Five dancers lay on their backs in a circle with their ft in the direction of the middle. They all maintain versatile plastic containers filled with water on their abdomens, some with their knees bent, a couple of have their legs prolonged, heels rocking on the ground. The soundscape feels like digital waves crashing and plane taking off within the distance. The containers of water they maintain are entangled in a system of ropes. They are tethered collectively. The motion grows slowly. They start rocking extra totally from one facet of the physique to the opposite.
This motion jogged my memory of a grounding meditation I did in a Nancy Stark Smith workshop years in the past. She invited us to put on our backs, shut our eyes and really feel earth’s gravity whereas imagining the numerous ranges of the earth under us, inviting us to launch as a lot as attainable into the bottom, letting the earth maintain us. Like that meditation, this efficiency led me to think about the consequences pure forces have on our our bodies and minds. We are manufactured from water, we’re born on and manufactured from this earth, we’re all tethered and tangled collectively in an online of interdependence and local weather disaster.
As the motion grows and the dancers rise, a star-like form emerges from the criss crossing ropes. The dancers rise and bear the load of the containers of water. A narrative develops in my thoughts knowledgeable by the Mad Max-like costume aesthetic. This is the approaching future during which water is our most valuable useful resource and there’s hardly any left. These is likely to be the final survivors on earth. Are these containers the final little bit of potable water obtainable? Are they on a quest to protect it, to copy it, to ship it to these in want in an imagined hostile surroundings? Now standing, they start to journey a pathway throughout the stage, a tangle and a caravan. Maybe that is the day by day journey our future ancestors should soak up difficult circumstances to remain hydrated. The tether form generally makes a type of line, just one individual is standing and the remaining appear to break down again slowly to the bottom relying on the one remaining upright to encourage them to rise once more.
Eventually, the dancers launch their maintain on the water. One dancer stays dragging the net of the containers and ropes to the facet as the remainder of the dancers unfold out by way of the house, one holding a microphone. I discover now that all of them have unusual digicam wanting units hooked up to their heads with bands. The lights go off and a projection display screen constituted of a billowing sheet hanging upstage begins to point out projections of storm like photographs, swatches of coloration and lightning flashes…however then we see one of many faces of the dancers shut up from the point of view of their head digicam and so they start talking on to the viewers from this reside feed projection:
“Welcome to Velocity and to 12th Ave Arts, please take a moment to silence your cell phones. In the unlikely event of an emergency, please locate the theater space exits to the left of the space directly behind the seating area or behind the stage. Once outside please convene at the garage across the street and await further instructions. But for now ssssssssssssssit back relaaax and enjoy the perfooormanccccceee.”
The projected photographs from the cameras hooked up to their heads retains the dancers face in a hard and fast nonetheless level. All that strikes is the swirling motion behind them. This efficiency of SUPERCELL is by the group slowdanger, a Pittsburgh primarily based, multidisciplinary efficiency entity based in 2013 by co-artistic administrators taylor knight and anna thompson. I helped curate this work into the Velocity season whereas I used to be creative director a couple of years in the past.
A dancer begins a monologue that offers us some plot exposition for what we’re witnessing.
“I remember sirens. I remember sirens across the field. I remember clouds swallowed the sky. They said it was just a test. It was just a test. Ears to the ground. Ears to the ground. Hearing the aahhhhhhhhhh…I remember that it came down in sheets and sheets. And you asked, are we safe here. Get in the tub NO get in the closet, we are safer there. It’s coming closer, it’s coming closer. “
What ensues is a disorienting and technologically brilliant meditation on climate catastrophe informed by Hollywood-style disaster sci fi films and apocalypse mythologies that morph in and out of dazzling contemporary dance phrasing and dystopian electronic jazz-like fugue songs. Mad Max meets Martha Graham. I see jazz and modern influences rooted in ritual tribal dance styles from indigenous techniques and more absurd, what I call queer-core contemporary, gender-fluid variations on physical movements I associate with modes of survival. The movements are fluid and fast, full of leg balances and extensions and snappy phrase work that showcase the quick thinking and lighting flash reflexes of the performers. These humans embody characters through dance that seem to call forth an evolved human race, gender fluid and always moving, part thrashing sea creature, part vicious tiger. They are fighting for their lives.
Why dance about climate change? I wonder about the necessity of body awareness in order to survive insane circumstances. The bodies that can survive climate dystopia must be fast, strong, flexible and able to partner with groups of people to get things done. These dances make me wonder what we would all need to embody and attain in order to survive the extreme conditions of utter climate catastrophe.
The performance mixes spoken text from the dancers and melds in and out of theater-like monologues with Laurie Anderson vibes into more ambient, techno influenced musical moments.
“We could really use the rain…so Dryyyyyyyyyyy”
These characters appear to be attempting to depart messages to others that will have survived, to one another, to the viewers.
The dancing overlaid with voice over describing climate disasters made poetry of a nightmare. I puzzled, why make this subject material lovely? To present us a imaginative and prescient in which there’s nonetheless hope for the human physique’s capability to endure, adapt and transfer in collaboration with others even on the finish of all issues? In their spectacular tornado-like spins I see the patterns of pure forces at work, within the leaps and cartwheeling we see how the “documentation” on the display screen within the reside feed is by no means speaking effectively what is going on in entrance of us onstage.
It makes me consider the persevering with genocide raging on in Gaza and the broadly diverse opinions of what’s occurring within the information and on social media. As I watch this efficiency I’m deeply conscious of the numerous lives being misplaced within the small period of time it’s taking me to observe this hour lengthy present. I felt helpless and submerged in a form of grieving house that I wasn’t positive I used to be emotionally ready for.
Spoken and sung textual content occurs all through the piece giving it the texture of a musical about impending destruction. The textual content provides voice to imagined experiences of the rich and the poor and the way local weather disaster will ultimately pressure us all into the equality of survival after capitalism’s inevitable collapse. One tune stood out, a techno aria from the standpoint of a really prosperous individual that refuses to vary even within the face of annihilation:
“I could do more, but I won’t. I’m just so comfortable. I could change, but I won’t. I could change but I won’t I could change but I don’t”
As Thompson of Slowdanger sings these phrases in a squatting place, the opposite director of the group Knight dances behind them, all physique rolls and melting limbs, mutating between jazz dancer and paranoid refugee being affected by forces of nature we are able to’t see. The meta-ness of the textual content means that this dance…that efficiency basically…might merely be a observe for the top of our lives and the lifetime of our planet.
“How’s rehearsal, how’s rehearsal for the end?”
The picture that sticks with me most from this dance occurs on the very finish. The solid is wrapped in material, cocooned and in connection. The shrouding is loaded, bringing to thoughts all the photographs of martyred harmless our bodies with crying family members saying their final goodbyes earlier than burial…however these our bodies are nonetheless shifting. Perhaps these characters are ghosts and we’re seeing them dancing in limbo or no matter creative afterlife holds the souls of people who tried to outlive forces past their management.
They unwrap themselves and some of the dancers begin to create ocean waves with a protracted single piece of iridescent material, a sluggish ritualistic dance begins made hauntingly ethereal with the addition of a field fan introduced casually onstage to assist the material float greater. Two dancers maintain the ends whereas one other begins shifting beneath the material. This should really feel luxurious after the bodily shows the majority of the piece comprises. To bear in mind the wind and its grace, the fun of a cooling breeze, the tender really feel of the material on pores and skin…a ceremony to recollect the candy contact of nature, of air and water.…a good looking sluggish drowning on the finish of the world.
A query involves my thoughts, not how will we survive, however how can we die as greatest as we are able to? This creative course of is speaking that they need it identified that a few of us mentioned no, mentioned cease, mentioned let’s repair this, let’s do what we are able to to heal ourselves and the planet. Let it’s identified… I hope this message of despair reaches you that not all of us agreed, that we resisted till the very finish. As my information feed is filled with harmless Black, brown and transgender individuals being murdered and horrifyingly abused…our rights to bodily autonomy being stripped away slowly by our personal authorities…I feel what a horrible distraction this violence is from uniting individuals to collaborate and ensure our earth grows meals sufficient for all, that our water is clear sufficient to drink, that every one creatures nice and small have what they should reside as greatest they will. It is so onerous to battle for local weather change as so many people are consumed with merely surviving below social realities that appear bent on our erasure.
“This is practice for the end. Learn how to hold your breath! Learn how to improvise, improvise, improvise!”
There was one thing deeply unsettling in regards to the showcase of such deep bodily talent and stamina and the dancers skill to carry an motion film degree of precision to dancing and improvising their method by way of local weather apocalypse. In actuality we gained’t be capable to be this nimble, this technologically outfitted when the top comes. We will seemingly be observers sitting in an air conditioned HVAC theater house when the flood hits. There is probably going nothing we are able to do in any respect so long as the one % controls nearly all of our assets and does their greatest to silence and eradicate people who problem the capitalistic established order that’s destroying our world. This efficiency isn’t providing options however it’s validating our actuality and pointing in the direction of a cultural shift. Can we do greater than scream that science is actual, that this finish is inevitable and that we now have to acknowledge it and put together for the worst? All we’d have to supply is a fantastically choreographed ritual dance of drowning in a sea of issues we didn’t create however are compelled to contribute to and really feel powerless to vary.
SUPERCELL by slowdanger (produced by Velocity Dance Center) ran March 21-24 at twelfth Ave Arts.
Note: This efficiency was dense with textual content, concepts and pictures. It was evident their analysis course of was deep and expansive. One of my favourite facets is that this beneficiant bibliography they supplied as a part of the supplies to go together with their providing I counsel checking it out: https://www.slowdangerslowdanger.com/supercell-bibliography