Dance: little seismic dance at CounterPULSE

little seismic dance company
CounterPULSE
August 25-27, 2006

The spiffy CounterPULSE space was home to the debut of Katie Faulkner’s little seismic dance company in late August. What a perfect name for this new troupe, which delivered a small-scale, yet ground-shaking performance.

Over the last few years, Faulkner has appeared around the Bay Area, notably with AXIS Dance Company and Randee Paufve. This time, she presented a thoroughly stimulating program of mainly her own works, with an emphasis on varying textures and backgrounds delivered with the utmost care. One could only wish that every evening of dance was produced so well and with such taste.

From the outset, Faulkner’s choreography seemed to take in stride the constraints of the CounterPULSE space. Once a gallery for ICAN, the narrow stage -- which is deeper than it is wide -- has sometimes been a challenge for dance groups, although in this show, the dancers appeared to relish the unusual proportions. In “Fit of the Survivalist,” which opened the program, Janet Collard struggles to walk a long skewed line down the narrow space and the bodies compacting against each other, stacking on top of one another only heightens the sense of self-conscious dysfunctionality.

The canny use of environment and structures is there too in the “Shadow of Matter,” which premiered on this program. An investigation of physical and Newtonian mechanics between five dancers, (Collard, Margaret Cromwell, Rebecca Gilbert, Sonshorée Giles and Renée Waters), this rather lengthy piece was perhaps not as successful as “Survivalist” and yet, the stories of attraction and repulsion that Faulkner constructs between each dancer with their elastic and inelastic collisions had a visual momentum that carried not only from one dancer to the next, but also from one segment of the piece into the next.

In between on the menu of dances, Randee Paufve’s angular “In Exhale,” danced by Rebecca Johnson, was the only piece not created by Faulkner on the program. Johnson’s loose low hip swivels and double-hinging leg and arm swings were nicely counterposed by the almost runic shapes she created, but in the end the abstract piece felt fragmentary, like a movement study that didn’t seem to really go anywhere.

More finished was the clever “Decorum,” which Faulkner created for AXIS last year. A sly portrait of insiders (the gossiping Giles and Faulkner on a Victorian divan) and outsiders (Bonnie Lewkowicz, in her wheelchair in a square of light downstage), “Decorum” is detailed with specific phrases– a push here, a nod there – that repeated inexactly and sometimes off balance, adding up to an overall effect of emotive watchworks that swiftly devolve into chaos.

A filmed piece, “High Tide” gave the program an added dimension. Filmed out near the old Sutro Baths by J.C. Earle, this short subject follows four women-- Faulkner, Collard, Stephanie Ballas and Rebecca Gilbert—as they roam the ruined walls by the oceanside. In this conception, the film makes the choreography as much about what you don’t see as about what you do. Movement happens in fragments, or just out of reach of the camera, inviting instead, a much more specific focus on shape and form rather than on the overall spectacle.

Faulkner has pursued that impulse in her 2004 “Still,” danced with disquieting serenity by Collard under a bare light bulb to music by Slow Blow and sound design by Jacques Poulin-Denis. Swathed in a filmstrip garnished dress that could give any Project Runway outfit a run for its money, Collard’s strangely plumed odd bird gave her movements the occasional jerkiness of a silent film played at 24 frames per second. A fading silent film star or perhaps an embodiment of the entire era of the silver screen drawing its last gasp, Collard was riveting in her performance.

For this new venture, Faulkner has gathered a group of dancers who are clean, well trained, but most importantly, display no doubts or vagueness about the motivation of their movements. When Collard grasps her leg to lift it forward or shuffles the celluloid fringes of her skirt, we may only be guessing as to why she needs to do so, but she herself is clearly motivated by a lucid internal logic. It means that as an audience, we can continue to watch, satisfied in the knowledge that whatever we don’t comprehend at the moment will unfold and become clear as the piece progresses.

That clarity of purpose may be Faulkner’s greatest asset as a choreographer. She is undoubtedly meticulous – the costumes she created for each piece had none of the bargain-basement thrift store look, but were instead assembled with an eye to both color and functionality, with the added benefit of actually flattering the dancers. And her choreography is organically and engrossingly structured in a way that leads the viewer in gently and then traps them in a maze of unpredictable and yet compelling patterns. Ultimately it added up to a top-quality debut from a dancemaker we will hopefully see much more of in the seasons to come.