Picture it: during the Middle Ages, villagers began dancing for inexplicable reasons. Musicians played along, hoping their melodies might soothe the choreomania. No such luck as it turned out. For hours that accrued into days, the stricken boogied and boogied. Some succumbed to exhaustion before rejoining the frenzy. A few were injured. Others died, as many as a hundred in the most famous incident in 1518 where, in Strasbourg, they danced for two months.
Now erase that picture. Although choreographer Kathy Westwater uses the dancing plague and other catastrophes as inspiration for her split-bill program at the Chocolate Factory Theater, only glimpses of that pre-Industrial, collectively consuming, febrile madness will reveal themselves. Instead, prepare to watch the post-modern version of dancing like no one’s watching. Revolver, the opener, is publicized as its own piece. Yet its content, costumes, lighting and score overlap so significantly with the latter offering, Choreomaniacs, that it functions as an (overlong) overture.
Here’s how it goes.
During Revolver, Lance Gries and Westwater lurch, contort and flail against a set of plasticky tarps.
During Choreomaniacs, Alex Romania, Rakia Seaborn, Stacy Lynn Smith, Nattie Trogdon and Westwater lurch, contort and flail against a set of plasticky tarps. They thrash too, and employ a greater spectrum of vertical expression, finding themselves kneeling or airborne.
Both works unfold to splatters of electric guitar by Ava Mendoza, with Mike Baggetta credited for Choreomaniacs. While the thick, staticky strums and peals aren’t pleasant to listen to, they are blessedly low in volume and subside into a heavy metal-inflected white noise.
Madeline Best’s lighting adds sophistication with its splashes of azure, turquoise, and steel gray peeping through the upstage tarp. Among the pale haze, wrinkles in the plastic suggest tree branches or intricate laces or the edges of clouds. Pass the time by seeing what your eye constructs from the illuminated gnarls.
And that’s it, folks. Those are the two pieces. While movement abounds in both, the improvisational, backs-to-the-audience ethos doesn’t organize into the meaning, we pattern-seeking animals wish for. To combat the ennui and discomfort of an aimless environment where the stimuli rarely evolve, locate the details.
Gries’s feet reward sustained viewing. Attached to legs that’d make a hosiery model jealous, they tread with exquisite care. He articulates them by flexing and pointing. He shifts weight from the inside edge to the outside one. He turns in, he turns out, he rises onto demi-pointe and he steps flat-footed. He even splays his toes so that they resemble fingers.
With their long braids and earth-toned attire, Seaborn and Smith seem like a duo of goddesses sprung from the loam. Their energy, exacting for Smith, punchy for Seaborn, commits them to the source material as they writhe with purpose. During one moment downstage, the two gyrate like they’re unknotting the tangles in their souls.
Although this is where I’d usually braid my threads into an overarching verdict, the evening resists that urge. My attention was too fractured, my opinion too ever-changing as I swept from boredom to focus, from irritation to admiration. Mostly, I resigned myself to enduring the 90 minutes, like it was a mental plank I had to hold for an extra-long time.
While I’m not sure why witnesses were required for these works, the performers clearly found catharsis and merit in doing them. At the end, they appeared wrung out, like they’d cleansed themselves of whatever demons had beset them and were now made anew. Perhaps this chasm between my experience and theirs hints at how the onlookers and the participants encountered those Middle Age dancing plagues. The compulsions only make sense to those who are compelled.
