Into Air, Into Thin Air

Gotta catch up - missed my weekend post, so here it is.

My sister came out to see me Saturday, and we had some good fun sissy time. We went to White Orchids for dinner (Tom Kah soup and a shared plate of pad thai, fried bananas and coconut ice cream for dessert - delicious and decadent!) Then we saw the Momix show at Baker. It was kind of a "Best Of" show of dances all strung together. I preferred their "Lunar Sea" show last year - more ensemble work and fewer breaks between pieces - but it was still incredible and affecting. Their strength and control is stunning. They often work with sculpture and props, and some pieces were just fantastically conceived while others seemed like a smaller part of another work that didn't accumulate in the way it would have originally.

The opening dance was well placed and just breathtaking - a single girl moves slowly and meditatively on a bare stage with a large round hat that has dangling strings of beads all the way around like a veil. She is deliberate, subtle, reverent. She reminds me of a geisha. Slowly she starts to spin. The veil lifts with tension in a whirling cone. She spins faster and faster, the fan of beads flies up and the "hat" opens up and she can put it around her neck and shoulders - she tilts, she bounces, she leaps, she never stops spinning. Her balance is amazing. For minutes she spins, mesmerizingly constant.

Another of my favorite pieces started with a woman seated in a saucer-like structure, three men with long poles standing behind her. They insert the poles at three points of the saucer and they stick up and out. Three women lie beneath the poles, around the saucer. They start to spin the structure, the women popping up between the poles to touch the woman in the center then down as the beam flies over their bodies. The men spin the poles like a merry-go-round. They grab onto the poles and let them carry their bodies, "running" through the air. The men and women dance together on, under, and with the poles. Side by side the three couples each take a pole, one couple pushing theirs toward the floor and the opposite side lifting up into the air, carrying the dancers like angels. It makes me want to fly. In the final image, the women embrace the central woman on the saucer, the men spinning around them noiselessly, their legs in mid stride. The lights dim so that the poles are barely visible, and they look like spirits hanging in the air.

I was reminded of the dance show I saw my freshman year - I think the group was called "Diavolo"? - and how immense their sculpture pieces were. One of their dances featured a giant (HUGE!) wooden, boat-like thing, sort of a large ark. It rocked back and forth, and the dancers would manipulate it by balancing (or unbalancing) their weights on either end of the deck. At one point the boat was head-on with the audience, rocking waaaay back with the front tilting up, up in the air - and suddenly a dancer comes flying over the top, blindly swan diving into the arms of two other dancers downstage. It was shocking. Everyone gasped collectively as one in the audience. It was....indescribable.

This weekend I'm seeing Cirque Eloize: NEBBIA. Their "Rain" show last year was spectacular (it rained on stage and they splashed, slid, and swam in it!) but I'm not sure what the concept for this show is. I hope to be surprised.