Saturday, February 21, 1998
'Trapture' and
'Numb'
featured at Arts Bank
By Merilyn Jackson
FOR THE INQUIRER
If there is such a thing as raw elegance, Bazell taps its essence. Trapture, she says, looks like murder but feels like love.
Indeed, Trapture opens with two inert bodies lying in darkenss like the shell of one person broken in half. Jennifer Clutterbuck, dancing behind them in a sanguine circle of light, reincarnates them in herself.
Melissa Carey dangles from a harness in one of three 12-foot-high scaffold/traps designed by Conrad Bender, who also did the lighting. Higher up, on the second stage, Katya Roelse sprays out works inspired by Bazell, but refined by Sam Henderson, who portrays a judgmental father figure asking for a seven letter word for guilt.
The company of nine poises itself stage front, backs to the audience, interpreting textuality with sexuality. In fluctuating number and gender combinations, they seduce and reject one another. The dancers' feet stutter as they tack toward the traps, brave and chary as bullfighters. Accepting the vertical challenges of the traps, they weave through them with amphibian lightness.
At the close, the red disk of light reappears on the stage, sure as sunset.
Both Trapture and Numb are filled with rich meaning. Each choreographer uses autobiographical content as an exploratory, rather than a confessional, tool. Different in tone and delivery, they share such affinity that it's no surprise when Livingston deploys the Trapture dancers (clad now in black slickers) through her own troupe in Numb.
Livingston, perched atop an Olympian mound, performs an ancient ritual. The mortals below mechanically perform quotidian chores. Costumed in smart black pants and cropped tops, the seven dancers rimmed their eyes in black, too. A young dancer, sheathed like a chrysalis in red satin, dances as if unaware of them, while a nightmarish film is projected onto the snowy folds of curtain.
To Weimar-like music, Alex Cordaro and Janet Pilla dance a novel duet of despair and ennui, leaning on each other and falling away with exhaustion.
Livingston descends to earth only to mutilate herself. Unhealthy in reality, as a metaphor for re-creating pain followed by healing, it works. The self-afflicted goddess tenderly takes the child-chrysalis back into herself, stemming the flow of blood.
Paul Struck appears in the
premier of "Numb", by
SCRAP's Katharine
Livingston, at the Arts Bank