Power in Parallel

“play, thing”
Heather Kravas
Chocolate Factory
Long Island City, NY
April 27, 2016

by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman

The cool symmetries in Heather Kravas’s “play, thing” were spread through the evening in layers of texture and movement, prodded along with crisp, smart disconnects. The piece is a study of women in relationship, in full command of their considerable powers. In the opening scene, Kravas previewed it all: three pairs of dancers at different depths in the room, at different heights from the floor, in paired costumes like rakishly sororal twins, all different but entirely linked. The duos moved in parallel, and each pair lived in its own singular latitude in the white brick world of the Chocolate Factory.

Photo: Anna Azrieli, Rebecca Brooks (foreground), Omagbitse Omagbemi, Heather Olson, Natalie Green, Heather Kravas (foreground) in "play, thing." Photo © Brian Rogers.

Kravas’s precision of design was both relaxing and demanding to watch – like a photo where both the figure and the ground require attention, all three pairs insisted that our eyes try to focus on all of them at once. In the center of the performing space, stately Omagbitse Omagbemi and sprightly Heather Olson stood (a marvelous dance pairing,) in simple black dresses. They rotated their bodies, slamming feather pillows around their waists to thomp! against their backs, then reverse. The sound was hypnotizing, as were the slow, winding turns.

Behind them, Anna Azrieli and Natalie Green stood gazing out the false back windows of the Chocolate Factory’s back wall; an illusion of illuminated windows beyond captured their attention as they stood, at soft attention, and waited, while in the foreground of the space, the third pair moved with languourous, hypnotizing precision.

Heather Kravas and Rebecca Brooks, also physically different but beautifully paired, were dancing in the horizontal plane closest to the audience. They moved through a slithering pattern of parallel poses – yoga-like in their deliberation, and enunciating each element, a lifted leg here, a curled elbow there. Their eyes met as if in wonder, Brooks, especially, was wide-eyed and startled as she moved confidently matching her partner’s shape and pace. As controlled as the movement was throughout, the dancers’ eyes were our windows to their distinct selves.

This opening scene lasted for a while (and was fastidiously repeated – a parallel of parallels – later in the performance,) until Kravas gave the command to shift (“Now.”) Then the pairs began migrating – gathering props that leaned against the walls: mattresses, wooden slats, large rolled mats. Without a wasted motion, the props were on the stage, transforming the dance environment.

The dancers’ movement patterns easily moved between workmanlike and elegant craft, each with an underlying calm and power. Nothing was out of place; there was not a moment of uncertainty. The wooden slats tipped to the floor with a crash, into grids that held the wooden boards which became miniature dance stages. Later, the wood was also transformed into two tables that Kravas and Brooks set on precarious, balanced legs.

When the mattresses were carefully tipped onto the floor (making their coincident, dull thuds,) they, too, offered a bounded frame, small mini-stages for the dancers. When the mats were unrolled on the floor, Azrieli and Green had their stages within the stage. In a riff that echoed synchronized swimming, all six dancers used the props -- the pairs split into two lines of three dancers and in a repetitive sequence, they bounced along the width of each mattress then scraped their fingers along the unfurled mats, a rolling parade of motion and play.

The work was cushioned in Eliane Radigue’s 1973 “Transamorem-Transmortem,” a tangle of synthesized frequencies heard as a low hiss and almost-musical-tones, like a community-inflicted tinnitus, thick and billowing. The heartbeat thuds of the pillows, and the flopping sounds onto the mattresses (along with occasional vocalizations) were layered on top of the modulated frequencies and were softened and enveloped by the score, just as the dancers were layered on the stage. It felt as if the sound came from the walls. Everything was cushioned by it.

The final scene was a repeat of the long opening sequence (in its carefully constructed geographic triangle.)  It felt as if the patterns and parallels would just go on forever, a quicksand of motion and sound that pulled us in. But the lights came up, and the score ended. When the room went silent, the applause seemed surprisingly harsh-edged without the cushioning hiss of Radigue’s sound envelope. Coming back into a messy world from the precision and order of Kravas’s creation also felt shocking and abrupt. But the echo lasted.

Top photo: Natalie Green and Anna Azrieli in "play, thing." Photo © Brian Rogers.

Bottom photo: Heather Olson and Omagbitse Omagbemi in "play, thing." Photo © Brian Rogers.

copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman