BodyVox’s ‘The Cutting Room’ at Annenberg

Its full-length piece called The Cutting Room took the audience through representations of every imaginable aspect of cinema. These dance pieces were interspersed with film segments in which one man chased another for possession of a film canister. I suppose that would qualify The Cutting Room as multi-media performance art. And since each dance segment attempted to tell a coherent story, it would also qualify as a modern ballet.

In the end, The Cutting Room was a hodge-podge. There’s really no point in trying to define it more concretely.

Bollywood silliness

BodyVox co-artistic directors Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland divided The Cutting Room into eight relatively short segments: historical fiction, documentary, screen kiss, romantic comedy, Bollywood, chase scenes, sci-fi and Americana. As you’d expect, these pieces varied in their effectiveness. None was less than pleasantly entertaining, but few rose to the level of inspiring.

For me, the “Bollywood” segment was the most original, and hilarious. In a segment taken right out of Indian film culture’s musical dance tradition— with the appropriately silly music and lyrics as well as colorful costumes by Ashley Roland— the dancers romped and cavorted with flair and humor. The hilarity ensued mostly because the parody was only slightly more exaggerated than the real thing.

Echoes of 2001

The most experimental piece was, unsurprisingly, the sci-fi section, which used a sound track from Stanley Kubrick’s classic futuristic film, 2001 A Space Odyssey— specifically, the dialogue between the astronaut played by Keir Dullea and the insane computer Hal 9000. It makes sense if you know the film; others who’ve never seen the film might feel a bit lost. This segment was less a dance sequence than a series of movement tableaux, which I assume are meant to reflect the story being told in the voice-over from the film. This was the most conceptually audacious and abstract of the evening’s segments. Since I’m a big science fiction fan, I paid particular attention to this piece but ultimately found it ultimately unsatisfying: too abstract and stylistically jolting in the context of the program as a whole.

Overall, The Cutting Room is a reasonably pleasant evening’s diversion, with a few exceptional moments that elevate it above the mundane. For its next project, BodyVox would do well to dispense with the multi-media aspects; the film segments don’t really add to the proceedings, except to give the dancers time to change their costumes.