All Things Come

"Everything You See"
Vicky Shick
Danspace Project
New York, NY
April 20, 2013

By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2013 by Martha Sherman

With her carefully crafted movement, a large and beautiful cast of dancers, and a translucent dark scrim splitting the action in two, it feels like you can’t possibly see everything in Vicky Shick’s “Everything You See.” If you wait and watch patiently, though, all things come. The duets and trios glimpsed through the dark curtain (as you watch the solos or quintets on your own side) migrate into view. Blinking might mean missing something good --  and don’t expect to see everything at once.

“Everything You See” is a jumble of idiosyncratic patterns. In a flow of continuous motion, Shick stretched and distorted everyday gestures, creating brief shifting scenes with ten dancers (two men and eight women, including marvelous Shick herself.) She used vocabulary that she’s used before, familiar movements like crumpling bodies that hollow from the stomach as shoulders cave down, or jiggling legs and bobbing torsos with unrelated arm movements and crooked elbows.

But in “Everything,” Shick explored new troves of quotidian movement, and added gentle humor, and layers of color, and sound.  The dancers moved in every combination and back and forth around the black translucent boundary curtain. Audience members focused on their own side of the curtain, though the shadows of dancing on the other side beckoned and distracted. The pace shifted from frenzied to languorous, highlighting and repeating movement phrases, including simple ones such as a dancer who mimed a silent call, mouth wide open and hands cupped around it. A pair of women moved their arms in a graceful swimming crawl, first parallel, then closer, until their outstretched arms seemed to swim over each others’ shoulders, coming to pause in soft parallel lines that yearned toward something in the distance. Soloists skittered manically across the stage, their hands frantically curling and gesturing on sharply angled elbows.

Shick herself is still most striking in embodying her movement; entirely un-self conscious, she inhabits small shifts in weight and direction, a loose connection of limbs in motion and stillness, unpredictable but clear. Each of the other dancers brought individual grace to their moves, and no one pulled a punch. A collision between dancers near the end of the work made the audience gasp, and was a reminder that the timing and precision of each scene and every grouping was risky and demanding, even if it looked whimsical or casual.

The spectators were arrayed against the long horizontal walls, watching dancers, and the shadows of dancers beyond the curtain, and the waiting dancers at the edges. Danspace’s nooks allowed the cast to move around the scrim to pause, wait, and watch their colleagues from the steps of the altar or the unused seating at the front of the church.

Shick and Wendy Perron created a two-person tableau, enfolded on a corner of the floor on one side, as the other women dancers stretched out languorously on the floor of the other side, six odalisques leaning on their elbows and gazing at the audience. In another languorous image, Jodi Bender, Lily Gold, and  Marilyn Maywald draped their bodies over and around each other on top of a solid square table, carried on and off as the only prop on the stage besides the defining central curtain.

The sound, by Elise Kermani, included bells and percussion, waltzes and swing music, and a gentle country band (to which pairs of women – and one snug threesome-- slow-danced.) The idiosyncratic, colorful get-ups by Shick’s design partner, Barbara Kilpatrick, looked plucked from a thrift store, but they created a whole town of characters, from Laurel Tentindo in a circle skirt festooned with movie star portraits, to Perron in layered leggings and a crinoline pouf, paired with dark-rimmed glasses.

Shick is a choreographer often described as mysterious. “Everything You See” offered more whimsy than mystery. Dynamic, funny, and often touching, Shick directed her extended family of powerful dancers to create a world, and then invited us in to see as much as our eyes were able to catch.

copyright © 2013 by Martha Sherman

Photo by Barbara Kilpatrick: Donna Costello, Jodi Bender, Marilyn Maywald, Lily Gold in “Everything You See” by Barbara Kilpatrick.