"Private Life"
Deborah Slater Dance Theater
ODC Theater
San Francisco, CA
December 11, 2014
by Rita Felciano
© 2014 by Rita Felciano
With the emotionally turbulent, but firmly shaped "Private Life", Deborah Slater stepped right smack into the middle of one of our society's most scandalous injustices. She created it to for her company's 25th anniversary. Slater has never been a slouch looking at difficult and complex subject matter that in her and her collaborator's hands reveal widening circles much the way the pebble does when thrown into proverbial pool. In the past she has made often searing work about hindsight and aging ("Night Falls"), the rage and grief of death ("A Hole in the World"), the destruction of the environment ("Men Think They are Better than Grass"), and being shipwrecked ("The Survival of the Fit Enough"). But with "Private Life" the choreographer has taken on an age-old but also topically painful issue of our own day. The question she raises, and provides no answer for is: What happens to our soldiers when they re-enter civilian life, their bodies perhaps healed, but their souls crushed maybe beyond repair?
Derek Harris in "Private Life."
Photo © Pak Han
"Private" was generated by conversations between Slater and Brandon "Private" Freeman, a long-time member of ODC Dance who throughout his dancing career remained enlisted in the Reserves as a matter of personal principle. Slater's one-hour multi-media effort broadens the perspective to the ramifications of such decisions, working closely with writer Deborah Crooks who created a loosely structured narrative for two iconic military men (Derek Harris and Andrew Merrell) and the women they left behind (Kelly Kemp and Kerry Mehling).
Slater's choreography, developed with the dancers, gives emotional depth to her characters in a way words cannot. The contrast between the cool factual language and the raw physicality of bodies that fly, crawl and attack is often striking. She makes good use tangos and the genre's implied volatility to suggest onspoken conflicts and turmoils. Harris and Merrell speak with each other in expansively athletic duets, upside down lifts and fierce holds and throws. Solos are particularly revealing. Thrashing, throwing and rolling himself with the speed of a machine out of control, Merrell builds a heartbreaking crescendo as a tormented and desperate father; Mehling, strutting, preening and retching, loathes her body's needs as the faithful/unfaithful wife. A thousand words could not convey the anger, helplessness and disgust that Kemp's shivering, recoiling yet frozen limbs convey as she faces her spouse's re-entering her life. As the most overtly emotionally troubled character, Harris' connection to the other three just about tore him apart. Throwing himself all over the stage and at his partners, seeking and yet rejecting the human touch, he never was able "to tell his story", as the text suggested. But we understood.
Simple moves and small gestures detailed the choreography, none better than in the opening section in which Harris and Merrell face each other on two grey chairs.Taut with tension, they flick insects off their bare skins, pick at wounds, tentatively extend open hands; weary and fatigued, they stretch and they leap. Mirror images of each other, are they buddies or enemies? In a motif that will recur througout the show, Harris curls his hand into a fist and slowly and painfully forces his fingers to re-open. Later in the piece, Kemp and Mehling repeat the same duet in their own confrontation with helplessness, frustration and pain.
Neither the choreography nor the text could stand on its own. But Slater has that (still) rare ability to have them interlock fluidly in many different ways. At times the text served clinically with the excellent narrators (actors Paul Finocchiaro and Sarah Kliban) becoming outside, almost disinterested observers. It told us why Mehling was on a train, that Merrell's wife was out of town. In my least favorite moments the narration put something of a drag on the choreography's thrust. Yet the text was absolutely necessary; it shaped the narrative that gradually connected the characters with each other. At the end they had become rounded individuals who were irrevocably tied to each other -- emblems of the social fabric.
In Ian Winters' stark black and white video, Freeman's fractured dancing -- "Private" evolved out of a solo Slater had set on the dancer in 2012 -- appears ghostly. Sturdy yet elegant silver grey chairs (recycled from "Furniture Dances") become weapons, cages, refuges. In Allan Wilner's masterful lighting, Sean Riley's elegant set of three slatted walls through which inchoate actions could be guessed, worked well. On a parallel track, Bruno Louchouam's score called up the sounds of a big wide world somewhere beyond the stage. These collaborators put a larger social context around what we may think of as private but are in fact very public lives.