IndyFringe Review: humanature

Humanature, a collaborative dance, music, and video performance at this year’s Indianapolis Theater Fringe Festival, goes a long way toward realizing the features of live dance performances that make me love dance. The (Re)Collective Company is more than a dance company: as its website and literature profess, the Company is committed to collaboration across artistic disciplines, and its staging showcases its musicians as much as its dancers. The stage is shared by the all-male musical ensemble, which includes hand drums, a cello, and an electric bass, and by the female trio of dancers. The musicians and dancers partner to create a series of scenes in different styles, expressing the destructive and redemptive forces of Nature, and the result is often invigorating and beautiful. The performance errs occasionally, however, when it slips into the sort of awkward pretension that too often plagues avant-guard performance pieces.

As the production cycles through its various styles, the choreography appears to be influenced by everything from ballet, to African dance, to yoga, to belly dancing and modern. In its best moments, the dancers whip through rhythms with clean, decisive movements, or slow down to exhibit the exquisite bodily control required by classical styles. The music, too, is most powerful when influenced by either African or classical styles. Portions of the production spotlight the hand drums, and the audience begins perhaps inadvertently to tap and bob along with the pulsing rhythms. In a striking and lovely departure in tone, the cellist and electric bassist lift into an unexpectedly delicate classical duet.

I found myself stifling groans, however, during those postmodern interludes of dancers walking across the stage in slow, measured steps with affected expressions of solemnity on their faces, or creeping and swaying in interpretation of jungle creatures or perhaps the animalistic impersonality of Nature. Contrasting with the buoyant vigor of other portions of the performance, these moments of mannered earnestness are disappointing and distracting.

Occasionally the instrumental mix doesn’t quite balance, either. The bassist sometimes drifts into digressive rifts suggestive of the easy-listening variety of Classic Rock, which clash faintly with the rest of the ensemble and the physical mood established by the dancers. A particularly painful segment for me features a halting monologue about the savage vitality of Water, delivered in a style evocative of slam poetry on sedatives. Unfortunately for the guy murmuring ceremoniously about Water, Disaster, Tidal Waves and Fault Lines while the dancers creep and slither and downward-dog across the stage, the other performance this bit most resembles is Sarah Palin’s doggerel tribute to the “big wild good life teaming along the road that is north to the future.” Perhaps I just misunderstood the intent, though.

Notwithstanding these occasional stumbles, the overall production is compelling and enjoyable. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys watching human bodies transformed into artistic mediums, into reminders of the possible exaltation of embodiment, movement, strength, and corporal freedom. A last note I'd like to make is that this performance was also my introduction to the Earth House, a space well worth many visits.