IndyFringe Review: Gone, Gone, Gone

Gone, Gone, Gone is a love story told through movement and masking tape, with a strong supporting role played by paper towels. The performance is mostly engaging and fun, except in a few tiresome interludes involving arranging the tape and paper towels; I haven’t made out whether these adhesives and sanitizers are meant to be metaphoric, or are playful exhortations to see the magic in the everyday (or signs implying that love fits us with crazy, rose-tinted lenses that transform even our domestic necessities into sources of delight), or whether they’re simply incidental set pieces. In any case, the tape and paper towels are sometimes enchanting, and sometimes aggravating props in the narration of a romance. Gone, Gone, Gone insightfully chronicles the maturation of a relationship, as the pair moves from a giddy beginning, through a tense patch, and into a more restrained and adult attachment in the conclusion. At least, I think that’s what all that masking tape, leaping, and swaying were illustrating.

When you first meet the couple, they’re in the blissful, drunken early stage of love. They dance with their domestic supplies and each other in delirium, playfully and giddily, and their silliness has the same effect as that of your classic Elizabethan fool: at times, their frolicking and grinning and indiscretion appears so liberated and inspiring that you’re prompted to wonder why we bother acting so sensibly all the time, when we could be delighting in the very fact of being alive. But then the answer comes, as you start to grow exasperated with the frivolity. After all, there’s more to life and love than stretching out strips of masking tape and unrolling paper towels. Why are they wasting all that tape, anyway? And what about the trees sacrificed to make their absorbent confetti? The joy this pair derives from putting masking tape on the floor becomes altogether perplexing, and suddenly you recall a movie whose premise alone made you too uncomfortable to watch it. In order to stop feeling guilty about watching the love story of simpleminded folk, you begin to tell yourself that they are illustrating the very accurate point that love simplifies even as it complicates. It inspires, or perhaps it requires, us to be naïve, innocent, vulnerable and simple, even while it makes a sticky mess of our lives (hey, that’s just like masking tape!). This makes you feel a little better.

The affair begins to run into some trouble, though, when the female tapes their hands together. There’s major strain with this possessive claim, and the two appear to quarrel before their bond(age) ruptures. The male dancer then performs an impressive and rather mournful solo bit flecked with acrobatics and some horizontal writhing, before his companion returns. They reunite and test their bounds with each other, negotiating the terms of a more sustainable and less juvenile partnership. As the piece ends, the mad exuberance has been replaced by something more studied, more tempered. Paper towels and masking tape still have a rather puzzling presence in the final moments, but the dancers’ movements are altogether more independent, and though they still touch and support each other, they leave each other more space and opportunities for autonomous motion.

It’s a tribute to this piece that it reminded me of the wisdom of Mr. Edward Morgan Forster. In Howard’s End, the more sensible of the Schlegel sisters rhapsodizes about the “rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion,” and preaches proportion. You know the drill. Responsibility tempered by whimsy, passion tempered by reason, business by sensibility, wild untamed nature by civilized society. But, Margaret Schlegel says, proportion should only come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed. We ought to lurch either way before striking a bargain, she (or Forster, through her) suggests. And the love story told in Gone, Gone, Gone seems to be a similar tale of lurching, reeling in joy and anguish, codependency and loneliness, and finally reaching a balance.

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.