Dance - Relative Movement
Festival showcases the best of Atlanta modern dance
Weighing in on a metaphysical debate regarding what happens to the water within a pail when it spins, 19th-century physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach argued that the very idea of “to spin” or “to move” could only be understood in reference to other objects and their relative movement, that there is no absolute space and thus no absolute movement. It’s a vertigo-inducing notion: Imagine spinning in an otherwise empty space, not even a single star to mark the turn. What would it mean to move if we couldn’t see others move, too?
Atlanta’s modern dance community is coming together again to do just that in the 11th annual Modern Atlanta Dance Festival. And the idea of what it means to move in relative spaces - physical, spiritual, social or otherwise - seems to be on the minds of many of our choreographers. Watching their performances, imagine that there is no stage, and thus no right or left, no upstage or downstage, no audience to define a front. Instead, look to how the dancers move in relation to one another.
We spent most of the last century blowing ourselves apart in our various attempts to impose our own absolutes on the rest of the drifting world. In artistic director Douglas Scott’s sinister “Crawl,” the dancers of MAD Festival host Full Radius Dance claw and tear and, yes, crawl on one another to music by the Kronos Quartet, two pieces inspired by the Vietnam War and the victims of fascism.
The dance world, however, seems to be coming to grips with meaningful movement in the absence of absolutes.
When Sue Schroeder first created “Messiah,” to Handel’s composition of the same name, she choreographed classically structured ensemble movement, the sort of clearly defined, almost mathematical motion she thought the music demanded. But as she heard the music performed by many ensembles, each with their own interpretation, she began to see that even Handel had left abundant space for variations and dynamic relations. So she’s freed her troupe, Several Dancers Core, in her reworking of the dance (only an excerpt of which will be presented at MAD), letting them find their own connections to the music, then figuring out how to relate each dancer to the whole.
The Coriolis Dance Project gives us Elizabeth Dishman’s “One,” a complex and formal investigation into the relationships between individual and community. It begins with a soloist dancing content and self-contained. The Baroque bassline in Biber’s “Passacaglia for solo violin” hums steady triples. Then three other dancers enter the stage, and both movement and music peel off variations that interact with and transform the original phrases.
The five dancers from Good Moves Consort are “Shards” of a broken whole in Pamala Jones Malavé’s creation, dancing always in relation to one another, defining the space as they go, using their own moving bodies as reference points.
Space so defined exists only in moments of time, but it can have a spiraling continuity. The Spelman Dance Theatre’s dancers performing Nicole Wesley’s “Exodus and its Blues” move each to a different overlay of polyrhythmic music by the Balanescu Quartet. Images of birds flocking suggest the many as one and the resilience of evolution, which somehow advances and emancipates life through chance and the uncoordinated motion of the many.
There is this paradox to many of the dances: the idea that the one is found and enlarged through participation in the many. That, with no reference to an authoritative center, we can move as individuals in a collectively defined space, each becoming more through our relations with one another.
The dancers of the company “there ... in the sunlight,” performing “A View from the Edge,” mix African roundness with balletic lines to Vivaldi and drums. They embrace their past, their present community, their communal space, and still all add movement only their own bodies could accomplish.
And even as we move in concert with the many, there is motion held inside us. The Zoetic Dance Ensemble reminds us of this in “WET,” a condensation of last year’s show at Dad’s Garage (this time without the water pistols and the Slip ‘n’ Slide). We are not just points in a physicist’s diagram; there is liquid motion within us. We can feel the blood press against our fingertips when we spin.
We have our own weight, our own mass. We’re pulled together, but there’s nothing at the center pulling us, only each of us stretching out and spanning the in-between. Our bodies bend time and space, and we roll toward one another’s attraction, spinning and twisting, holding on to those we can reach.