BalletLabs: Amplification (left)
BalletLabs : Miracle (right)
"Miracle" wasn't the first BalletLab performance I’ve seen. A few years back the premiere Australian group had a performance called “Amplification”. This was in the RPI Playhouse, which doesn’t have the multimillion dollar stage and equipment that EMPAC has at its disposal. It was ten miles uphill too.
So I had a general sense of what I was getting into. I knew I was going to hear some strange audio accompaniment and that I was going to see something naked. It’s not “experimental” if there’s no nakedness involved I tell you.
For the nitty gritty: The performance recreated cults and drug-induced behaviors. The performers were amazing in their mental breakdowns. Your subconscious shook with the raw emotion. One at a time a cult member would lose complete control and the others would act to cover them or to snap them out of it. They weren’t gentle about it. The strongest moment for me was when the music cut out completely and all you could hear was the brunette’s screams. This is the fantasy of the cult stripped away unveiling a brutal dark reality.
They covered a lot of ground. Amongst the gibberish voices I made out Christian-Judeo, Islamic, and Buddhist references. There was even an outer space reference, which reminded me of our class discussion of science itself being a belief. “Help me Wan Kenobi”. The great frontier has its share of devotees.
Overall I enjoyed this performance. Someone mentioned how sunglasses would’ve been useful, I’d suggest earplugs instead. And that’s sound advice for every EMPAC event you go to, unfortunately.
-Derek
That is awesome that you have seen BalletLab perform before! I would have loved to have something to compare this piece to.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your comment about the strongest moment of the performance. I still cannot get the image of the screaming brunette being pinned against the wall high above the heads of the other dancers. The sound of her palms slapping the concrete wall combined with the screams was haunting.
yes, earplugs! It seemed that there was little attention paid to sound mixing, mastering, and equalization in a lot of the pieces at Filament, which was quite unfortunate.
ReplyDelete'Contemporary dance' is also still a little new to me, but I've seen a few pieces (Chunky Move's GLOW, Wayne MacGregor | Random Dance's Entity, among others...)
So, to be honest, the screaming moments weren't very powerful to me - in fact, they seemed rather trite. Been there, done that. Can we get over the screaming savage thing and move on? The shock value has worn off.
There were only two moments in this piece that I found really compelling: the very beginning (for reasons of sheer dynamics between silence and group screaming), and a moment later in the piece where one of the dancers was repeating this circular series of stomping steps with his legs. It was sort of entrancing to see him caught in this loop of movement, creating his own hypnotic musical soundtrack, with no technology to detract from this moment.