Dance - Dancing in the RAW

Saskia Benjamin is on stage at The Beam, halving raw potatoes with a kitchen knife. The sound is solid, fresh; clean as a guillotine. The space is sparely lit; Benjamin is simply clothed.

Potatoes are an earthy food, buried in the soil, with flesh uniform and plain. “I like the idea that they’re kind of odd and lumpy on the outside, and that inside they have a very different texture,” says GardenHouse founder and artistic director Nicole Livieratos, whose dance RAW premieres this weekend.

Livieratos is better known for more complicated fare. Her choreography for GardenHouse has a strong performance art sensibility to it and is often highly experimental. In 1998, she collaborated with Georgia Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center to produce Desired, which incorporated real-time motion-capture technology and graphics projection. Her 2000 dance, Mowing, partnered dancers with push mowers on the grass of three Atlanta parks. Livieratos has lately focused much of her attention on video creations.

But in her return to live work, Livieratos is trying out a new simplicity. RAW is physical and strong, pure and unadorned: clean lifts and forward leans, elemental lines and movements. The dancers work within loosely structured choreography, each dancer persistently distinct rather than processed into homogeneity. They adapt the common movements to their own styles: Blake Beckham’s astonishing assurance, Blake Dalton’s daunting power, Courtney Adams’ precision and grace.

Four R.E.M. songs contribute the band’s characteristic soulful sincerity and simple rock aesthetic to the dance. “Rock and roll has such a raw feel to it,” says Livieratos, “a poeticness.”

RAW is poetry of plain meters and a lucid lexicon. It’s a stretched chest, deep breaths, knuckles cracked and popped. It’s a dance for the belly, a dance of bare feet in the dirt.

GardenHouse Dance presents RAW June 6-7 at 8 p.m. and June 8 at 5 p.m. at The Beam, 750 Glenwood Ave. $5 suggested donation. 404-373-4520.