Unconventional SCRAP melts
dance, movement expectations

By Louis Whittington
PGN Contributing Writer

SCRAP Performance Group premiered its company last week at the Arts Bank with two rousing works showcasing the rage of performance art dance theater.

One piece, "Trees," is a studied cameo employing minimalism to evoke broad sentiment; the other, "Scrap," is a huge dance canvas exploiting extreme movement to produce a series of garbled messages. In tandem, they present a boldly conceptual company as unconventional as it is vital to this area's dance scene.

Alya Howe's eco ode, "Trees," opens the program with simple expressionism in a hypnotic style. Dancers Myra Bazell, Trina Collins and Katherine Livingston are trees fending off the onslaught of an industrial society. The dancers, as plants, are naturally grounded. They stand on small mounts of varying heights with their lower bodies wrapped in bark-toned sarongs.

Using deep torso undulation, bodyscape poses and contorted limb extension, the trio invokes the secret life of plants -- both inner and outer identities. The dancers bring a dignified attitude to their characterizations and make every gesture significant. They command us to see their delicate balancing act, and we root for them to stay put.

The restrictive movement, literally hamstringing the dancers, is reminiscent of Japanese Butoh dancing, a technique that uses cubist body structuring, slow motion and rigidity. Howe uses this style to dramatize branch shifting and starkness, all the while contrasting it with the dancers' suppleness (cued by deep breaths) to create forms responsive to every natural and unnatural change around them. Howe scores the dance with forest and industrial sounds laced with a children's chorale. This, along with soft light and shadow designs, creates an ethereal time-lapse tempo that breathes through the bodies of the dancers. Credit goes to Todd Gilens and Charles Cohen for their atmospheric designs.

In another part of the forest, the urban jungle, we witness "Scrap," the group and performance-art piece. This multi-media diatribe is a junk yard of ideas colliding into one another including scraps of dances, of music, video, technique, narrative, sex. It may not have everything but the kitchen sink, but it does have a chainsaw and a washing machine.

The difficulty in grasping its formulations is deliberate, and it is as energizing, as well as doggedly frustrating. At the hands of four choreographers, "Scrap" careens into an artistic nether region, melting our expectations of dance and movement. Denying structure, classification and technique, putting forth for examination what would otherwise be discarded as hazy and always reveling in its own excesses, "Scrap" escorts our senses on a ballsy point-of-no-return trip.

The set consists of red pipe/steel girder scaffolding -- the hardware caging and expanding the skeletal lines of the body. The structure wraps the inner perimeter of the stage allowing frameworks for the solos and a dimensional catwalk. Save for a sword jig, "Scrap's" broad movement palette is a catalog of anti-classical styles -- non-allusive portraiture, hyper gesturing, male-on-female lifts, horizontal jumping, body slamming and throughout dangling, suspension, hanging, wire-flying, inversion, among other precarious aerobatics.

Occasional solos, pas de deux, pas de trois and corps groupings are thrown in like spare parts. The score is pointedly disengaged from most of the dancing, but effective as a concept element.

The solo work is dramatic and sharply executed. Eric Schoefer does a hilarious partnering with a running chainsaw. His moves will be recognized by local social dancers of a certain age as the Shavu grind (any similarities of the chain going at full speed and the smell of sulfur is purely coincidental).

Livingston is the statue of Eve come to life on a Doric column, crisply balancing frieze poses with strip hall burlesque. The electrifying Bazell explodes with abandoned virtuosity, commandeering all of her solos and punctuating the piece. The group work whould be tighter in applied technique. The ensemble of about 11 dancers come together too frequently as a collective organ, and when they do, it appears gratuitous and sloppy. The jousting court dance hits, catching fire with the company and the audience.

Disparate and fluid at once, SCRAP is the kind of performance that would give Jesse Helms hemorrhoids. SCRAP is the kind of experimental group that would probably be denied NEA funding. Don't miss it next time.