Dance, Time, Telescope
For Barking Legs Theater and everyone who's danced there
Our lives and our dances are always built in relationship to time and, by extension, mortality.
— Crystal Pite
There is a gesture you can make with your hand. It is as if you held a telescope. Form a circle with your thumb and first finger. Bring the circle toward your eye. With your telescope you can see a star at the zenith, or the new moon rising above the treeline.
The dance is called Levity, and at the end the three dancers walk a circle, looking through their telescopes, each slowly bringing the lens closer to her eye.
The fall to the ground. Thump flap whump. They fall heavily, landing on a haunch, a forearm, a hand. They are not girls. I’m guessing they’re women in those next three decades, 20s, 30s, 40s. You see the reverb through their flesh as they hit.
They sit up. They smooth their skirts. The star is hidden but each brings her open palms to the sides of her head, lifting her hair, touching her ears with her fingertips, listening for the air to vibrate.
This is the end of a dance by choreographer Melissa Miller. The dance is called Levity. It’s being performed at Barking Legs Theater at a benefit for the AIM Center, which offers “employment, education, housing, socialization, and wellness opportunities for adults living with serious mental illness.” Tonight the performance exists in conversation with this theme, but Melissa created the dance several years back. Tonight Levity is danced by Sarah Yvonne, Grace Ragland and Andrea Solis. Andrea is dancing Melissa’s part — the dancer who touches the others and in some ways connects them.
The dancers drop books. They stack books. They move a chair from one place to another. They are restless. They wring their skirts. They pace the floor. They balance. They fall. In notes from previous performances, the dance is described as a lifting above sorrow. Elevation out of time of trauma.
The movement vocabulary flows in long traveling gyres — head up and over and down, chassé after the head, head drops and up and around, reversing the direction of travel, up again in a sauté and the pendulum swings the other way, carrying you from the air to the ground.
Silence. Head rolls one way, hand pushes it back the other way, and up and around to standing and on you go. The long unadorned arcs are spare as the lines of Shaker furniture.
The long curves contain madness. They cannot quite contain it. The books are rectangles and the bars on the wooden chair are rectangles and they feel like just that: bars. The dancers cover their mouths. The point to the stars, to their bellies: a stab. They jump, a flopping contraction straight up, as if they’ve been punched in the gut.
There’s that reverb again. That loose shudder around the invisible fist.
Time changes bodies and time changes dances. Music and circumstance change dances. This dance was choreographed to be performed across music, not to music. Not to illustrate the music, but to be interrogated by it.
They’ve changed the music this night. It’s slower and heavier. Lots of low strings. The tempo builds.
The dance that once lifted nervy sorrow into lightness now shovels hope up out of guttural despair. We’re not sure if it succeeds. One dancer trembles. She strikes herself. She can’t trust her body to obey. Another calms her, touching her with hands and troubled eyes.
There’s a pernicious energy in those gyres, those chugs, the way the hand flings the knee back into that turn.
If I had written about this dance before, I’d have placed it in dialogue with Emily Dickinson, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer. Now I’m not so sure. Time has gotten into it and warped the wood. Or maybe the house has a dirt floor under that bare furniture.
It’s dark enough they leave us exhausted. Torn. They’ve imposed their trauma on us not quite with our consent.
But that’s what happens, isn’t it? To whatever they’re levitating from, they did not consent.
After the performance, they’re sweating, giddy, you can feel the dance still vibrating through their skin. A dark dance is a joy to perform. “That was heavy,” Sarah Yvonne says, “heavy. The way those books acted.” The books were eerie, true. One balanced when it fell. The books were bewitched and Levity was heavy, so much fun, so good. When you dance something wicked you want to squeal with glee.
But it wasn’t only heavy, was it? That would be too easy. Wouldn’t it?
What about those stars? What about those three women walking in a circle with their telescopes, studying, studying the clotted sky for stars?