranger's April 28 issue)
 
I don't understand why dance companies don't coordinate their schedules better—for months, next to nothing will happen, then BAM! Everything's happening all at once: Amelia Reeber's new show, this is a forgery; Lingo dancetheater's new show A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light; a night of Butoh improvisation by Danse Perdue; the final week of rehearsals before Cabaret de Curiosités at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival; and even West by "Awesome" at On the Boards. (The latter isn't dance, strictly speaking—despite a long Butoh-style walk by a hooded figure between undulating packing crates—but On the Boards is the city's dance-centric theater, and its shows are required viewing for dance geeks. Click here for David Schmader's full review of West.)

Reeber's solo show begins with the facts of life: a video projection of a gray planet spinning in the dark, then a mass of animated spermatozoa rushing down a tube, each hoping to be the first to bang its head against the great, gray orb. As one of them succeeds, a subtitle says "damn it!" and the lights come up on Reeber, lying placidly on her back, her legs in the air. Whose accidental conception are we watching? Reeber's? A child of Reeber's? The dance itself? Maybe looking for allegories isn't the way to go—forgery is relentlessly abstract.

Reeber says she's only fixed five minutes of this hour-long dance, but the stage pictures are coherent: video of a giant cat coming and going, or just sitting; video of Reeber in a Cub Scout uniform, looking happier than she does onstage; an anchor on the floor, surrounded by rocks; small golden pyramids and step-pyramids upstage; some lower halves of mannequins suspended by chains. Reeber gently twirls and spins in a small black dress, frolicking like a Greek nymph (or Isadora Duncan). Even at her harshest, when she lurches around pigeon-toed and angular with frozen joints, she still seems pliant and rounded—a creature made of Tinkertoys, not an Erector Set. The whole of forgery is soft and pleasant to watch, but few shards of it lodge themselves in the memory.

A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light makes better on its promise for skin and light than for hope. A modern-dance masque in ACT's subterranean purple cabaret room, Glimmer follows the arc of a party of the Eyes Wide Shut sort: some drunkenness, some nudity, and some moody rock 'n' roll. Choreographer KT Niehoff sings during the proceedings with the band Ivory in Ice World, kicking her bare legs (and strappy, expensive-looking shoes) to the drumbeat. The audience sits at tables or leans against the pillars and walls, watching the dance happen around them: writhing, sexual duets from principals wearing white gutter-glam costumes while a dozen extras in frilly blue watch, wander, and preen.

Niehoff has spent years exploring and aestheticizing social situations for dance performances: a dinner party (at which she served actual dinner), a regular party (in which it was sometimes difficult to tell the performers from the audience), and now a sort of glam-rock ball where some dancers walk around flirting with the audience while others undulate up and down the stairs. But unlike her earlier efforts, Glimmer has a chilliness—maybe because of the formalism of ACT Theatre, or maybe because the line between participant and spectator was sharper (the costumes more obvious, the audience doing nothing but watching) and therefore more forbidding. Principals Bianca Cabrera and Michael Rioux gave notably strong performances, with heat in their movement and fire in their limbs. But for all of Glimmer's pageantry, it felt like something stuck behind glass.

While Glimmer pretended to be a rock 'n' roll party, Hipster Death was one. The musicians and dancers would've loved the audience to tear the joint apart—if only they'd had the audience. Four goth-rock and noise bands played at the Mix in Georgetown (a medium-sized concrete room dolled up with a little wood for the bar and balcony), and performers from Danse Perdue improvised during a few sets. Dancers Alex Ruhe and Vanessa Skantze coated themselves in white makeup, donned white robes, and laced the stage and concrete floor with strings and bundles of white fabric, a mess of snowy intestines. Joy Von Spain of the 100 Pieces shrieked out her She Slicing She: A Fury Opera (sounds like: a Diamanda Galás impersonator accompanied by an electrical storm), while Ruhe and Skantze staggered and curled around each other, rolling their eyes back in their heads and grimacing. The audience—mostly made up of the other bands (Dark Matter, Stabbings, Caligula Cartel)—leaned against the walls and watched reverently. They were a church in search of a congregation.

This weekend, at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, director Roger Benington, Stranger Genius Award–winning designer Jennifer Zeyl, and a pack of burlesque dancers (Waxie Moon, Inga Ingénue, Indigo Blue, Pantera, et al.) will present Cabaret de Curiosités. Paula the Swedish Housewife plays the hostess of a Parisian cabaret who mails a cabinet full of sexy persons to her nephew. (Isn't that illegal?)

A prediction: The burlesque will be more narrative than forgery, more saucy than Glimmer, and better attended than Hipster Death—but not necessarily better than any of them.




KT Niehoff's Response By Email
(Sent April 28 Directly To Brendan Kiley)

Dance companies don't coordinate their schedules better because they don't have the luxury of choice.

They take what they can. They save ridiculously small pennies and book themselves into whatever space/weekend they can find. They are sad when they can't see each others shows to support one another and be inspired by each others work. We are not idiots that just forget to call each other and ask when we are putting on our little shows.

And aside from the logistics of it all, I wonder why the implied negative in the fact there is enough dance in this city to actually support multiple artists and their work in the same weekend? Music venues produce a plethora of artists every weekend in Seattle, as do theater venues. We thrive on the artistic energy happening all around us and revel in the fact that our little corner of the world continually gathers to experience the riches these artists have to offer instead of sitting home and watching CSI re-runs. Why not be proud of a grown up city that has a thriving local/national/international appetite for contemporary dance/performance? Why not applaud it?

Amelia Reeber does not "twirl and spin, frolicking like a Greek nymph (or Isadora Duncan)". My five-year old God Son twirls and spins. And why is it a uniquely, ground-breaking contemporary dance artists is equated to a century old physical vocabulary? I have stopped telling people I am a contemporary dancer because the earliest point of reference our culture has for the art form is Martha Graham, circa 1926. Reviewers can educate. They can connect the time we live in and the people who are making work in relationship to that time to their actual forbearers - in Amelia's case, Deborah Hay, Lisa Nelson, Nina Martin and Jeanine Durning - say nothing of the Seattle dancers who have helped shape and define her acutely 21st century work. If you are going to review dance, please learn more.

"Some drunkenness, some nudity, some moody rock 'n' roll". Check. Yup, these obsessively hard working and ridiculously talented artists got together and checked a bunch of gratuitous, two dimensional boxes and had a party. Really? "Gutter-glam costumes and frilly blue extras"? When I had the audition for those "extras" I asked them if they all wanted to wear the recital costumes of their youth and the rhinestone heels their mothers wouldn't let them wear to prom and they all wanted to play dress up so bad they put in 100+ hours of absolutely NAILING the synchronized intricacy of the physical vocabulary for free. And I myself wanted to put on a little dance show so I could "kick around my bare legs" and have an excuse to buy some expensive shoes with all the copious amounts of cash I have laying around. Oh boy. Here I am indulging in my own sarcasm and anger. Damn it.

Help us to go deeper as a society. Help us to think more about our actions, ask more from our primary relationships as well as our daily interactions. Learn more about an art form that has the ability to free our minds to think non-linearly, non-narratively and push into raw emotion, involuntary kinetic kick-back and dream states. They "teach" this kind of thinking out of us in school so completely we are actually afraid of it ("I don't know anything about dance." "I don't know what it means." - i.e. " I am scared shitless of being wrong and if their isn't an actual plot line with dialogue I could get it "wrong" and look like an ass-hole.")

Everything I read of yours is quip and pat and imbued with sarcasm and cynicism and has a mind-made-up-before-I-even-showed-up kind of quality to it. Come in with an open mind. Allow yourself to actually have an experience. There are incredible artists in this city. Thinking, grappling, practicing, risking, asking and hoping they can penetrate just the tiniest amount into the exoskeleton that keeps us all from the kind of raw, vulnerability that could open up our capacity to reveal the better (or worse) parts of ourselves to each other. And in that revealing, hook into what I believe most of us want from life and each other - more.

I want so much more from you than I ever get. It makes me sad.