A bunch of ballerinas wander into a bar and flirt with some Ricky Martin wannabes. Then there’s a bump-and-grind by some murderous vamps. A strange angel floats around, women vogue in military fatigues, and some machines are saved-or maybe destroyed-by a bunch of pixies, I think. And then 34 other strange, and often wonderful, things happen. This is what your classmates have been doing in their spare time.
Last weekend, the nearly 150 students, faculty and alumni amateur dance enthusiasts of the Only Human Collective performed Embrace, their fifth-annual showcase performance. The Collective is an ‘all-inclusive’ dance company, a counterintuitive mission in that most restrictive of disciplines.
Of course the resulting range in age, body types and ability level led to a few unprofessional moments-stiff arms, wobbly ankles, stilted smiles. But, much more often, it displayed only the joy of moving, and being moved, by a beat, an idea, and a visceral, joyful experience.
Embrace’s unprofessionally-inspired eclecticism in music, movement and subject matter demonstrates that the genuinely weird is also often the weirdly genuine. “Rattle Crash Bang: Pixies vs. Machines, (Vol. 1)” was a culture-clash music video for which Bjork herself should be proud, while the jarring pairing of abstract modern dance-ish group choreography with Janice Joplin’s rending “Piece of My Heart” was surprisingly insightful.
The expressive rationale underlying a lot of western ‘professional’ is well-represented in many of the ballet and modern pieces; Annie Schachar’s playful choreography for “The Sweater”, for instance, was a hilarious and well-acted match between movement and lyrical content.
Dance as community-builder was very much on display, with traditional-looking dances (a jig, a belly dance, a tango) performed by very non-traditional bodies and ethnicities. And kudos to Christy Stoten and her dancers for bridging another cultural misunderstanding, dashing my ‘good girls tap dance/bad girls rock out’ dichotomy by syncopating to The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”.
Several of the pieces went pop, borrowing from the nightclub and from music videos for a very contemporary use of dance to play with identity and self-display, as in the high-energy and verrry stylish ReLoAdEd crew’s r&b mix, or the wicked stage presence of performers in Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango”. But I could have used a textbook to parse some of the more overtly sexual pieces (um, if we’re watching future marine biologists, nurses, and physicists pretending to be ornamental Moulin Rouge dancers, is this good or bad?).
Either way, there’s no question that it was all genuinely fun. Whether you’re a closet Martha Graham or a budding J-Lo, the breadth of Embrace’s embrace provided a fascinating range of reasons to put down a textbook and start a groove.
