Edge One—Vampires, Card Players, and Civil Conversation

From the side-by-side civility of Caesura, through the manic attacks of Blood, to the final card game in “A pocket full of questions,” Edge One, a well-danced program of lively contemporary movement, explores various danceable modes of human interaction with energy, clarity, and grace.

Caesura, choreographed by Justine A. Chambers and danced by Vanessa Goodman and Jane Osborne (two members of the three-member collective The Contingency Plan), is a piece whose simplicity sings. The dancers’ focus is a tonic for a frazzled day. In bare feet, with simple costumes, they move through elegant phrases inspired by everyday movement, pausing frequently. Program notes explain that “this duet is inspired by the literary term referring to a pause that breaks up a line of verse in order to convey meaning.” In the pauses, one can look between the dancers, noticing as well the negative space they inscribe.

Blood (an excerpt), choreographed by Malgorzata Nowacka and performed by The Chimera Project, is also very clear and also includes pauses and breaks, but with its dancers frequently preying on each other’s life energy, it is much less wholesome. Dancers Amy Hampton, Tyler Gledhill, Ryan Lee, and Malgorzata Nowacka deliver the “high octane physicality” of their self-description, which includes powerful leaps and shifts, high extensions, and precise timing. They wear black, including black ballroom trainers, and take turns sporting a red shirt. Beginning with a truncated warmup scene, they move into a series of groupings framed by geometrically shaped patches of light. In one, a woman persistently deprives a man of breath. She is suffocating him, but he seems to like it, as they proceed to dance an energetic duet. Train sounds in the background and several moments when the dancers walk directly toward the audience, eyes locked on, contribute to a “Tru-Blood” vampire or zombie feel. Don’t try this at home.

Farley Johansson and Shannon Moreno (a.k.a. Science Friction) finished the evening with “a pocket full of questions,” playful yet still precise. The dancers begin by pulling cards out of their costumes and throwing them on the floor. As they continue to play this unorthodox game, it eventually becomes something else. While Moreno retires upstage right, undulating and rocking out, Johansson moves to a diminutive table and chair downstage left and begins constructing a house of cards. “Sex scene,” an audience member stage-whispers, and suddenly I see it that way too, his concentration and balancing a counterpoint to her ecstatic movement. Shortly after, Moreno has a silly, highly deliberate “accident” with the card house, and then moves her chair into the audience to escape the consequences. At the end, delightfully, the dancers are slapping cards onto each other’s sweaty bodies (subtraction has become addition). Goofy, clever, and not at all self-important, this piece plays its four hands well.