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SCRAP Performance Group Creates Surreal Dreamscape
Jennifer Callaghan
Half an hour before the SCRAP Performance Group began, the show started in the Art Bank lobby. The theater-goers stood in compressed little groups or went fluidly between them, with everyone finding a slightly different way to balance. The range of hair color was magnificent, but it was the range of gestures and facial expressions that implied no one was here for anything sedate.
We took a short walk up the obligatory back staircase and found ourselves fairly comfortable in decent seats. Actually, the Art Bank Theater doesn't really have 'bad' seating - there seemed to be a good view of the stage from anywhere in the house; the choreographer sat on the stairs two steps above us. A fashionable twenty minutes late, Myra Bazell's TRAPTURE took the stage and kept it until intermission. The piece began with a poetic monologue like the attempted seduction of Dorothy by the Wicked Witch of the West, and ended with the most erotic use of monkey bars I've ever seen.
Music by Ambient, De La Guarda, Gorecki, Moby, Musrat Fateh Ali Khan & Roger White, This Mortal Coil and Underworld made up a seductive soundtrack which kept a pulsing beat. This worked well with Bazell's choreography and complemented the dancers' violent sensuality. An eleven member cast featuring Melissa Carey, Jennifer Clutterbuck, Alan Gunderson, Sam Henderson, Emily Hubler, Brenda Kunda, David Konyk, Katie McNamara, Katya Roelse, Rebecca Sloan & Orlanda Taylor, performed complicated lifts and frantic running sequences; when the music paused you could hear them gasping for breath on stage. The dancers' movements were classically precise but violent and sexually driven: orgasmic flexing was a common choreographic motif, as well as more sensual, rhythmically slower, sections -- but any feeling of gratuitousness was nicely avoided.
Bazell seemed to strive more for thematic than narrative cohesion, but the piece appeared to deal with a woman's desire and society's veto of that desire, with repression and guilt and finally a release in an incredibly intense duet between two female dancers. At the end of the first part of their dance, the two sat together on stage and watched as three other pairs of dancers, each within a vertical grid, played passionately with the space, convincing the audience they weren't interested in celibacy. A final acrobatic duet between the first pair of dancers, this time within a monkey-bar type cage themselves, ended with a symbolic death scene for the more passionate partner -- witnessed silently by the rest of the cast. Constant themes of struggle for escape, of shame and sexual desire, of violence and of mental anguish were woven into the performance; choreography took risks which were both shocking and gorgeous, and the dancers embraced these risks with graceful hunger. No peaceful bit of dancing, this: but it was very evocative -- a surreal habitat for Bazell and her dancers to push the physical limits of the human body.
The second piece, Numb by Katharine Livingston, was less impressive. Described as detailing "a society demented by violence and conformity," it perhaps too often illustrated itself through grotesque comedy. The eight Numb castmembers, Tony Agostinelli, Renee Banson, Alex Cordaro, Tom Cunnane, Maggie Moffett, Janet Pilla, Paul Struck, and Katharine Livingston herself, created highly stylized stage-collages, translating their unquestionably graceful movements into a utilitarian parody. Beginning with a Hitchcock-esque film clip showing a woman running from an unseen pursuer, the movie portion of the performance ends as she, trapped finally in a church basement bathroom, turns to the camera and opens her mouth to scream. The lights then rose, and all but one of the dancers commenced a mechanical routine, with jerky movements and occasional violent thrashings of each other, which I'm sure were orchestrated by the choreo- grapher, but appeared heartfelt on the part of the performers. One lone dancer, dressed in a pink contrast to her companions' black, moved gracefully and timidly around the stage, threatened and finally captured by the machinists; eventually released, she remained on stage for the entirety of the performance, lying motionless downstage as her co-stars twitched triumphantly behind her.
Livingston's choreography divided the piece into a series of skits, most of which utilized some aspect of black humor, and all of which had a more automated feel than the Bazell piece. Less symbolic than TRAPTURE, some portions seemed too explicit, even irrelevant; a sequence with an almost-masculine Bugs Bunny outwitting the usual pair of hillbillies out for rabbit stew seems wholly unconnected to the rest of the work. These portions even lacked the physical poetry which pervades most of Livingston's work, mostly preventing a sense of continuity and cohesion. Numb ended with an achingly beautiful interplay between Katharine Livingston herself and the pink-clad innocent from the beginning, but retained an impression of confusion more than anything else.