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| | Photo by Quinn Batson | | | (F to B) Beth Edwards, Mary Grace Sullivan, Kimberly Goss, Leanne Schmidt
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Women on their knees and in control
shows at Triskelion and BAX put a female focus on things
By QUINN BATSON
Offoffoff.com
Strange synchronicity put 3 groups of women on their knees in one weekend, each time as a way to represent female power.
Leanne Schmidt and company gave a charming evening of song and dance, This One Goes Out to You (You know who you are) at Triskelion, featuring song more than dance. Loud declarations like "Fire!" or "that is the last straw" punctuate a slowly moving series of vignettes, each vignette often accompanied by or accompanying a song. If there is a theme, it has something to do with sex, often involving all four women simultaneously, in hilarious bits like the one pictured and another where the four, on all fours, make that position look like the position of optimum power. An ending with one slumped across the lap of another leaves a note of sadness.
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| THIS ONE GOES OUT TO YOU | Choreography by: Leanne Schmidt, Lyndsey Karr & Sarah Holcman, Ximena Garnica, Jessica Morgan, Felix & Dexter.
Dancers: Leanne Schmidt, with Kimberly Goss, Mary Grace Sullivan, Beth Edwards.
| | SCHEDULE | Triskelion Arts
Brooklyn Arts Exchange
March 24-26, 2011
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Lindsay Karr and Sarah Holcman begin half-way, and the Believing Performance/Performing Belief program at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), on their knees, like goddess statues. They crawl down the runway they have created and come back standing, with ipods playing their voices back, each reciting a text about women. The gist, both oddly inspiring and basic knowledge, is that women in love are moved by their hormones and desires to greater productivity and higher purposes. The premise that women "need" to love is worth discussion and reflection, and it infuses the piece with an energy that fits the ending, both dancing with abandon to a song they get the audience to clap along to.
Jessica Morgan, with Adele Loux-Turner, Miranda Lyon and Kathy Wasik, give This Fire This Fire a fully feminine feel. From a male perspective, it is mostly opaque and obscure, but an intensity of purpose comes through. There is no emphasis on movement for the sake of moving, no need for speed, no second thoughts about spending equal time lying still on the floor and moving fast or slow. Here again, women on hands and knees seem to be choosing this position as affirmation or power rather than submission, but there is also a leg-extending crotch thrust movement that says the same. Red, in costumes and lighting, also implies heat.
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| Photo by John Huber | Jessica Morgan's This Fire This Fire
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Two other pieces complete the evening at BAX. Ximena Garnica, with live video projections by Shige Moriya and live music by Jeremy Slater, gives an unstable circular platform a workout in an interesting mix of butoh simplicity and multimedia richness, a fragment from Floating Point Waves. The result is somewhere between erotic and self-erasing, with the video projections strategically hiding and showing Garnica's form. And Felix & Dexter take us to the Dominican Republic with the onstage help of their father in a piece full of fragments of culture and concepts. Like the rest of the evening, A Cyclon Is Approaching doesn't feel meaty but still provides food for thought, in this case evoking flavors, smells and textures of a place, and touching on extreme poverty and ways of coping with it.
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APRIL 8, 2011
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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