Catherine Liu. Photo by Andy Strong.

Breaking Down with KWENTO

By Garth Grimball

KWENTO’s Break, a premiere directed and danced by Catherine Liu, artistic director, with an ensemble cast, opened at PianoFight on Jan 31. Break is dance theater. A medium of synthesis that few can get to show and not tell, rather than show and tell and tell and tell. Break explores the “most traumatic experience with [Liu’s] own mental health” in a mostly linear format of scenes progressing through introduction, climax, and resolution.

In Break the dance, theater, pantomime, and monologues are additive without being associative. The parts do not alchemize into a new whole but connect to each other like train cars heading in the same direction. What does an attitude turn have to do with a knife? How do we connect acrobatic lifts from a gurney to fear of abandonment? Each form of artistic expression seems to share a conceptual basis but not connective tissue. The moments of dancing are brief and used as relationship building between characters or as scenario like a scene of Liu attending an audition.

Liu has a director’s eye and sense of timing. No scene outstays its welcome. Whatever the mode of expression the plot moves forward at an even pace. She is a committed performer. In a monologue as internal dialogue Liu acts out a conversation with her inner depressive voice navigating self-worth. There is no shying away. It’s uncomfortable and it’s supposed to be. This is Liu’s story so it’s difficult to get a sense of the ensemble cast as more than collective supporting characters.

The most successful moments are the simplest. In a hospital visit scene Liu and Melanie Harvengt play the hand-slap game. Liu goes through a variety of emotions each time her hands are slapped. The brief moment communicates so well the incredible weight and energy of performing “normalcy” for others when you’re feeling anything but yourself. Later the ensemble wears lab coats and pelts an endless supply of prescription bottles at Liu as she stands in disbelief. I cannot think of a more perfect representation of searching for a doctor who will hear you and finding a medicine that will work for you.

We put a lot of pressure on art to give meaning, to transcend, to speak truth. Creating honest work is often most memorable. Liu’s honesty stays with me. An honesty that will hearten others on their mental health journeys.

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, California. He is the co-director of Wax Poet(s), company member of Dana Lawton Dances, and performs regularly with Oakland Ballet.

Catch Break at PianoFight February 7 and 8, 2020 at 7:30pm. Get tickets here.