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Ready to wear?
Kelley Donovan’s Visceral Threads
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL


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Marcia B. Siegel talks about Kelley Donovan dancing.

Kelley Donovan began her new piece, Visceral Threads, with a solo Friday night at the Dance Complex. Moving down a diagonal with large swoops and curves of her torso and scooping, spiraling arms, she spun a theme that the seven other dancers took apart and worked on for the rest of the piece. Although she seemed to be their inspiration, she danced separately from the rest of them in the 30 minutes that followed. The whole piece had a contradictory air of private probing within a shared body of information.

After Donovan exited, the other women (Sarah Ackley, Sara Allen, Courtney Cann, Cailin Good, Stephanie McHugh, Celeste Platt, and Mary Jane Tang) began crossing the space one by one. Entering from the audience’s left, they trod slowly, step by step, channeling their gazes straight ahead. When four or five of them had accumulated, they began to break out of the pattern, with turns or twisted gestures or momentary reversals of their forward progress. They seemed to choose their own timing for these mild outbreaks, and suddenly they fell into unison, running and windmilling their arms, only to return to their solitary journeys.

There didn’t seem to be any signals in the textured white sound that accompanied them, which gradually morphed from what sounded like an organ to glockenspiel to marimba. The whole dance had this mixture of diffused and indefinite activity that contained very clearly motivated personal action. The women paired off briefly for subdued or vigorous duets. Sometimes they lifted one another into big cartwheeling arcs; sometimes they barely touched or mirrored each other without touching at all or even making eye contact.

They grouped together to divide the space with a horizontal line-up, and Donovan expanded on her solo, first downstage of them, then behind their line. She’d arrive like this from time to time, as if to renew their energy source.

The music changed from the first, pleasing minimalist wash to a noisy combination of static, whine, and motors. But the dance kept on evolving in its own way. The seven women formed a line-up from upstage to downstage. Slowly revolving together, they took the line back across the stage toward the side where they’d first entered. Again without any obvious cueing, they stepped out of the line to dance solos, not straying too far away and returning quickly to their places.

When the line had reached approximately center stage, it suddenly broke apart. The women went flying off and tumbling in all directions. Then the line reassembled and the solos continued, now two or three dancers at a time, and you’d notice momentary reflections as they fell in and out of unison.

The music got more insistent. A man’s voice at one point belched out phrases from some kind of story or poem that I didn’t think worth concentrating on. There were high, grinding sound effects and whistles, and later another man improvising like a stand-up comedian but without saying anything funny. Trios of dancers scrolled back across the space again, the two outside women in unison and the one in the center dancing a different theme. The man’s voice went into a loop with tinkling finger bells and drumming.

All the women reassembled, and just as the male voice remarked, "You know, there’s a lot of closets," one person, not Donovan, was beginning what could have been another solo, and the lights went out.

Visceral Threads was billed as an "evening-length" work. A program note told us the dance was exploring "spirituality and internal transformation." I don’t know whether the abrupt ending signified that there’ll be more to the dance eventually, and maybe the transformation and spirituality took place in the pre-performance dancemaking. Without taking away anything particularly high-minded, I enjoyed it for the richness of the movement and the pleasure of seeing how a compositional process can develop.


Issue Date: November 11 - 17, 2005
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