I was surrounded by plastic of all colors and states of decomposition. Of course, they’ll never de-compose. Never fully. I wondered where all these bags came from. Performers swirled around me, shouting through and above the ambient music and emerging in out of the dim light. The ceiling of La Mama’s Downstairs felt too low and I’m not even very tall. My friend Rina greeted me and disappeared before I realized she was there, performing. Plastic. Plastic draped over the performers’ bodies, weaved through every surface, and billowing a soft boundary around a kind of cave within the main rectangular room. Where the light wasn’t faded, it was a green-ish blue, breathing through plastic light gels. I was watching one of the videos on the wall, trying to figure out where it looped, when more performers marched in. A celebration of some sort, the details hard to discern through plastic. I saw someone else I knew and the friend I came with had drifted somewhere in the ether. The cave that everything had been happening around was now the center of it all. Maura Nguyen Donohue’s face, eyes wide in something like shock or glee, spoke almost louder than the rustling plastic. The performers rolled around in piles and heaps of bags, creating a strange ocean in the small cave. I was pulled in. I knew before I felt it that the bed was shallow, that I couldn’t jump or fall into it and have it absorb the impact. There could never be enough layers to make it like water. And then it was flying. There was laughter and revelry that was part child-like play, part peak-cynicism. What is this world we’re in? A web woven in plastic, floating and drowning, drowning itself and us. We were corralled upstairs, squeezed even tighter together in the narrow stairwell and then Rina was singing. More than the words, I remember her lilting voice and the strum of a guitar I didn’t know she played. The song finished and the exit door opened. The light outside was yellow and too bright. (Note: This was written in 2018 in reflection on a performance during the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, from May 25 - June 3 2017 in The Downstairs, 66 E 4th Street. The video was from a performance at the West End Theater for Women In Motion program Soaking WET on Friday 5/22/15).

Excerpt from “Waxing Moon” Robyn Mineko Williams, Choreography Robert F. Haynes, Tony Lazzara, Music Burke Brown, Lighting Design Hogan McLaughlin, Costume Design Dancers: Jacqueline Burnett, Jonathan Fredrickson, Michael Gross Robyn Mineko Williams applies a desaturated, minimalist aesthetic to her fourth creation for Hubbard Street’s main company, and third collaboration with Chicago composer Robert F. Haynes and fashion designer Hogan McLaughlin. As its title suggests, “Waxing Moon” contemplates the process of becoming; its protagonist considers possibilities for his future through engagement with two forces we see as figures. Video by HMS Media, online at http://hmsmedia.com/ Created for and premiered by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at Princess Grace Awards: New Works, December 4, 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Edlis Neeson Theater, Chicago, IL. Original music by Robert F. Haynes and Tony Lazzara: “The Ivory Coast,” commissioned by the Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation. “Waxing Moon” is sponsored by the Princess Grace Foundation–USA and supported by a grant from The Chicago Community Trust. Visit http://www.hubbardstreetdance.com for artist profiles, touring schedules and much more.

Her limbs bent and contracted in a series of fluid gestures that—even when they stopped moving—seemed to be held over, like a musical phrase carried across measures. A mix of punctuated short and fast steps was suddenly cut off by a pause to look at the audience seated at New York Live Arts, which held my gaze until her left leg shot into a staccato arabesque and torqued behind her, shifting her direction upstage and then towards the floor. She turned and folded in on herself, easily creasing her limbs to roll across her back, only to stand up and propel herself in the opposite direction. The constant shifts in tempo and spatial orientation were entrancing. The phrasing of the movement reminded me of a game I played as a child: one person held their arms out with their palms facing up while their partner sought to slap them down before the other person quickly pulled them back. Even while the premise of the game was the elusion of contact, the continual testing of boundaries between the two bodies developed a nearly palpable resonance and ultimately strengthened their cognizance of their relationship. I found a similar thematic in the choreography of this solo by Darïa Fain as I was drawn in, captivated by her dynamic movement even as it seemed to consciously evade my ability to predict its impulse. While she continued dancing my perspective (and the video camera that provided the documentation I watched) expanded wider as other people emerged from the wings and surrounded her on four corners. These six new arrivals emanated sounds that grew in harmonic layers, frequency, and volume. Their vocal utterances took on an almost physical density, providing a flexible container for her continuing solo. Mina Nishimura, one of the people who became gradually visible as the camera’s frame expanded to the stage’s corners, grasped for pitches, stretching her body to fit amongst other layers in the accumulating thickness of sound. Levi Gonzalez, another person who had emerged from the wings, began to speak, a sharp contrast from the round vowels that blended together into the sonic landscape. As he teetered towards the floor, precariously balanced on one bent leg as the other curled around his ankle, Gonzalez noted: “In the law sanctioned by the second charter of the Virginia Company twenty-five of thirty-seven articles prescribed capital punishment, principally as a means of preventing new world orders from gazing beyond fortress walls where they could only see room enough, plenty, liberty, and classless Algonquin peace.” As Gonzalez’s recited text described how political powers sought to limit the sightlines of a growing nation the perspective of the documentation expanded to show the view from the back of the theater. The audience became visible for the first time, their bodies outlined as silhouettes against the light of the stage. Looking at the camera’s capture of their perspective of the performance I became newly aware of a series of barriers, and the efforts within the work itself to gaze beyond by looking closely and first recognizing the existence of the wall itself.

"Ghost", choreography by Randee Paufve, who has been creating dance in the Bay Area for over 20 years, and was recently featured on NPR`s All Things Considered,. Ghost is performed by Stephanie Ballas and Randee Paufve, with sound by Heather Heise. Video shot and edited by Christian Bruno. To learn more go to www.paufvedance.org.