Advertisement
Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
Bringing nature indoors
Merián Soto's "Postcards from the Woods' at Live Arts Festival
Jonathan M. Stein
Merián Soto came indoors with Postcards from the Woods, from an ongoing practice and performance series that she and a dedicated group of dancers, all fine movers (Shavonn Norris, Jumatatu Poe, Olive Prince, Noemi Segarra), have pursued in recent years around the Wissahickon Creek and surrounding Fairmount Park land.
Their challenge was how this in situ experience, with its personal explorations in nature, could translate into a performance piece in a huge, bare rectangular indoor space before a seated audience. Its success was perhaps defined more from its extension of the senses beyond nature than in simply being a re-creation of the experience in nature.
The audience entered a darkened space with four dancers (Norris was absent), each holding or balancing nearly 20-foot-long branch limbs, and then gathered to sit in four corner areas of the space. The sheer size and length of these shorn limbs within this space immediately offered a dramatic, surreal quality to their presence.
As the dancers began a slow duet with these objects, one's senses began to be filled by a surround-sound design and video projections that began to evolve onto all four walls. A cascade of soothing sound, at first of seeming electronic origin, was later revealed (by an accompanying video) to be the sound of rushing waters.
The size and weight of the tree limbs didn't allow for much movement invention or variety, or a discernible narrative arc, although runs and circling of branches generated some dynamic and sound generation with the floor and space. The weighty presence of the limbs was a restraint that seemed to force dancers and audience alike to alter their expectations for dance movement and to accede to another state of being.
The combination of the sound design by Cicada Brokaw— which maintained its fulsome continuity of sound, whether from rain, crickets or running waters— and Soto's own video of close-on woods and water imagery prepared the audience for an immersion into the performers' slow movements, which otherwise might not have sustained interest for long. Occasionally the expert lighting of Leigh Mumford cast prominent shadows of the dancers onto the surrounding walls of video of the woods, adding an otherworldly presence of spirits moving from our interior space and re-entering that natural space of the video.
If the dancers' experience was intended as a meditative connecting to nature outside, then the totality of this performance allowed this ready audience member to enter a similar meditative space through their indoor performance.♦
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
Their challenge was how this in situ experience, with its personal explorations in nature, could translate into a performance piece in a huge, bare rectangular indoor space before a seated audience. Its success was perhaps defined more from its extension of the senses beyond nature than in simply being a re-creation of the experience in nature.
The audience entered a darkened space with four dancers (Norris was absent), each holding or balancing nearly 20-foot-long branch limbs, and then gathered to sit in four corner areas of the space. The sheer size and length of these shorn limbs within this space immediately offered a dramatic, surreal quality to their presence.
As the dancers began a slow duet with these objects, one's senses began to be filled by a surround-sound design and video projections that began to evolve onto all four walls. A cascade of soothing sound, at first of seeming electronic origin, was later revealed (by an accompanying video) to be the sound of rushing waters.
The size and weight of the tree limbs didn't allow for much movement invention or variety, or a discernible narrative arc, although runs and circling of branches generated some dynamic and sound generation with the floor and space. The weighty presence of the limbs was a restraint that seemed to force dancers and audience alike to alter their expectations for dance movement and to accede to another state of being.
The combination of the sound design by Cicada Brokaw— which maintained its fulsome continuity of sound, whether from rain, crickets or running waters— and Soto's own video of close-on woods and water imagery prepared the audience for an immersion into the performers' slow movements, which otherwise might not have sustained interest for long. Occasionally the expert lighting of Leigh Mumford cast prominent shadows of the dancers onto the surrounding walls of video of the woods, adding an otherworldly presence of spirits moving from our interior space and re-entering that natural space of the video.
If the dancers' experience was intended as a meditative connecting to nature outside, then the totality of this performance allowed this ready audience member to enter a similar meditative space through their indoor performance.♦
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
What, When, Where
Postcards From the Woods. Merián Soto Performance Practice/ Live Arts Festival. September 16-19, 2009 at ICE BOX Projects Space, 1400 N. American St. (215) 413.9006 or www.livearts-fringe.org/details.cfm?id=8372.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
