Vault 6 Degrees 5.21.10

This performance at DiverseWorks was something that I intended to write about before I went. I had been anticipating it for months. Toni Leago Valle is one of the dance artists I've been following since I came to Houston over 6 years ago, and I'm always ready to see new work from her. That this was the debut of her first company, 6 Degrees, only sweetened the anticipation.

Amy Ell is a choreographer whose name I've heard a lot, but I've only really seen her work in festival/mixed company programs. She, too, debuted her company, Vault, with this performance. Amy uses trapeze arts in her choreography, which is becoming a bigger thing these days, even making it into the mainstream pop music world with Pink.

Vault was first on this two-company bill, with a piece call Blau. Let me first say, I'm a total sucker for floor work. I am almost always captivated by watching dancers find new ways to move across the floor without being on their feet. So, of course, when Blau opened with an extended section of several dancers, moving in unison, all on the floor---I admit it, I was mesmerized. I literally was on the edge of my seat for the entire section. I saw new ways for dancers to roll and sit up and sink back into the floor. That it was all done in unison made it all the more mesmerizing.

But of course, the use of the trapeze is what make Vault unique among Houston dance companies and here's where I stop and ponder. I've seen aerial dance here and there for the last 8 years or so. It can be beautiful, but so much of it looks similar to me. Whether using actual trapezes (as Amy did here) or "silks" as in the Pink video I linked earlier, there are certain limitations, or so it seems to me.

First of all, the venue was not great for aerial dance. DiverseWorks doesn't have the fly space in its theater for much height. There are probably dancers who can jump higher than these trapezes took the dancers. Second, once the dancer is off the ground, there is only so much space they can cover and it's all vertical. They lose the horizontal movement of the floor (unless you're Pink and have cranes to move you left and right, etc.). Also, there is a tendency to have a pattern in aerial choreography, a sort of "move move move pose" pattern. I'll give Amy this, there were moments on the trapeze that I would actually call moments of stillness, which I also find very arresting in a dance, but there were also moments that felt more like simply poses, a "ta-da!" moment. It seems the trapeze really wants "ta-da" moments.

So I have to say for all the "circus wow" that a trapeze injects, I'm not thoroughly convinced that it's a medium for profound artistic expression. No doubt there are plenty of people to argue with me. Obviously, Amy would be one of them.

Still it's on the ground that Blau really held me captive. I won't go on much more about it, but there was one section when a dancer had on what I'll call an "onion dress." It was a clingy blue number that was really several clingy blue numbers that the dancer peeled off, layer by layer. It occurred to me later that this might easily have come off as a striptease sort of thing, but it didn't feel that way in the moment. It felt like someone exposing more and more layers of herself. Very effective.

Moving on to the second part of the program, I come to Toni's piece, Baptism. I've thought a lot about this piece because my immediate response after the final blackout was, "wow, that was different for Toni."

Here's the dangers of talking about an artist in relation to her large body of work. Each work is someone's first exposure to an artist. At the same time, here is the blessing of finding artists to follow throughout their career. You see a trajectory and/or shifts in the trajectory.

Baptism often felt like a collection of smaller dances by a single choreographer, but not necessarily a single long piece, as the single title suggests. This lack of continuity between the sections was felt most when there were costume changes that felt radically different from what we'd seen before.

Even so, there was a consistent movement vocabulary that I'd only seen in Toni's solo work. It was very interesting to see her put some of that movement on other dancers and how that played out. It's a vocabulary that is somewhere between avian and entomological. Jerky, angular, quick.

And of course the visually unique thing about Baptism is the use of water---artificial rain, really---onstage. The movement vocabulary didn't look dangerous and all the dancers seemed secure in moving in and out of puddles of water on the stage. In that regard the movement worked exceptionally well.

All of which perhaps sounds like I'm ambivalent about Baptism. I am a little bit. Almost a week later, I'm still processing it. Out of Toni's larger body of work, I feel like this isn't one of her more successful pieces.

But because I know some of Toni's larger body of work, I find this piece all the more fascinating. Toni took some risks here. Her work tends to have a strong narrative drive, often using text to help with the storytelling. Here, text is completely absent and whatever narrative there might be was abstracted, allowing us to either see the narrative or not. She also risked with this movement vocabulary that isn't traditional modern dance, certainly not ballet, but somewhere around performance art territory. (It's really somewhat inspired by Butoh, but it's also removed from Butoh enough to not call it that, either.) Moving from a more literal storytelling to a more abstracted presentation is hard, scary work, and I'm excited to see Toni tackle it.

It's impossible for me to put myself in this position, but I imagine that if Baptism was the first piece of Toni's you saw, it might be difficult to process.

Again, there are blessings in finding artists to follow and watch as they grow, mature, shift and change. My second thought after the lights came up in the audience was, "this is a more introspective, quieter piece for Toni." I feel like there is some subtle line between autobiographical and introspective, and Toni crossed it with this piece. Toni has always drawn on her own experiences for her work, so that is not new at all, but what is newer is that she's exploring them in a way that is much quieter than I've seen her do in the past.

All of this makes me all the more excited to see what Toni cooks up next. Far from discouraging me from seeing more of her work, it makes me excited to see where she goes from here. In that regard, I guess I feel Baptism is a transitional piece. I can see she's been moving toward this, but it's far from the end of her journey.

It's fun to see two new companies debut with two experienced choreographers. They played to sold out houses. The next time they announce a show, get tickets early. Despite my stated misgivings about both of these pieces, I very much recommend getting in line for their next shows.