About the Company :: Reviews
Detour
All roads lead to death
by
Robert Faires,
The Austin Chronicle, February 4, 2005
All roads lead to Death. That's the plain if unsettling truth about this journey called Life. No matter where we start from or how far we travel, every single one of us eventually ends up in that "undiscovered country" from which no one returns. We like to think we're generally a decent distance from its borders, but that isn't always the case, as this ensemble-created new work from Ariel Dance Theatre shows. In it, we hitch a ride with three characters whose journeys through life are interrupted by detours that bring them disconcertingly close to that final destination for all.
One is a young waitress who barely escapes drowning after her car hits a patch of ice and skids into a river. Another is a man who sets a humane trap for animals infesting his home but then chooses to kill the creature he caught in it. The third is a woman wrestling with the impending death of her gravely ill father. They begin telling us their stories separately and with words, but this isn't a road that travels a straight line from point A to point B. Detour has each character represented by two performers, the second communicating the character's inner state through movement, and it weaves back and forth between drama and dance, solos and ensemble sequences, occasionally taking the characters across one another's paths. The shifts in form and complicated interplay among the ensemble members mirror the internal turmoil of these people who have skirted death's domain. They're far afield of home, of the place where they feel comfortable and that has meaning for them, and they're desperately seeking a way back.
The sense of dislocation is given vivid expression in the movements choreographed by Andrea Ariel and the ensemble: Leese Walker, wearing Rollerblades, spins and spins and spins, representing the disorientation of a child with a dying parent. Martin Burke jolts out of a sleep, eyes wide, gulping for air, right arm shooting out to his side as if reaching for something to save him. Sometimes alone, sometimes in a pack, performers run to one side of the stage, stop as if teetering before an abyss, back up, change direction, run, stop, back up, change again.
The characters' anxious search to resolve these close encounters is fed by a propulsive urgency in the score. Peter Stopschinski's percussive piano, its tempo steadily increasing, suggests a racing pulse, and the suspense it engenders is amplified by Graham Reynolds' tightly swirling brushes and thumping blows on the drums. They deliver the driving heartbeat of the work, but they also capture its sense of beauty and humor in sparkling melodies on the keyboards punctuated with bell-like tones from the vibes.
For while the creators have tackled a weighty subject, they balance its gravity with playfulness, often revealed in delightfully unexpected ways, as when five members of the ensemble link their bodies together to form a giant skunk or when they riff on the issue of euthanasia in a broadly comic song, "Pull the Plug." On the page this last may sound glib, but in performance it rises out of the distress of a character who is a bit quirky and capricious and irreverent herself. It feels like a natural, fluid outgrowth of who she is and how she handles crisis.
That fluidity is characteristic of Detour overall. Local choreographer Ariel and New York theatre artist Walker of the Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble have assembled a small company of artists whose work flows together with little sense of where one art form endsand another begins, of which contribution belongs to whom. Burke's verbal anguish bleeds into the urgent gestures and tumbling of Steve Ochoa. The exuberant kicks of Rebecca Borden flow into the exultant exclamations of Rosaruby Glaberman. They are a single character. And ultimately, the breathing of all six performers is as one.
It all comes back to breath in the end. That is what we, the living, do, and it calms us and centers us and connects us to one another. It makes us mindful of the world we're in and the life we have, and that's something we can never know too well, especially while we're on the road.
BYLINE:
By
Robert Faires
DATE: February 4, 2005
PUBLICATION: Austin
Chronicle
(TX)
Copyright (c) 2005 The Austin Chronicle
photo by Beverly Barrett
