On a warm overcast evening I hustle up a long metallic ramp that runs alongside the factory floor of Carrie Blast Furnace in Rankin. Entering the large repurposed space I see two long rows of folding chairs facing one another and separated by an equally long cardboard “stage.” Caitlin Scranton, one of the Blanket’s two founders along with Matt Pardo, hands me a program and tells me to sit wherever I like, and that I should feel free to move about throughout the piece, but take care not to step on the cardboard.
At either end of the space are two parked cars with their doors hanging wide open. The sound score emerges from the car speakers, creating a unique lo-fi surround sound. The dancers are milling about in a huddle, slightly obscured behind one of the cars as I make my way to my seat. They are wearing tennis shoes and bright gym shorts, athletic shirts, and knee pads that carefully complement the neon grafitti that covers the walls of the Furnace.
Waiting for the performance to begin, my focus drifts to the faces of the audience facing me across this wide river of cardboard and tape. Our chairs are creaky and they add an intermittent, but persistent, percussive effect to the otherwise subtle sound score.
With no announcement or fanfare, one dancer approaches the edge of the stage. She bends over and carefully removes her tennis shoes and then steps onto the cardboard. Her movements are simultaneously matter-of-fact and extremely dramatic, an aesthetic tension that persists throughout the piece. She stands with her hands on her hips, confidently planted on the far left (from my perspective). Another dancer enters in the same manner shortly thereafter. She plants herself directly opposite the first dancer and it has the feel of a dramatic stand-off, though neither performer’s gaze seems to fully register the other. The rest of the cast enters by the same process, removing their shoes and then taking up a position within small interlocking clusters of bodies at the far left of the stage. There’s a long moment of stillness and then a flurry of movement – each dancer’s pathway and gestural phrases unique – and then they slowly sculpt into a new scene. This pattern continues, steadily moving the whole group rightward.
The vocabulary is a mix of pedestrian gestures, more traditional dance vocabulary, and Gill’s unique twist on common forms. I see dancers lounging on the floor like swimsuit models, tense series of lunges, a delicious pelvic scoot across the floor that gave me a sense of great pleasure or great pain depending on the moment. The movement and the sound score move in waves, with a rush of sound or activity punctuating long moments of stillness and quiet.
This part of the dance, Yolk, is constructed within a loop. The choreography is repeated and each repetition moves the group further to the right. At the same time each dancer moves through the different roles within the structure. As a viewer the repetition gave me time to really learn the vocabulary, despite its complexity and nuance. It was extremely satisfying to feel like I had time to take it all in. And deeply rewarding to notice small details in each repetition that I hadn’t noticed before. Because the dance is constantly changing its position in relation to the viewer as it moves across the space, and because the performer of each role is constantly shifting, the pattern continues to feel fresh and alive.
I was just thinking how content I would be to watch this pattern progress across the entirety of the space when the dancers reached center stage and began shifting to the material from another one of Gill’s works, Grove.
The transition to the new material was so smooth it took me by surprise. I suddenly realized that all but one dancer had dropped out of the pattern and lay sprawled in a line on the floor. Meanwhile Isabella Bergamin completed her section of the pattern – typically a soft, swaying contact duet between two dancers – now an eerie solo moment. Bergamin takes brief note of the dancers lying on the floor and then walks across the line of bodies removing her shirt as she goes. Taking her time she moves through a solo of movement not wholly unlike the previous vocabulary we’ve seen but performed with greater thickness and tension in the muscles – maybe even a hint of desperation. The other dancers slowly rise from the floor and join this movement – again performing simultaneous and unique solos and duets, but with this same increased tension. Periodically, each dancer strips away an article of clothing – a shirt or a pair of gym shorts – until everyone is wearing only sports bras and briefs. Though performed extremely casually, the unpredictability of when each dancer will remove what item, and the bright contrast of the colors discarded and revealed, provoked the same anticipation as a strip tease.
This section of Grove concludes with one dancer trying to pull down an invisible object from above. The other dancers circle around her, their eyes focused on that same hovering object. At some point she succeeds and everyone’s gaze drops to the floor. This is perhaps the moment of greatest interaction among the group as a whole. There’s a sense of character and clear task that isn’t present elsewhere. In the other moments of duet or trio, relationships seem more referenced than realized.
The dancers move back into the pattern from Yolk and continue their looped repetition across the space. Watching the machinery of this loop performed by dancers now wearing much less clothing, the choreography seems suddenly more human. I realize that in the previous iteration it was easier to abstract the large blocks of color that made up their costumes; to see the performers more as a piece of architecture.
Again the repeated viewing of the pattern at new angles and with new flesh laid bare allows the audience to see new relationships. Now that the phrase has moved past my seat I can see that one of the flurries of movement is initiated each time by one dancer’s head pushing another dancer’s knee.
Upon reaching the far right of the stage the dancers exit one by one, the same way they entered – their tennis shoes having magically migrated from the left side to the right. The exit occurs surprisingly quickly. We are left with one last dancer standing with her hands on her hips, her face neutral, no hint of meaning behind the pose. And then she’s off, tennis shoes padding into the darker reaches of the furnace.
The Blanket’s mission is to bridge the gap between Pittsburgh and the greater dance community. This work certainly achieved that goal, showing Pittsburgh audiences a piece that delves deeply into post-modern forms and challenging the local cast to perform a new vocabulary with sensitivity and integrity – a challenge they fully met. The physical structure of the Furnace was ideal for this work – Yolk was originally created for a long hallway/atrium at University of the Arts. The curation of costumes, sound production, and lights were stunning without detracting from the work’s strength, which lies in its quietness and the generative simplicity of it’s looping structure.
Despite the obvious artistic virtues of the location, I find myself a bit troubled by the choice of Carrie Furnace. In a preview with the Post Gazette, Pardo says they chose the Furnace in part as a way to attract new audiences. But with ticket prices in the $20-$35 range, people living in Rankin are unlikely to attend. And unsurprisingly the audience the night I attended was primarily older and white. So much about the context of the work was dealt with so thoughtfully and carefully inside of the Furnace. But what does it mean for artists and producers to think as carefully about the context of the larger neighborhoods we perform in and who we are gearing those performances to reach? This is not a critique of the Blanket alone, but is a challenge I’d like to make to the many arts companies who create at the Furnace. There’s something a bit exploitative about utilizing the aesthetic of Pittsburgh’s industrial and working-class history while economically excluding the working class people living in that neighborhood today.
Moriah Ella Mason is a dancer, interdisciplinary artist, and bodyworker based in Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her work at www.moriahellamason.com
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