Dance - Hotlanta, WET and MAD
In search of our modern dance identity
Let’s get this straight from the top: This is not a “Why New York City is perfect and Atlanta sucks for not being more like it” story. The Manhattan dance scene may have as many “metas” as motions and enough “posts” to pole-vault the whole city past the end of days, but — stay with me, here — we’re not New York. Not Paris, Chicago, Philly or San Fran. And maybe that’s — say it with me, Chicken Soupsters — OK. We’re our own city, and we may, just may, have our own Southern style worth contributing to the global kinesthetic conversation.
So with the 10th Modern Atlanta Dance Festival opening this weekend and the undeniably distinct Zoetic Dance Ensemble presenting WET at Dad’s Garage, the time seems ripe for a little navel-gazing. Let’s call it a confab on “What Atlanta modern dance wants to be when it grows up.”
The MAD Festival is a professionally adjudicated show, the only one in Atlanta since the passing of the Arts Festival of Atlanta in 1998, and the judges — who each watched dozens of submitted videos to select the festival participants — are from outside Atlanta. So I asked the judges to characterize the Atlanta modern dance scene.
“It seems to me that, for a city the size of Atlanta, the dance scene is not as well developed as it might be,” said Jan Van Dyke, a professor of dance at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and director of the company that bears her name. “There is no particular ‘Atlanta look.’”
Uh-oh. Has this nascent introspection already stumbled into a post-meta-pseudo-solipsistic-self-annihilation? Van Dyke complained that “most of the work was about dancing.” Ouch! Take that you, uh, dancing Atlanta dancers!
OK, so among those troupes performing at MAD, it’s true of Duende Dance Theatre’s “Tango,” an Amanda Exley Lower riff on the sensual tradition. And Jonathan Reidel’s “Of Apes and Angels,” set on the youthful dancers of Good Moves Dance Consort, is more into the discussion between ballet and modern than the dance vs. motion commotion. Only Coriolis Dance Project’s “Reflex,” an erudite quintet by Elizabeth McCune Dishman, broke free from the tyranny of dance to deal with form, in Van Dyke’s estimation.
Judge Cherie Carson (I have to interject here that I think someone should do a show called “Dance Court,” if for no other reason than all the laughs you could get every time someone said they wanted to “make a motion.” OK, back to Carson ...), an Oakland, Calif., choreographer, dancer and interdisciplinary artist, came to the defense of our schizophrenic scene. Fond of stilts, musical skirts, bungee cords and banyan trees, Carson said Atlanta dancers “push the limits of dance and encourage their audiences to think outside the box in defining dance.”
Of course, it should be noted that judge Carson has some Atlanta ties. She co-founded the now defunct Chappstick and the Cars, an Atlanta contemporary dance company, and her work is in the rep of both Room to Move and Moving in the Spirit. But if Antonin Scalia can try Dick Cheney despite the whole duck season thing, I say there’s no need for Carson to recuse herself.
Besides, I think she’s onto something. As Melanie Lynch-Blanchard, co-director of Zoetic Dance Ensemble, said of the dancers “up North” — they have “so many different dances and yet so many people doing the same thing.”
Atlanta’s scene is too small to gather a movement of, say, purely post-structuralist dancers, with hosts of other companies ranked and columned into their own scholarly derivatives. That may prevent the inbred iterations of self-referential schools of dance, but it also permits dancers and choreographers from wildly different disciplines, styles and approaches to exchange ideas and movement, their gestures cross-germinating faster than chlamydia at the Velvet Heaven, with unpredictable results.
“Everybody is working on movement, but you don’t have to stamp a label on it,” says Lynch-Blanchard. “You know everybody, but you never know what they’re going to do,” says MAD Festival organizer and Full Radius Dance Director Douglas Scott. “Even though the community is small, I think there’s a diversity of voices here.”
But enough with the attempt to look into our own womb. (Amazing what those flexible dancer bodies can do, isn’t it?) Time to dump an irony-free bucket of lanolin-laced water over it all. Seriously. The folks at Zoetic figured out that lanolin made their homegrown Slip ‘n’ Slide slicker. WET has some serious concerns: the qualities of liquid motion, the weight of water, internal tides and flows. But you’re more likely to need a poncho than a political primer for this playful dance.
Maybe this points an elegantly arced finger to the narrowest definition that the Atlanta scene can accept: dancers and choreographers with serious artistic concerns but an unwillingness to submit themselves to any theory that would make them too cool to play in an inflatable pool. Don’t forget your towel.