A triumphant 'Thirty Seven Isolated Events' combines butoh, digital imagery at CounterPulse
Eyeing Blindsight. Photos by Byian Winters and design by Paige Sorvillo.
By Dina Maccabee
It feels a little overblown to say that Thirty Seven Isolated Events, conceived by choreographer Paige Sorvillo with her company Blindsight and presented at CounterPulse with the San Francisco International Arts Festival, is a triumph of independent experimental performance. It's a relatively lean production, well-scaled to maximize CounterPulse's somewhat Spartan interior. Still, for this audience member, there were so many successful aspects in what might have been a risky venture that triumph is the word I'll use.
Though promotion for Thirty Seven Events uses spiffy words like "intermedia," dance fans wary of fancy gadgets edging out real-life rippling muscles needn't be scared off. In fact, displacement of human intimacy and desensitization to violence enabled by ubiquitous modern media are the kernels of Sorvillo's exploration, and they provide a rich source of imagery and metaphor. The Blindsight company members slithered, twitched, and struggled with determination, fluidity, and tight control, sculpting their own flesh into an unforgettable reminder that real human contact, whether caressing or brusque, is utterly irreplaceable.
Sorvillo's training in contemporary Japanese butoh clearly played into both the conception of Thirty Seven Events as a platform for dealing with fairly abstract emotional material, and in the style and mood of the movement itself. In the opening passage, Sorvillo writhed in a single column of yellow light, seeming to test the power of her joints and limbs against the pull of gravity in an alternately lyrical and frenzied monologue. But as she pointed out in an after-show panel discussion, the ghostly white body paint and gruesome facial contortions are parts of the butoh vocabulary she's deliberately left out.
This choice made room for all the dancers to project their own versions of emotional intensity, and somehow, blank-faced, they emoted with a vengeance. The partnering of dancers Claire Willey and Loren Robertson, who miraculously appeared as distorted mirror images of one another, wearing tattered white mental-ward rags, was an especially moving commentary on the maddening inability to transcend the limits of our own bodies and experience, to trade places with another.
The act of collaboration among live performers, composers, and visual designers, even if you call it intermedia, is hardly experimental. It's called theater. Still, the teamwork on Thirty Seven Events is pretty darn inspired, and each element manages to complement the others without distracting from the total effect: a mood of energized volatility. The score by Australian composer Susan Hawkins and Oakland avant-garde performer Liz Allbee was haunting, gritty, and fast. This isn't the kind of production where dancers do anything as gauchely obvious as move in rhythm to the music, but they are nevertheless elevated by it, eager for another sensory surface to push against. As for the digital imagery of Los Angeles media artist Lucy HG, I'm reluctant spoil the surprise of one of the show's highlights: a stunning combination of live choreography and video that's as disconcerting and chilling as it is clever. I'll just say that human skin is both the creepiest and most sensual canvas for film projection I ever hope to see.
In one of the closing images of the performance, Willey crumpled and stiffened into an almost absurdist rigor-mortis pose, prostrate, with one arm awkwardly raked toward the sky, her unblinking eyes glittering up toward the audience. In Sorvillo's vocabulary, getting thrown to the floor by unseen forces is no dramatic flourish: it's an exploration of one possible state of the body and the mind, or maybe a paralysis born of desensitization to everyday violence. Without constant renewal of the motivation to act, interact, and feel, Willey's skeletal tableau seemed to say, none of us is anything more than an inert pile of bones, lying useless on the floor.
THIRTY SEVEN ISOLATED EVENTS
Thurs/29, 8 p.m., pay-what-you-can (also May 30 and 31, $15-$20)
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission St., SF
(415) 626-2060
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