Everyone is on stage in 'Daylight'

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Saturday, October 8, 2005

Everyone is on stage in 'Daylight'

JIM DEMETRE
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

How many dance performances can be said to have generated as much movement within the audience as there was on stage?

DANCE REVIEW

SARAH MICHELSON

WHEN: Wednesday night through Sunday

WHERE: On the Boards

In "Daylight," which opens On the Boards' New Performance Series this week, acclaimed New York choreographer Sarah Michelson has created a work that involves the audience and its expectations in an improvised dance.

The 20th century is littered with theater experiments that sought to break down barriers between the viewer and the performance, but Michelson takes things a step further. Forcing the audience to grow restless with its own passivity, she succeeds in heightening its collective level of engagement.

From the outset, Michelson's fault lines are evident. Dancers can be seen outside on the sidewalk, across the street in the parking lot and in the brightly lit lobby. Entering the hall, ticket holders are surprised to find a new set of seats where they are accustomed to seeing the stage.

The piece begins with two men in shirts sleeves and two women in dramatic print dresses performing a jazzy, conventional dance set to the classic '70s tune "Baker Street" on the narrow strip that remains of the stage. As it continues, becoming repetitive and a little silly, people begin to realize the song is being performed by a live band situated above the empty rows of seats behind them.

Suddenly, other images come into focus. The ubiquitous sets, with their lattices of white interlocking circles (a pattern that recurs on the dancers' beige unitards) are now visible along the peripheries of the reconstructed hall, which seems to get larger. To my right, over the risers, I see a small girl bouncing down a corridor I had not noticed. Behind me, the green-lit sound room is inhabited by a pair of dancers wearing large Afro wigs. Other dancers, barely moving, can be seen throughout the hall.

As soon as the music shifts gears, becoming more rhythmic than melodic, the audience loses interest in the dance taking place in front of them and begins to seek out better views of these more remote, concurrent activities. Members of the audience stand up, uncertain where they should be looking; their curiosity enhanced by sophisticated lighting that subtly draws their attention to the hall's recesses. Over time the tension swells, and soon the audience spills out of its seats. Swirling about the room, people look for what they are missing, what might be important, or what they can use to explain things.

Very little actually happens on stage or elsewhere in the hall; the activity takes place within and among those who observe it.

As I stood with the rest of the audience outside the hall watching the performance continue, inexplicably, on the porch of the large Victorian home across the street, some young women caught wind of the fact that I was a reviewer. "I saw you walking on stage taking notes and thought you were part of the show" one of them said. "We were all part of this show," I replied, and they concurred.

Jim Demetre is the publisher and editor of Artdish (www.artdish.com). He may be reached at mail@artdish.com.

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