EDGEWORKS Dance Theater, from what I can tell, is kind of a big deal in the Washington DC dance scene. I’ve only been here for a little while, but I’ve seen their name tossed around a lot and they seem to be very well-respected. With this in mind, I’m very glad I saw /CLOSE/R first, before I saw any of EDGEWORKS’ other pieces. /CLOSE/R is a solo piece by company director, Helanius Wilkins, his first in fact, and sells itself as an evening-length solo project that “marks a shift in Wilkins’ creative process.” By not setting choreography so much as engineering settings for movement explorations, Wilkins keeps each performance organic and shifting, open to mood and reaction, informed by the dancer’s own live experience of performing the work.
I feel like there should be a genre of modern dance denoted as MFA Thesis Dance. This piece is, indeed, the culmination of Wilkins’ Master’s program but I didn’t need the program notes to tell me that. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing; the questions that dance makers are asking in graduate programs are important ones and I often very much enjoy the products. However, it does put a somewhat sardonic smile on my face when I can tell from the opening bars just what kind of erudite, self-contained environment the work was spawned from. If you’ve ever seen any other MFA work, perhaps you know what I mean – the jilted pacing, purposefully exising any sense of cause and effect, the lab experiement style of movement invention, the unwillingness to settle in one idea when there are so very many to explore and to link tangentially to each other. I just can’t shake the sensation that dance makers, who are trying to desperately to work progressively and break from the mold, are spinning their gears trying to reinvent the wheel. Perhaps it’s the urgency of the young speaking here, but I feel like while the questions asked in MFA dance programs are important and valuable ones, they appear to be the same damn questions over and over again. There’s a lack of communication, lack of dramaturgy, in modern dance that has us innovating at a glacial pace.
I suppose that was most of my issue with /CLOSE/R. I enjoyed the piece to a certain point and thought there were many excellent gems of ideas nestled here and there throughout. Even that statement isn’t entirely true. I really enjoyed the piece – but then Helanius spent a good ten to fifteen minutes shaking and only shaking. Literally standing in the corner of the stage jittering, shuddering, jostling, wiggling, through a shifting soundtrack of pop classics and electronic soundscape. And even this was quite lovely! As you can see, I found myself, at the end of the show, quite at a loss to explain my feelings.
On the one hand, I was talking to people leaving the show, who felt the display deeply moving and inspiring or revealing and edgy in its fascinating feat of repetition. I could see where they were coming from but couldn’t one hundred percent agree. But on the other hand, there were those who I talked to who didn’t “get it” and thought it was kind of weird, just more over-indulgent artsy modern dance crap, and I didn’t really agree with them either.
The thing is, I’ve seen this before. Yes, it was a technical feat of performance stamina and steadfast confidence, to have the last chunk of your piece be solitary jiggling, slowly (so slowly) sloughing off layers and layers of thick wooly clothing. It takes me back to the good old days of Pina Bausch, eking painful anxiety and helplessness from the performance by trapping the performer in an impossible task: take off all of your clothes without ever appearing to touch a button or zipper or lace, never backing down from the intensity of shaking, only morphing the quality of it from time to time, stuttering the performer out of a comforting habit. I was there for time, with Helanius, watching him struggle with his own self-appointed task, wrestling for completion, but he lost me so quickly. Because it’s nothing new. Whether it was new for him as a performer (and I imagine it was and can see how that personal usefulness to himself and his artistic process is an important motivator) doesn’t matter because I had already been there, done that. And so I sat for the rest of the shaking, completely disengaged from the display before me. It was grueling but complacent. It was tiring but he could have gone so much farther, taken the idea to a much more humbling extreme or expressing that old idea in a new way.
Often when trying to review dances in an objective way, I find myself asking, “Well, what do you want, you crazy person? Are you never happy, you miserable harpy?” But I think it’s important to remember for myself, that as an observer of someone else’s artistic process, I don’t need to answer that. I can just have the opinion that it is not good enough. In fact, if I need to ask myself how I’d improve it at all, then the dance needs more work. A completed work should leave me certain, whether I like the content or not, that there was no other good way that the dance could have progressed, that this was the best continuation of earlier parts.* /CLOSE/R, to me, felt like a placid reflection of the so much contemporaneous dance. Helanius, too, has clearly seen this type of dance before, has studied Bausch, and performance art, and other MFA Thesis Dance, and wants to try on that skin for himself. Ironically enough, in a piece about shedding away artifice, Helanius seems to be clinging to this skein of the artistic intellectual dancemaker.
I find I have trouble shaking something that bothers me, while things that I like fall by the wayside, forgotten for all of time. I’m sure there were parts of /CLOSE/R that I very much enjoyed. I liked Wilkins’ ease in front of the camera as well as his responsiveness to him on camera within the live performance. His willingness to insert comedy and anger alongside each other were well done and drew out the audience to really respond effectively. The piece was deeply personal and touching, and many weeks later there are many aspects of the textual work that are still resonating quite deeply with me – particularly an anecdote about his grandmother and a pretend response from Rosas choreographer Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker to Beyonce (which is its own blog post altogether). I would definitely go to see more of Helanius’ work based on this experience, and even EDGEWORKS, though all-male dance companies set my teeth on edge. He has some lovely ideas, a compelling eye for stage design, and pleasant ability to invite laughter (although not, I sense, at himself). I’m curious to see what else he’s got in store.
*I’m not sure if this is what I believe. As this is a blog, that I am working on continuously over time, I reserve my right to hypocritically disagree with this statement in the future but hope nonetheless that someone will remind me of it so I can reconcile the ideas of past me and future me into a working whole who is not a contradictory jerk.
the terpsichorean 