Remembering Beauty with Anemone Dance Theatre
June Julian
You may think that
anemones are underwater dancers, plantlike animals, translucently quivering to
the touch of the tides. But they also move among us in our Code Orange city nowadays,
and dance this town around quite a bit.
From the first time I saw Anemone Dance Theatre perform their Moving Water Theory
at the Puffin Room last fall, I knew these were extraordinarily gifted dancers.
At the Evolving Arts Theatre in early May, they premiered remember? at Just Move,
the anniversary concert for Dance Space, celebrating the downtown center’s
nineteen years of service to the dance community.
In remember? Sara
Baird, choreographer and Anemone’s co-founder, is Odysseus’ sea siren,
mesmerizing us with her spell of pure beauty. For a delicious interlude, she
and Erin Dudley, move with undulating projections and a hypnotic sound score,
to carry each of us to a personal place of luminous vitality and freedom.
Beginning as tight huddled packages on the stage, they slowly emerge, like a
chrysalis, or an unfurling fern, darkly silhouetted against Lee Whittier’s
lusciously patterned video backdrops. Christopher Tignor’s soundscape embraces
their primal metamorphosis from confinement to glorious expansion. First, one
big leaf-like headpiece appears, then the other, as the dancers couple and uncouple
to create giant plants with their bodies in the pulsating deep green light.
For blessed moments,
we gratefully forget death and destruction in the desert, and drink in the cool
lushness of our evolutionary journey from the dark wet mud to the sun – our toes
as roots, our trunks strong and supple, our heads as verdant haloes in the dappled
light. We remember.
Sara speaks about trying to embody life force in the dance medium and Lee tells
us of working with the idea of the “expanded moment”. Both describe
their collaboration method as the mutual fine crafting a strong idea. They say
that remember? is very much a work in progress, and like the images of growth
and change that it evokes, it is also continues to evolve.
In her famous book,
What is Art For?, Ellen Dissanayake tells us that all humans have a basic biological
need for beauty in their lives. Although notions of beauty may be culturally
determined, the urge to seek it and embrace it is very real. Anemone’s remember?
is a wonderful offering of the beauty we crave, now when we need it the most.
