"Confined"
Emily Berry
Dixon Place
September 10, 2010
New York, New York
By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
It ought to be enough that three of the core elements of “Confined,” Emily Berry’s many-faceted new production at Dixon Place, work so well together: a fine, passionate group of dancers, a dynamic score on solo violin composed and played by Daniel Bernard Roumain, and an effective video backdrop. It isn’t enough. These elements are also confined by an almost non-stop dramatic reading. The stories, a combination of memories and poetry, were inspired by the performers, but were overwritten and over-performed, ultimately throwing the piece out of balance.
The recently re-opened Dixon Place is made for the multi-media event that they've commissioned. The simple open box with stadium seating allows for great flexibility. Here, it accommodated the screen, (which could have been higher and larger) the dancers with their multiple props, and two opposite corners where the actress and musician framed the action. The essential idea and image were also well-suited to this media riot. Confinement, both physical and psychological, is a state that resonates, one that begs to be communicated through any artform.
Berry and her four dancers made up a rainbow coalition of women. Late in the program, a series of projected articles about violence done to women called them out: black, Asian, lesbian, Latina. After an opening exhortation to the audience from actress Shonnese Coleman to “inhale” (an early warning that we were going to be lectured,) the dancers emerged to become one body in a morphing pentagram that formed the backbone of most of the evening’s dance. To the spoken cliché “I am Dance,” all five bodies rose in an energized leap off the ground in joyous motion. The diversity of these bodies meant the movement phrases were delivered with different power and detail, and most were echoed in later scenes. In her early solo, Sara Roer transformed the group's earlier shoulder turns into her own whirlwinds. Yuko Mitsuishi, in a later solo, made herself into a snow angel of specific and sweet memory.
One story, of growing up, relied on Roumain’s marvelous music for its pathos. The dancers emerged each tethered to a rope made of old clothes and were dragged across the stage as if in chains. The scramble of bodies and chains of rags spoke to history, a broad canvas of mothers, grandmothers and the confinement of poverty. The violin first accompanied softly, gently urging on the dancers. When the music broke into frenetic energy, the dancers and their rag chains became a mass of color and movement, a huge rag ball of anger and longing.
Gail Scott White's video poured images behind the action on stage as a second accompaniment. A rain of purses and shoes and a later cascade of paper dropping down the screen framed linked stories. The best use of the video was in its generous showcasing of the individuality the dancers, in long vertical visuals. While the film offered their single faces and torsos, the five dancers onstage formed one mass of bodies. They were slung together and hauled or dragged by one dancer in the center in another evocation of family, with its confinement of obligation and its links of love and meaning.
There were other scenes and images, from thought-provoking (being buried in stacks of books), to clever (woman being defined by “that damned dress”) to clichéd (being wrapped in sheets labeled “Repression,” “Exploitation.”) In a program that was too long and too dense, the non-stop stream of words was its most defining element. When the audience was exhorted at the end to “exhale” with the performers, I wished that Berry had trusted all of us more, had allowed us (and the dancers) some breathing room for image without explanation. The piece became feminist polemic, confined by words instead of being set free by movement and music.
copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
Photo: Sara Roer, Yuko Mitsuishi, Emily Berry, Nicole McClam, and Milvia Pacheco in "Confined" by Hugh Broadus