Same Planet Performance Project in Ivy Baldwin’s Ammonite, photo by Vin Reed.
by Lizzie Leopold
This moment is particularly politically charged; in fact, I can no longer imagine moments that are not. We prepare for, or have already encountered, the realities of a world-wide pandemic. The presidential primary season draws bare the harsh and violent ideological divisions of US populations. President Trump enjoys gold-leaf-crusted mandarin oranges on a state visit to Delhi, as India’s Muslim population faces deadly attacks. And last week, Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein was found guilty on two felony sex crimes, as the legal system begins the work of reflecting the greater labor of the #MeToo movement. Sitting in the audience of at Columbia College Chicago’s Dance Center for a performance of Same Planet Performance Project I ask, with all sincerity, can dance afford not to do anything in this moment – in most moments, in all moments?
The two premieres were Ivy Baldwin’s Ammonite and artistic director Joanna Read’s BAD BUNNY and the dancing was exquisite. The performers were strong, confident, and articulate. The ensemble commanded the space and communicated seamlessly among themselves. The costuming was lush yet scientifically crafted (even if the color palettes were all too similar between the two works). The stage space was affecting and awash in white marley and underwater tones. In fact, during much of Baldwin’s work the expanse of the Dance Center stage was frustratingly/productively grand; I wanted to be much closer to witness the underwater undulations of Enid Smith’s fingers or hear the collective gasps for air in enough proximity to feel the performers’ exhalations. I have grown accustomed to watching Same Planet in their home, Dovetail Studios, and missed the community ethos of dance-in-the-round, stuffed into an overcrowded studio. The act of witnessing is often a great communal doing and powerfully political. Yet, in watching Ammonite and BAD BUNNY I did not feel a part of something, and more importantly and more broadly, what I was watching did not engender urgency.
Like many small modern dance companies, Same Planet operates as a nonprofit – public good above commercial gain. What is best for the public and what is best for concert dance, together, is ensuring that choreography is a craft engaging with the world around it. Especially in moments of chaos, dance must be a language that acknowledges its privileges and asserts its importance – if the fragile economic landscape of the nonprofit is to survive. While I am not suggesting that all concert dance turn to activist artmaking, Same Planet did not take advantage of the possibilities that dance provides – doing a disservice to the thing that we all hope to hold up.
Same Planet Performance Project in Ivy Baldwin’s Ammonite, photo by Vin Reed.
Baldwin’s Ammonite is a meditative movement exploration of extinct marine mollusk animals. (An ammonite was a shelled mollusk animal, much like a shelled octopus.) The work ended abruptly, almost without beginning. Much like a still-life painting, Ammonite is Baldwin’s rendering of a singular movement idea. The quartet of dancers moved carefully, at times truly evoking underwater terrain. Yet the studied patience of the dancers’ minor movements was not matched by the patience of the audience. I was left wondering why. There was no strong argument about why this mattered, amplified by the apathy of the performers’ bows. Each nearly shrugged as bowing. I believe in the urgency and communicability of bodies. I watch this all day on my computer screen – bodies in protest, bodies in rest as protest, bodies unable to move, bodies desperate to move. Ammonite did not acknowledge the potency of a human body in motion, inextricable from its identity politics. In this moment, to turn the body into an octopus is a privilege or an oversight.
Read’s BAD BUNNY, as noted in the program, took the idea of consent as a jumping off point. Read then turned to “the natural world,” using animal behavior to side-step the sensitivity of consent’s political, human, embodied potentials. The choreographic construction was lovely and satisfying. Fast-paced unison phrases offered the climax-and-release that I so craved after the meditation of Ammonite. Yet, by invoking the politics of consent and dodging its complexity through post-modern abstraction and bunnies, dance’s possibility was again denied. And again, dance’s importance (the thing all of us in this discipline so desperately work to assert) was lost. BAD BUNNY did not make a statement about consent. Rather, ideas of consent were a shared secret of the cast, explored in rehearsal and abstracted beyond recognition upon proscenium viewing. Did Read not trust dance to take on such a loaded topic? Did she not trust herself? I trust them both and wish she had taken the leap.
Same Planet Performance Project in Joanna Read’s BAD BUNNY, photo by Vin Reed.
Perhaps this is a larger question I am grappling with about the relationship of whiteness to abstraction – both Baldwin and Read are white, as am I. Choreographer Miguel Gutierrez’s essay “Does Abstraction Belong to White People?” spins in my head endlessly. In this particular instance, does choreographing people as animals – a mollusk or a bunny – read as an escape from the subjectivity of the dancer and/or the choreographer? And it is precisely this subjectivity (race, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, and so on) that connects staged dance to the world stage; it ensures the political potency and associative vibrancy of dance writ large. This is what makes dance important: its ability to comment on and reflect the world around us. I wonder if Ammonite and BAD BUNNY instead built worlds of their own, bypassing the particularities of the body as a privilege of whiteness. These are questions that Read herself began to unpack through her 2018 work Lie Through My Skin.
Same Planet Performance Project in Joanna Read’s BAD BUNNY, photo by Vin Reed.
I can’t remember the last time I watched a dance show more than once. Tickets are expensive, and babysitters even more so. But last weekend I had the opportunity to watch Same Planet Performance Project for two nights in a row. The audience was full both times. The Dance Center is a prestigious and well-loved space, and there is pride in a hometown company inhabiting it. I recognized many faces, as the Chicago dance community came out in force to support these premieres. Many of us share a deep respect for the artistry and infrastructure that Read has built and sustained. But while the production was well done, it simply fell short of doing something with dance.
It goes without saying that these are my directives, a very personal call to action. Yet I can’t help but feel that dance does itself a disservice if it is only an escape from the world, and not an integral, dialogic part of it. I have respect for all of the artists of Same Planet, as I know I share a belief in dance’s possibility with them. But we should remember the relationship of possibility to privilege and of privilege to responsibility.
Lizzie Leopold is a Chicago-based artist/scholar and the Executive Director of the Dance Studies Association, currently working in the film archives of mid-century modern dance pioneer Sybil Shearer. She received an interdisciplinary PhD in theater and drama from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the political economy of choreographic production and circulation, asking questions about the intersection of cultural and financial value. Her essays have been published in Perspectives on American Dance, Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and Dance, and Futures of Dance Studies. Leopold is also a choreographer and the director of the Leopold Group, a 2018 Links Hall Co-Mission Resident.
