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MoveOpolis dancers frequently look and gesture upward as if paying homage to an unnamed deity. This icon emerged in an astonishing winter program at Dance Theater Workshop in which Richard Move’s earlier works are revisioned through the eye of a virtuoso collaboration, Towards the Delights of the Exquisite Corpse. The transformation breaks new ground for the avant-garde passage into popular culture for the 21st century.
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MoveOpolis! Returns Image to its Origins – Lisa Paul Streitfeld
MoveOpolis dancers frequently look and gesture upward as if paying homage to an unnamed deity. This icon emerged in an astonishing winter program at Dance Theater Workshop in which Richard Move’s earlier works are revisioned through the eye of a virtuoso collaboration, Towards the Delights of the Exquisite Corpse. The transformation breaks new ground for the avant-garde passage into popular culture for the 21st century.
Move makes a giant evolution in shedding the classical influence of his modernist mentor Martha Graham. At astonishing speed, he moves into the primordial realm. With the aid of venerable collaborators (a Hilton Als score, the costumes of Patricia Field and live digital imagery of video pioneer Charles Atlas), MoveOpolis serves as a compelling vehicle for a new Aquarian Age icon. A career-long devotion to exploding gender boundaries has triumphed in a new formalism evoking the primordial Sacred Marriage Rites, in which inner archetype and outer expression converge by way of the body.
In the first half of the program, the pentacle shaped orbit of Venus is evoked through a five-part geometry built around Als’ startling mix of Verdi’s Divertimento. Referencing the mythical framework of ancient cultures, a trio of dancers frame and act as centerpiece for two mesmerizing solos evoking the fierce beauty of Sumerian hymns (Catherine Cabeen’s Lust and Miguel Anaya’s Dilemma) in which eroticism beckons, seduces and transcends in mesmerizing fluidity.
The MoveOpolis technique has foundation in sexual equilibrium: outer motion of energy is balanced by pulling inward—as in the inhale/exhale of the breath. The closing movement of Divertimento expresses a sacred geometry of hand and arm signals that celebrate the crucial role for dance vocabulary in establishing the human body as the temple of a new order.
The appearance of the late Julius Eastman as the literal “exquisite corpse” in the second half of the program binds the notion of artistic genius to blood sacrifice. Als’ score mixing Eastman with the Crystals establishes a rhythm of Eros/Thanos that attracts and repels pioneering artists to the primordial realm where new archetypes constellate.
In the first of three distinct narrative segments, a quartet of dancers (Cabeen, Kristen Joseph Irby, Blakeley White McGuire and Kevin Scarpin) ground themselves in floor work, images linked to both the collective unconscious and pop culture through identical, hooded costumes blending the anonymity of the spiritual initiate with the pedestrian sweat suit. During this yoga-inspired movement punctuated by frequent headstands, Atlas launches us into spirit through primordial symbols such as the spiral, sphere and flock of birds. Subsequently, he plunges us into the natural elements—fire, water, earth and air.
In the second segment, Eastman arrives on the scene. As dancers stand with backs to the audience, the composer explains his use of the confrontational title: “Gay Guerilla.” An image on the screen is of a woman with magnets hooked up to her brain, establishing “blood sacrifice” as madness. Logo-rhythms reflect the sound vibrations; through the fractals appears the strange attractor around which energy organizes into patterns.
The final segment requires a change into Field’s reflecting costumes that spectacularly reflect Donalee Katz’s virtuoso lighting. Cabeen and Irby appear in pigtails to dance a duet to the Crystals’ song He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss. In this evoking of tension between the opposites (love/hate), the screen supplies a body evolution through vintage film clips: stiff motions of teenage mixers; a Charles Atlas muscle man and a masked figure shedding sexual identity. As the music evokes the anxious anticipation and danger surrounding a creation myth, the Sky Goddess enters the narrative via the aerial movements of a waving line. The curved shape indicates the collapsing wave where Wolfgang Pauli predicted the new icon would emerge.
The disintegration of gender stereotype in the face of this holistic Venus brings us to a blindfolded dancer who surrenders to having his body molded by his partners. This collaborative act of improvisation brings us to the final stage of the narrative—the quintessential element—where the quartet interacts in Field’s costumes. The formal passage to the sacred marriage on the screen, logo-rhythms generated by sound, is reflected in the dancers’ movements from the square to the ancient form of the circle. The dance ends with a ritualistic gathering in a circle, bodies spinning on their personal axis with heads lifted upwards.
In this manner, the sacred language of signals expressed in the final movement of Divertimento is incorporated into the exquisite corpse, the holy body, by way of a unifying icon: a six-pointed circle with a dot in the center. The genius shepherded by Move is the harmonic blending of all components: Atlas’ real time imagery of this symbol reflects the shimmering forms of Field’s costumed bodies responding to the creation mythos imbedded in Als’ score.
An additional factor of perfection is the timing of this work, which brings me to a personal zenith. This event culminates a painstaking seven-year search for emerging art forms’ expression of the Aquarian Age icon. In a gestation period of just about nine months, I pursued the MoveOpolis vision into this alchemical transformation through the four elements (fire, water, earth and air) to reach the unifying icon of the hieros gamos (sacred marriage).
In severing the umbilical chord to the mother of modernism, Move has zoomed into a new epoch where body meets image. The effect is pure magic, perfectly timed to the rebirth of the sun at the Winter Solstice!
