Searching for a Perspective in DIM3NSIONS

By Garth Grimball

The New York-based Passion Fruit Dance Company performed DIM3NSIONS, a “multimedia journey…exploring perception shifts and critical conversations,” at Meredith College as part of the American Dance Festival on June 14-15. The exploration was rich in movement but lacking in perspective.

Artistic Director Tatiana Desardouin was joined by five dancers and music producer/dj and sometimes dancer, Saadiq “The Last Musician” Bolden, in this full-length production that made liberal use of projection—text, animation, motion capture, photography.

The choreography was a blending of street and club styles, primarily house, breaking, and tutting with other styles and motifs interpolated throughout. The dancers wore denim colored jumpsuits with variations in styling.

DIM3NSIONS brought up many ideas but didn’t develop a clear take on them, and if the point was to remain illegible, that wasn’t clear either. The first section of the dance had two mannequin torsos downstage on carts. Projection was mapped onto each of them and at one point Desardouin and Nubian Néné danced behind them with their arms and heads filling in for the mannequins’ absent appendages. Later, the dancer Lady Ice drew on a downstage canvas as digital images swirled and evolved across the backdrop. Was there supposed to be a tension between what is human/human-made and what is virtual? Or were the combinations an aggregate of creativity and creating?

Photographs of the dancers swathed in fabric, styled and edited like a magazine spread, were projected onto the backdrop and used frequently as interludes between sections. At one point the score included sounds like camera shutters and the dancers crouched down and covered their faces. Were the gorgeous photos and the eschewing of photography meant to elicit an “I contain multitudes” ethos or were they unrelated?

Perhaps most confounding was the intimating towards but explicit avoidance of race. Late in the dance, four dog tags were projected onto the backdrop with the words Identity, Classism, Ableism, and lastly, a bunch of characters like a wifi password or the textual euphemism for a curse word, eg @!X2*. The choreography is not markedly different in this section so it is unclear what perspective shift is meant to be taking place, and what the unwritten word is meant to be. There is one white dancer in the company, Lauriane Ogay, and she is featured throughout DIM3NSIONS, with the exception of a section in which the question What if colonization didn’t exist? is projected behind the dancers. Is she a representative of colonization in the context of her absence? 

While the concepts in DIM3NSIONS were muddled, the dancing was strong. The ensemble never sagged energetically under the demands of 75 minutes of dancing to propulsive hooks and rhythms. The downbeats of the house footwork and the angles in the tutting maintained clarity in unison and solos. Néné in particular shined in her groundedness and ease into the groovier hooks in the score and the technical precision of her isolations. 

As is often the case when a choreographer is in their own ensemble work, DIM3NSIONS would benefit from an editor who is not in the production so the sum equals the parts.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dancer based in Oakland. He is a regular contributor to Dance Media and SF Examiner/Nob Hill Gazette. He is the editor of ODC Dance Stories.