A Moveable Dance from LA Dance Project
By Garth Grimball

Four bodies appear from the emptiness cast by a building’s corner. They dance in unison. Between them the space stays equal. Faces masked and bodies covered in loose, transparent overcoats, their forms disintegrate before outlines snap into being. The unison ends, the energy diffuses into overlapping mini-events, changing place and changing the place. “The Betweens,” a new work commissioned by LA Dance Project from Jermaine Spivey and Spenser Theberge, questions stability in body and site. 

“The Betweens” is the first online dance I’ve watched twice. One, because I liked it; two, because I struggled to put my experience into words and the internet allows multiple viewings. On theme, by coincidence, my viewings took place in two different states, Florida and South Carolina, 48 hours apart.* In Gulfport, Florida, I watched from my dad’s home office/meditation room. In Charleston, South Carolina, I laid on the guest room bed in my aunt and uncle’s house with my computer on my belly. Because of the internet my change in location changed nothing about the performance. Because of the internet my change in location actualizes the performance’s ubiquity. “The Betweens” remained the same unaffected by time and place. The stability of the medium sharpens the content of the work.

LADP dancers, David Adrian Freeland Jr, Mario Gonzalez, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, and Naomi Van Brunt, perform with remarkable timing in what appears to be a 30-minute single take film. The piece combines Dada playfulness and Brechtian commentary. With a drag affect Freeland shares the throughline of the work: “displacement, replacement, engagement.” The cast interrupts each other in movement and language never settling into a single idea or spot. Words repeated and reformed morph into abstraction. Bodies slide through emotional territories – uncertainty, confidence, neediness, calm – as if a personality test were mapped onto the physical space. The bland parking lot setting could be anywhere except for a few regional specifics: cinder block walls, a glimpse of palm trees, the cotton-mouthed light of Southern California. Whether it’s whale sounds or R&B grooves, Maxwell Transue’s original score folds in between the speech patterns of the dancers. It feels appropriate to detail the contours of “The Betweens” rather than describe beat-by-beat moments. To do that would sacrifice the work’s avoidance of pandering or relying on the meme-ification of discourse. 

I wish I could praise Trevor Tweeten, the Director of Photography, in person. His filming was so thoughtful, so inside the logic of the work. The visual tone shifts from participatory to voyeuristic to omniscient seamlessly. “The Betweens” was commissioned as part of the Drive-In Dances series but the filmed version isn’t a recording of a live event, it is a true dance film.

The piece ends with an opening. Sorzano opens a gate and follows a dancing Freeland out of the space and out of frame. Cars zoom down the road. “The Betweens” is specific and roomy. It is of the moment and it allows an aesthetic distance from the familiar. It will stay with me no matter what state I am in.  

 

*COVID – era notice: My trip was a family visit. We are vaccinated.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland. He is co-director of Wax Poet(s) and hosts the podcast Reference Desk.

——