Spoon & Katie Faulkner's little seismic dance: Filaments & Derivatives

Filaments & Derivatives
Spoon & little seismic dance
at CounterPULSE
January 18-20, 2008

The diminutive but versatile CounterPULSE space was crammed to the rafters, literally, for a Saturday night show of Filaments & Derivatives, a collaborative evening put together by Kegan Marling and Jane Schnorrenberg's Spoon and Katie Faulkner's little seismic dance.

All the attention seems wholly warranted -- after all, Faulkner's 2006 season in the same space generated a rare excitement with her polished presentation and multi-faceted program. I remember after seeing her show, I had the most satisfying kind of question in my mind, what would she do next?

Marling opened the evening with his solo Memory, a mannered, mildly humorous assemblage of eccentricities and peculiarities. If there's a confused pause at the start -- is this piece really serious or not?-- it's quickly dispelled by the opening bars of Irene Cara's "What a Feeling." Marling plays it all straight though, from the jerky marionette moves to the unnerving, pigeon-like gaze at the audience, and it's lifted from garden-variety dance, of the sort I used to see at college, by Marling's athletic grace.

Faulkner makes another foray into film with Loom, a rather sweet chronicle of the romantic ups and downs of a couple, played by Faulkner herself and ODC/SF's Private Freeman. The concept of the film, which gives the sense of falling from one scene into the next through still photographs, will be familiar to anyone who pays attention to HP ads, but Faulkner edits effectively, skillfully weaving threads of humor and non-linear sequiturs throughout.

Spoon premiered The Derivatives immediately afterward, but unfortunately after the larger-than-life Loom, this new work had a rather pedestrian air. Marling and Schnorrenberg, joined by Ross Hollenkamp and Rebecca Johnson, seemed to lack the energy to match their chosen score-- a mix that ranged from Philip Glass to Osvaldo Golijov to Cibo Matto--which was a pity because, at times, the bolts and catches of the partnering held the promise of developing into something meaty.

Similarly, Faulkner's Imprint, a moody kaleidoscope of shifting patterns for Carl Bellinghausen, Rebecca Gilbert, Heather Glabe and Chelsea Taylor, had moments of clarity, but ultimately looked like a work still under development.

Far stronger was Faulkner's unusual The Dry Line, which closed the hourlong program. Across a video projection of a storm approaching a lonely, weathered barn a trio women--Stephanie Ballas, Janet Das, and Marlena Penney Oden--drift like Fates, or weird sisters manufacturing a dream world. Faulkner's movement here is clean and definite, with a bit of An Afternoon of a Faun in the isolinear movements and flattened hands that look like they are drawn from ancient Egyptian paintings. The only danger with this piece is that the women, all strong performers, nevertheless are somewhat swallowed up by the video, which occasionally distracts the eye away from the people losing in the process some of the subtleties of their intricate trio. And after all, when all is said and done, it's Faulkner's choreography that I want to remember.