Chrissy Martin and Amanda Maraist in “between us and everyone here”/Photo: Surrinder Martignetti
Audiences who attend small, avant-garde dance performances often fall into two categories: those who know the performers and “get” what’s happening onstage, and those who feel interested but uninformed—and, as the lights come up—still a bit puzzled. If the latter describes you and you’re looking to change that, “between us and everyone here” is a good choice. Do not come to sit back and be wowed by virtuosic technique or by rarified beauty of any kind. Do come to understand dance as a series of actions—actions that sit closer to everyday experience than you may have thought.
Your involvement starts at the door, where the choreographer, Gina Hoch-Stall, greets you with a prompt and draws a word (or in my case, a gesture) from your response. You are assigned a color that makes you part of a team and determines where you sit. While audiences (and especially reviewers) usually aim only to observe, unobtrusively, this performance sets different parameters: right from the outset, it makes insiders of us all.
The program you find at your seat is not an exposition but a series of charming little drawings which, it turns out, map imaginary places that influenced the set choreographic material. Each night the performance will “visit” different places; at opening night, we first visit “soft donna,” choreographed to the sounds of Donna Summer. The dancers and choreographic collaborators, Amanda Maraist and Chrissy Martin, begin at opposite ends of the stage, facing different directions; hops, squats and flowing arm gestures periodically bring them together. Each dancer describes in unfinished sentences—some of them eventually completed by her partner—what she did outside the walls of the theater that day. For dancers to tell us about their lives is nothing new. But more interestingly, these dancers also speak to each other, casting their duets as friendly negotiations and exercises in mutual trust.
This first act (there are three) then introduces a game that generates the evening’s explicitly improvised material and pulls us into the choreographic process. Audience responses, drawn at random, become a series of movements onstage. Directives like “lean” and “uplift” easily yield to interpretation. “Extract” is a bit more complicated, inspiring Martin to pull a fully prone Maraist up from the floor by the back of her shirt. As the dancers repeat the series, the tempo changes refine and the dancers’ movements get larger, more weighted, less pedestrian. By the third repetition, “extract” becomes a lot of work and a comic moment. In Act Two, Martin performs some of the material as a solo; we get a taste of how context can make all the difference.
Some of the middle section (frequently a troublemaker) gets a bit didactic. I do want to know how my pink-team compatriots are experiencing this performance versus other dance they’ve enjoyed: Is this fun of a different kind? For me the next part, where each team reports its findings, doesn’t shed new light on what I’ve seen or what I am about to see.
In the third section, however, things come together in a satisfying way. The dancers let us in on how the first section’s incomplete sentences resolve. Their falls and spins give way to lovely lifts where one body wraps around the other. They end the evening head to head—which, in the context they’re carefully built, reads clearly as a sisterly embrace.
“between us and everyone here” at the Neo-Futurist Theater, 5153 North Ashland. Thursday, July 9 through Saturday, July 11. Tickets available through The Neo-Futurists box office.
