Connected, a collaboration between Australian dance company Chunky Move and Bay-Area kinetic sculptor Reuben Margolin had its North American premiere this last Thursday, October 20 at PSU's Lincoln Hall.

In Connected, Margolin's sculpture shares the stage with three women and two men of Chunky Move, and the performance consists of two acts expressing their relationship and connection to each other (including the sculpture). I do mean that it is expressed -- it is discussed, questioned, and demonstrated, but the interaction between the human dancers and the sculpture is a realized experience, something with metaphoric quality, sure, but it is something unique and real that only exists during this performance. There is no point for me to describe the sculpture when you can see video of it here.

As you can see, the piece's main conceit is that the sculpture, which hangs from dozens of cables, can be hooked either to the dancers' bodies or a machine to give it movement. A lazy director could have taken the easy route of simply encouraging the five talented dancers to interact with a beautiful sculpture without hurting ticket sales too much. Thankfully we have Gideon Obarzanek, who used the sculpture as one instrument in a rich, well-considered piece full of engaging themes which remain unobscured by the considerable abstract pleasure of the performance. With the second act, he has the courage to break the satisfying experience built by act one in order to push the viewers into a critical accounting of their relationship to the phenomena they are witnessing. The two acts flow into each other without intermission, breaking instead along aesthetic and structural lines, the second act reflecting indirectly but critically on the abstract world of the first, intimate and athletic act. 

Before even the five performers take the stage (in subtle and precise sequence), the audience has more than enough time to contemplate Mr. Margolin's waiting contraption, a device which embodies the concept of connection so overtly that any warm-blooded audience member would ask for their money back if the dancers treated it like a normal piece of stage decoration for the duration of the performance -- that is, something to be danced around rather than with. As the dancers meet each other and the sculpture, things get tangled and beautify as they tangle. As some dancers establish the abstract but recognizable relationships and sometimes-frenetic physical vocabulary of the first act, others assemble the sculpture in the background. Once it is live, the dancers' momentum and the intense-but-not-gaudy scoring carries their bodies through the transition of being physically connected to the cables of Margolin's sculpture. In the compelling intercourse which follows, the dancers manipulate and react to not just the sculpture, but their own connection to it. This portion ends with only one dancer, the boyish Alisdair Macindoe, still tethered to the creature, suffering and enjoying full responsibility for the relationship until the transition to the second act severs him from it for good.

The ways in which the dancers project themselves through the sculpture and what it does to them become perhaps the most significant plot element. There are remarkable moments when the troupe moves in unison so the sculpture may dance like a single body, while at other stages the sculpture's undulations serve the dancers, projecting their postures like a ghost or a shadow. Dancer Marnie Palomares, in white while the others wear black, stays free from the cables, but has perhaps the most complex relationship with the sculpture. The moment when the tethered dancers lower the grid over her like a grid of security lasers from a spy movie is one of the most thrilling points in the evening. In the final scene, the sculpture's reactions to Palomares' interactions with Macindoe become acutely tender. It eloquently orates the motion of Macindoe embracing Palomares, and its tremors when she toys with it and finally leaves the stage are heartrending. 

This may be the chief accomplishment of Connected -- its ability to manipulate the heart rate of a whole auditorium through an abstract, non-verbal narrative. The literal story was solid but very basic -- individuals interact, embrace, manipulate each other, and leave each other. By projecting these interactions through the sculpture, the tiny movements and moments of the bodies which occupied the narrative were made significant without any literal signification. This analog amplification seemed to also make the movements of the unfettered dancers more acute and relevant. (For this reason I suspect that Connected could serve as an excellent introduction to contemporary dance for those who usually find it inscrutable, affected, or strange.)

I am sure that there were dozens of dinner party conversations this weekend in which people who've seen Connected struggled to explain the narrative to friends who weren't there, gave up, and said something like "you'd understand if you saw it." For this, I am endeared to the show.

While any aesthetically-affecting performance can produce that feeling, the way Obarzanek pushes us into the second act makes it impossible to escape critical reflection on that feeling, which is itself part of that feeling.

A set of staggered ruptures and shifts announces the second act -- significant change of costume, the first words spoken directly to the audience, raising the stage lights to the blanket-bright of a corporate office, and other aesthetic breaks (more on those later). This array is triggered by the most significant change -- Macindoe is unhooked from the sculpture, his lines are bound together and harnessed to a faceless cable which leads offstage to an unknown terminus which retracts until the sculpture is detained almost uncomfortably high above the stage, never regaining the freedom of the first act. Finally, a waiting machine consisting of a motorized wheel on a cam is engaged with an auxilary set of lines to produce a lazy, consistent ripple through the hanging grid.

These changes are skillfully jarring -- I imagine that most of the audience was comfortably uncomfortable, startled out of the previous dream but with more thrill than nausea. I say 'most' because I was not; during the transition, the score employed a piercing, high-frequency squeal roughly equivalent to a smoke detector being played through concert speakers. This tone is my only major complaint about the show, but it is a very subjective complaint.*  

As I say, the other breaks were skillfully employed, transporting the audience, with just enough whiplash, to a new, bright world of plain-spoken museum guards, dressed in artfully-generic grey uniform. They recite a series of monologues from interviews with real art guards, delivered in a sort of spare canon during minimal choreography over the steady drone of the rippling sculpture. These explore art theft, the boredom of the security guard, all the things that one can look at in an art gallery other than the art, the reasons each guard ended up in a museum, and the more confusing ways in which the art ends up there. I wonder how necessary it was to include a fragment which blatantly throws out the words "why is it art?", but maybe I am just being oversensitive again.

Gradually the rigid nation of the guards, their language, the separation of their bodies, and their uniform begins to disunify. In the final stage, our transformed performers lose their pants but gain the ability to laugh and run. Another skillful break, their laughter and the semi-abstract game of tag they seem to play on stage feels brightly out of place and lays yet another layer of perspective over the activities on stage for anyone in the audience trying to resolve the last 60 minutes into a narrative. The show ends with a what felt like a blissful embrace of the mixed-up state of things, as an unseen actor releases the sculpture's controlling cable, lowering it over the happily-disheveled guards lying together on the floor.

The connections between the two acts are clear enough to prompt a good volume of discussion on the walk home, but ambiguous enough to avoid being overcooked (except perhaps the squeal and the "is it art"). These discussions are interesting, as are the inevitable ones about "our relationship to technology", but they are, in the end, literal. The skillful choreography of the show -- sculptural and not -- matters not as symbol or suggestion, but as movement and real action in space. It is remarkably effective at being the thing it is and making us care about it without having to relate it to something else we might more readily desire or comprehend. The answer to the question "What is this show about?" can be answered better by pointing to the piece itself than discussing it. In my opinion, that is the only way a consciously postmodern piece like this succeeds.

Thanks to Walter Jaffe, co-founder of White Bird.

- Ním Wunnan

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*Being heavily synesthetic, that sort of noise is physically painful to me, equivalent to bee sting. While I'm sure that the percentage of the audience with similar audio sensitivity is sufficiently low that it doesn't really have a practical effect on directorial decisions, it is more than a personal sticking point for me. The fact is that it is a sound with a potential to hurt, and it was certainly used at a fitting time in the show, but I wonder if this is that sort of performance. By all means, if your performance is intend to reach out and stab the audience, do so with vigor. Daniel-Day-Lewis them for all their money's worth. But the other components of the break -- and it was a break -- from the hypnotic first act were cerebral and staggered enough that the squeal seemed conspicuously out of place among the rest of the conspicuously-out-of-place elements. (The lights rose, but they were not strobes.) Ultimately, I really don't know what the rest of the audience felt about the sound, but I imagine that, if it did stick out to anyone else, it was probably not more dissonant than the poor planner who sneezed during the most profound silence of the performance. While the question of "how radical do you intend to be" is important, I've only stuck on this element because I have so little else to criticize about the show.